Portside

Globalization and technology have gutted the labor movement, and part-time work is sabotaging solidarity. Is there a new way to challenge the politics of inequality? Tackling inequality is clearly going to require more than technocratic fixes from above. It isn’t likely to succeed unless workers themselves can reclaim some bargaining power, and the sense of political and social inclusion that can go with it.

Teachers at the largest charter school organization in Los Angeles have launched a drive to unionize, a move that could alter the path of school reform in the city. Nearly 70 teachers and counselors at Alliance charter schools say they intend to partner with UTLA. More than 100,000 students, or 15% of LAUSD enrollment, attend charters, the most of any system in the U.S.

As more states feel they’ve been put at a competitive disadvantage by their right-to-work neighbors, the pressure only increases to follow suit and enact their own right-to-work laws. And after a while, a national right-to-work law might not be far behind. “I suspect that will happen within the next decade,” says Marquita Walker, an associate professor of labor studies at Indiana University.

The subtext is that unions are on their way out, and that taking actions like agitating for pay and benefits will only hasten their disappearance. Recent events, however, are pointing in the opposite direction. Labor organizations are starting to show new creativity and militancy in attaining their goals.

An estimated 15,000 teachers and their supporters rallied in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday, threatening to strike should union and school district representatives fail to reach an agreement to reduce class sizes, raise teacher pay, and eliminate the existing system for evaluating educators.

“[Right-to-work] is going to bring everybody down,” said Russ Krings, the directing business representative for the Milwaukee union International Association of Machinists District 10, during a press conference with other labor leaders on Monday. “It’s going to affect not only the union families and nonunion families. It’s going to affect all the businesses that we go and spend our money at. This is going to bring the economy down."

In this article Kristof acknowledges he was wrong about unions - As unions wane in American life, it’s also increasingly clear that they were doing a lot of good in sustaining middle class life — especially the private-sector unions that are now dwindling. "To understand the rising inequality, you have to understand the devastation in the labor movement,” says Jake Rosenfeld, a labor expert at the University of Washington and the author of “What Unions No Longer Do.”

There is nothing new about Republican opposition to teachers unions, but in recent years, it has become increasingly clear that some Democrats have turned against them as well. In the following post we hear from a union leader, Bob Peterson, the president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, about how he thinks teachers union must change to keep alive public education.

Anti-union laws don’t help the economy, don’t create jobs and don’t end ‘compulsory union membership’. They can only kill off unions