An Injury to All: Going Beyond Collective Bargaining as We Have Known It

The hope and optimism of the 2008 election is being derailed by economic meltdown and a legislative process seemingly incapable of producing real change. We entered 2010 with workers having lost trillions in income, homes, and retirement funds while the banks and corporations that crashed the economy continue to use taxpayer subsidies to further consolidate their economic control. The majority of union members are in the public sector at the very time when states are drowning in hundreds of billions of dollars of budget deficits. And if labor and other progressives don't offer an alternative, there is a real danger of the right-wing capturing the growing populist anger and using it to attack government's ability to limit corporate power, and regulate and repair the economy.

This is the time to offer a moral voice for those devastated by the economic crisis, and to have the courage and passion to liberate ourselves from the straitjacket of limited expectations. Unions, and their members, must join with communities long mired in poverty—and the tens of millions of people being forced out of the middle class—to imagine and articulate a vision of a better world, and to help lead the battle to win it. We have the opportunity to work with a growing group of potential allies to develop a plan and strategy to achieve that vision—but, to do so, we have to question and challenge long held assumptions and ideas.

The labor movement in the United States suffers from a version of "the Stockholm Syndrome." We have been held hostage for so long by a messianic free market ideology that we have come to empathize with it and adopt the views of our "kidnappers." We have been on the defensive and losing for so long that we have internalized the idea that the economic system we currently have is the only one possible, and that the only progress we can make is modest and incremental at best. Instead, we have no choice but to chart a fundamentally different course grounded in the idea that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small economic elite and giant corporations is warping democracy and undermining the ability of the vast majority of the people in this country—including workers, unions, and progressives—to organize, bargain, pass legislation, and make substantive change.

Although we missed an opportunity last year—offered by the economic collapse to organize against Wall Street, the banks, and giant multinational corporations—the ongoing economic crisis and recession continues to create the conditions to organize on a far grander scale. It is precisely in times of economic and political turmoil that movements have been born, and the radical redistribution of wealth and power becomes possible.

Just as the economic collapse exposed the fundamental flaws of how our economic system is governed, it also exposed the failure of the labor movement's approach to the economy and the shortcomings of our approaches to organizing and bargaining. In the post-World War II era, labor accepted that corporations managed their companies and the country's economy. Corporations produced profits and jobs, and unions played the role of a very junior partner negotiating narrowly on issues of wages and benefits for unionized workers. Labor's job was to negotiate for a "fair" share of an expanding economic pie for union workers and to leave the rest to corporate America. During bargaining, unions didn't demand a role in determining how corporations managed companies, what products they made, or the quality of the services they provided. Nor did they consider the impact of their decisions on the health of specific communities or the overall economy. Unions accepted the cliché that what was good for business was good for America. While this produced real gains for unionized workers in the booming post-World War II industrial economy, it's clear that this model doesn't work; it is broken and it isn't repairable.

Any effort to address this requires...