Reviving Workers' Rights in a New Economy 

Amy B. Dean

Co-Author, "A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will
Reshape the American Labor Movement"

Posted: September 6, 2010
http://www.amybdean.com/

This Labor Day, we must consider how a new generation
of unions can become relevant in a transformed economy.

Every Labor Day, we hear about the landmark
achievements of working people and their unions.
Advocates of the past successfully worked to prohibit
child labor and to create the 40-hour workweek. They
closed sweatshops and ended systems of industrial
homework, in which factory employees were made to do
labor-intensive tasks for businesses late at night and
in their own homes.

These achievements were indeed historic. At the same
time, one wonders if these hard-fought rights are still
meaningful for American workers today. In our global
economy, many of us bring our work home with us, few
enjoy an eight-hour workday, and everyone is forced to
compete with sweatshops and child labor in far corners
of the world.

This year, when so many Americans are struggling just
to get by--rather than working to make a decent
living--we must rethink what type of labor institutions
are needed to restore and protect workers rights and
make work pay again.

Since the nineteenth century, our economy has cycled
through a radical transformation every fifty to
seventy-five years. Just as America went from having an
agrarian economy to an industrial one in the late 1800s
and early 1900s, we have more recently shifted into an
information economy. During every period of transition,
many people get left behind and our democracy feels the
strain of growing inequality. Too often, the insecurity
and resentment fostered by rapid structural change
provokes harmful waves of scapegoating and
anti-immigrant nativism.

It takes the organized efforts of working people to
reverse these trends toward exclusion and to ensure
that each new epoch will bring a shared prosperity.
During the transition to the industrial economy, it was
not preordained that the auto, steel, or textile
industries would provide living wages, health care,
pensions, and other benefits that allowed for a stable,
thriving middle class in this country. Rather,
employees needed to use the institution of collective
bargaining to come together, negotiate with their
employers, and demand the conditions that would provide
a healthy quality of life for working people.

Today, in the wake of an economic crisis that has left
American workers more insecure than ever, we need to
move our nation's labor laws out of the industrial era
and into the new economy. American labor law is still
based in the National Labor Relations Act, passed in
1930s. It was designed with the employment
relationships of those bygone times in mind. Today,
even in a bad economy, most people don't see unions as
the solution to their woes. That's because current
unions are structured to represent employees in
traditional workplaces that are steadily disappearing.

In the fast-growing service sectors of the economy, new
work arrangements are the norm. From accountants and
software developers to technical writers and quality
assurance workers, individuals who might once have been
permanent employees of a single company are now
independent contractors, working on a contingent basis
for a variety of corporations. Even in blue-collar
fields, employees are increasingly hired on a part-time
or temporary basis. They are often outsourced and
subcontracted. And they move regularly from one
employer to another.

These people all have an interest in organizing with
their co-workers to better the conditions of their
employment. But they do not fit within the structure of
yesterday's unions.

Given these profound shifts, labor laws must be changed
to recognize the rights of new types of workers. And it
must allow them to form the next generation of labor
organizations.

Labor has always been structured in direct relation to
capital. In the nineteenth century, skilled trade
workers formed craft unions and professional guilds,
building organizations like the Knights of Labor. In
the twentieth century, as large corporations emerged,
employees organized themselves across industries and
formed national and international unions to match the
scale of business.

In our flexible economy, people once again identify
more with their profession than with a single employer.
For them to come together, we need to revise the rules
around freedom of association and allow contemporary
workers to form organizations that are a hybrid between
older industrial unions and modern professional
associations.

Getting there requires the labor movement to use its
political capital to demand a legal framework for
collective bargaining that will allow it to push beyond
its traditional boundaries. This means spending as much
time advocating for the rights of those currently
excluded from its ranks as it spends protecting
existing union members. Moreover, elected officials
must enact substantive reforms that will allow labor
organizations to change with the times.

The alternative is dire. The longer we neglect the
yawning gulf between the structure of our economy and
the structure of our labor laws, the faster shared
prosperity and a secure middle class in America will
become relics of the past.


Amy Dean is co-author, with David Reynolds, of A New
New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the
American Labor Movement. She worked for nearly two
decades in the labor movement and now works to develop
new and innovative organizing strategies for social
change organizations in progressive, labor, and faith
communities. She can be reached via the Web site:
http://www.amybdean.com/.

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