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The contract is a compromise between labor and an employer, private or public. The workers agree to suspend most of their demands for a designated period of time, which grows longer in duration every contract season. In the past decade, that period has grown to as much as six years. Even if working…

[...] For more than seventy-five years, the labor movement by law and by custom has been enclosed by and restricted to collective bargaining, with the goal of achieving a contract that seals in wages, benefits, a grievance procedure and specified work rules. In return for that security, workers and…

Criticisms aside, organized labor is integrated into the prevailing political and economic system; so much so that it not only complies with the law but also lacks an ideology opposed to the prevailing capitalist system. Integration has even led to cooperative relationships between union leadership…

The crucial turning point for nearly all radicals, however, occurred with two historic developments: the New Deal, particularly the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 [...]

The NLRA recognized workers’ right to form unions of their own choosing, to take “concerted action” to w…

In the case of VW, the company’s neutrality may have vitiated the effect of such tactics, but that did not prevent others from engaging in them.