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 conditions change, the employees cannot reopen the contract unless the employer consents. The contract has the force of law, and its violation can lead to serious consequences.

The union is responsible for enforcing the contract, and for disciplining workers who violate the agreement through direct action. Of course, companies and state administrations themselves regularly bypass or brazenly violate the contract. To remedy these infractions, the union can grieve and finally arbitrate the violations. Increasingly, the arbitration process has been heavily weighted on the employers’ side, but workers have no other recourse, under the law of the contract. Consequently, if their issues are sufficiently serious, workers sometimes engage in wildcat walkouts and other job actions, such as work-to-rule or sabotage.8 Their union is obliged to renounce the strike or job action, and must “order” workers back to the job. Ironically, under the law the union acts as management’s police force.

Under these conditions, the union tends to become conservative and can even become an agent of shop floor worker subordination. A minority of shop floor leaders and some officials do resist, but the weight of the law mostly prevails. Thanks to the weakening of workers’ rights—during economic booms as well as busts—collective bargaining is now mostly a kind of collective begging. Yet for most union officials and activists, collective bargaining remains a sacred cow to be cherished in the name of worker security. And, of course, as conservative state legislatures try to emulate Wisconsin’s and Indiana’s abolition of public employees’ collective bargaining rights, we can expect the next period of labor action to be a fierce struggle to preserve existing bargaining rights, even though employers in the private and public sectors have long exhibited their contempt for the institution and have ceaselessly undermined its dialogic assumption.