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 win union demands, and to negotiate with employers over wages, working conditions and other issues of mutual interest. The NLRA did not mandate that union labor and employers reach a collective bargaining agreement, but it did make negotiations with a union that had won a representation election compulsory—a matter of law, not voluntarism—if the union showed majority support in a unit deemed by the Labor Relations Board appropriate for collective bargaining. The Labor Relations Board was established by government not only to determine this eligibility but also to administer the representation election; it also adjudicated “unfair labor practices” that might thwart labor’s right to form independent unions. It is worth noting that the ACLU opposed the NLRA, on the grounds that the law granted exclusive bargaining rights only to victorious unions. But most unions wanted exclusive representation because they feared that a plurality of representatives would open the door to the company unions that had been dominant in the 1920s. Exclusive bargaining proved a boon for the formation of a strong labor bureaucracy, but it limited workers’ ability to choose alternatives when the union failed to support their struggles. Even so, the NLRA provided for the possibility of minority unionism, an option few labor organizations took. [...]

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 leaderships and the companies with which they deal. Company-union collaborations are symptoms of nearly all unions’ loss of class perspective. Corporate capital, on the other hand, knows it is a class and acts accordingly. Unions have renounced class warfare, while their adversaries pursue it with a vengeance—against the workers unions are supposed to represent and defend.

[...] 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 their union agree, crucially, to surrender their First Amendment right to withhold their labor. The penalties for violating these unconstitutional agreements are often severe: stiff fines, imprisonment of union officials and sometimes, as after the three-day walkout by New York City transit workers, a court order barring the automatic check-off of union dues.

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.