Freelancers' Union
Labor Day Blues
I am, by sentiment, by heritage and by political perspective, a fan of the organized labor movement --which, as I see it, improves the lives of its members and the content of the body politic. As a result, each Labor Day seems an occasion more for nostalgia than celebration. My ideas about the decline of the labor movement are confused and the solutions, tentative.
The proportion of the US work force which is represented by union continues its decline year-to-year. The sectors in which union-membership growth occurs at all, public employment and health care, are largely outside of the profit-making sector of the economy so that those employers are somewhat less frantic and use fewer scorched-earth “preventive labor relations†tactics. Retail giants like Wal-Mart and Starbucks fight unions tooth and nail, mostly with success. For a thoughtful, but somewhat dated, essay by labor educator-gadlfy Harry Kelber on unions’ very long losing streak click here.
Labor | Labor Law | AFL-CIO | Bruce Raynor | Freelancers' Union | Sara Horowitz | UNITE-HERE
