Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

A COLLECTIVE BARGAIN

Jane McAlevey

Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy

From longtime labor organizer Jane McAlevey, a vital call-to-arms in favor of unions, the only force capable of defending our democracy.

For decades, intractable social and economic problems have been eating away at the social fabric of the United States. The crisis is now so deep it's threatening democracy itself. Income inequality has reached epic proportions, resulting in a lopsided political system that bestows tax breaks on the rich while the rest of the country has been economically abandoned. There's a single, obvious solution to these problems, one with a long, successful history, but one that too many have forgotten: unions.
In A COLLECTIVE BARGAIN, longtime labor, environmental, and political organizer Jane McAlevey makes the case that unions are the only institution capable of fighting back against today's super-rich corporate class. Since the 1930s, when unions briefly flourished under New Deal protections, corporations have waged a stealthy and ruthless war against the labor movement. Today, McAlevey argues, it's time for unions to make a comeback. Want to reverse the nation's mounting wealth gap? Put an end to sexual harassment in the workplace? End racial disparities on the job? Negotiate climate justice? Bring back unions.
Alongside McAlevey, we travel from Pennsylvania hospitals, where we're thrust into a herculean fight in which nurses are building a new kind of patient-centered unionism; to Silicon Valley, where tech workers, fed up with the illusory promise of a better world, have turned to old-fashioned collective action; and inside the most promising anti-austerity rebellion in years, the one being waged by America's teachers.
A rousing and electrifying manifesto, A COLLECTIVE BARGAIN shows us why we must strengthen and defend the only force capable of fighting back against social injustice and the alarming right-wing shift in our politics: a strong, democratic union movement.

JANE MCALEVEY is an organizer, author and scholar. Her first book, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) (Verso Press) was named the most valuable book of 2012 by The Nation Magazine. Her second book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (Oxford) was released late in 2016. She is a regular commentator on radio and TV. She continues to work as an organizer on union campaigns, lead contract negotiations, and train and develop organizers.

Available products
Book Published 2020-01-01 by Ecco

Comments

Longtime union activist McAlevey, whose Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) was named the most valuable book of 2012 by The Nation, essentially reintroduces the idea that labor unions can be a correctiveas they were in the years following the Great Depressionto the yawning economic disparity between the corporate superrich and those underpaid, underserved workers who helped create that wealth. She ties that disparity to what she sees as the foundering of the democratic electoral process, and begins by presenting three casesthose of healthcare workers in Pennsylvania, teachers in West Virginia, and hotel housekeepers in Californiain which striking workers not only scored economic successes for their unions but also laid bare serious management wrongdoing before the general public. She follows with an account of corporate efforts to diminish, if not abolish altogether, the union movement over the past 70 years, following with a robust, point-by-point rebuttal of presumptions the public might wrongly hold about unions: that they're compulsory, exclusive to blue-collar workers, racist, sexist, anti-environment, and corrupt. After calling out Silicon Valley, with all its progressive veneer, for its anti-labor actions, McAlevey finishes with keen insights into creating a union and rebuilding a union from within. Another most-valuable book from McAlevey. Alan Moores

Publishers Weekly STARRED REVIEW Labor activist McAlevey (Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell)) delivers a persuasive argument that the power of strong, democratic trade unions can fix many of America's social problems in this timely cri de coeur. Sketching the history of the labor movement from the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which guaranteed the right to collective bargaining; through the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which banned sympathy strikes, legalized corporate campaigns against unionization, and created right-to-work laws; and the union-busting effects of globalization beginning in the 1970s, McAlevey contends that the weakening of private- and public-sector unions over the past 80 years is directly responsible for increased income and political inequality. Yet unions can be successful even in a diminished state, McAlevey notes, pointing to recent strikes in the education, health-care, and hospitality industries that led to improved contracts. She offers a useful primer on how labor organizing works, and effectively refutes common assumptions about unions, including that they discriminate against women and are inherently corrupt. Well-run unions, she contends, can achieve better schools, stronger environmental protections, and increased racial and gender equality. McAlevey's caustic humor (We don't need robots to care for the aging population. We need the rich to pay their taxes) and contagious confidence in the efficacy of organized labor give this succinct volume an outsize impact. (Jan.)

A battle cry for union rights in a time hostile to labor organizations.