The Labor Movement Is About the Fight for True Democracy

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- Union leaders are joined by community group representatives, elected officials, and social activists for a rally in support of unionization efforts by Amazon workers in Alabama on March 21, 2021 in Los Angeles, California.
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“The Labor Movement Is About the Fight for True Democracy,' Common Dreams, April 21, 2022. - The Americans organizing their workplaces aren’t simply fighting for themselves. They’re storm troops fighting for democracy. -

This spring, we find ourselves in precarious waters. The global COVID-19 pandemic has exposed deep cracks in the foundation of our democracy. Our economy remains deeply unequal, with billionaires profiting off the pandemic while workers struggle to keep up with inflation. The moment we're in is not simply a fight to restore normalcy. It's a moment to decide if we'd rather have a democracy or run-away capitalism. So now more than ever, we need to deepen our democracy—not just in the voting booth, but on the shop floor, too.

In our new book, The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, we argue that we're long overdue to build the democracy our ancestors imagined—one that prioritizes participation not just in politics, but in our economic lives too. Our country has a rich, if incomplete, history of these efforts. After the abolition of slavery, the groundwork was laid for formerly enslaved workers to make decisions about the conditions and compensation for their labor. Although later years brought setbacks, during this period our country made genuine strides toward building a real multiracial democracy.

We believe it's in this spirit that so many workers today seek the ability to organize and collectively bargain—at Amazon, Starbucks, and beyond. The people organizing these workplaces aren't simply fighting for themselves. They're storm troops fighting for democracy. A healthy democracy is a system in which people have the ability to consult, confer, and govern themselves. As we strive to recover from this pandemic, we'll need to create new mechanisms that allow everyone to participate in decisions about the political and economic questions that impact us all.

Workers are already developing exciting new innovations to accomplish this. For example, domestic workers are excluded from the protections of the National Labor Relations Act. Yet workers operating on the gig platform Handy successfully negotiated a legal agreement with the company that piloted some of the same standards, practices, and protections you might see in a traditional collective bargaining agreement. More recently, the independent Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island won a traditional union election at one of the largest companies on the globe, originally without any union or non-profit infrastructure to support them—or even a bank account...

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/04/21/labor-movement-about-fight-true-democracy