A COLLECTIVE BARGAIN

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

Longtime union organizer McAlevey (Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, 2012) is nothing if not a tough talker; her first chapter closes with the provocative phrase, “As the Parkland youth say, I call bullshit.” The objection is to the prevailing narratives about unions and the causes of their decline—the notion, say, that unions are immaterial in an age of robotics and globalism or the charge that unions are racist, sexist, and corrupt. “Of course,” writes the author, “some unions are sexist for the same reasons that they are racist: union formation is a product of a sexist society.” She adds that women and people of color fare better economically with unions than without them. Even as she points out some inconvenient truths about certain elements of unions and the tactic of striking, she ably demonstrates how there is nothing quite like a strike to get the juices flowing, as when the 20,000 teachers of West Virginia recently went out on strike and, in the end, emerged with higher pay not just for themselves, but also for 14,000 nonteaching staff—and, still more, gave “the state police, roads workers, and everyone else on the state payroll a raise those workers could not have won because they did not strike.” Union busting is a big business, she writes, because unions are the capitalist’s greatest fear: Whole Foods may appear fresh and organic, but its methods in this regard would please John D. Rockefeller, and even the Democratic Party, she writes, has cast its lot with the enemies of their base: “When it comes to public education and teachers’ unions, Democrats don’t look much different from red-state Republicans.”

Tough talk for tough times and a welcome guide for labor activists.