We Need a New Methodology for Upward Pressure Within Workplaces

[RadiationTherapy]

We need to do more than re-brand what unions are and what they do, we may need to re-evaluate altogether how workers should communicate, organize, and pressure workplaces. Our imaginations can find ways to utilize contemporary communication technology to accomplish all three of these things.

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	It is time for a new way of dealing with employers and workplace conditions.
	0 (0%)
	Unions can be re-branded, revitalized, and return to prominence in its historical form.
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[NightWatcher]

1. looks like we got someone trying to organize here. You're fired!

And thanks to the tide of changing anti union laws, your right to organize will soon be gone along with any hopes of seeking repair from damages.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. Absolutely we need to find new means

for protecting the rights & advancing the interests of the workers. Whether that means stepping outside the traditional union framework is uncertain to me.

[RadiationTherapy]

3. I regret I have never worked a job in which I have had an opportunity to belong,

but it seems with paypal, unaffiliated (with the workplace) websites and blogs, and social media, many of the functions - collecting dues, sharing concerns and developing plans, and communicating with one another - can all be done completely outside of the workplace. One small card with a website is all the info any worker would need. It seems the old model relied on the shared workspace to do most of these things, obviously since that is where everyone can be found. Now most people have online identities that are separate from their workplace ones.

[TheKentuckian]

10. The rubber has to meet the road, people don't need a message board to bitch about work

Particularly in an age where employers can either demand all your social network passwords and/or have people scouring the net trying to dig up dirt and firing people for it.

If you can't bargain collectively, can't slow down, and can't strike you have your hat in your hand.

You have to have labor rights and they don't come painless, without disruption, or freely from those who profit from you being powerless and grateful to be blessed by the "job creators" for grinding yourself in their gears for a few pennies.

A different structuring to cut out leadership that is far too cozy and of too similar a mind with management and more effective use of dues but that doesn't shortcut the gritty trench and knife work of securing the rights that even allow for collective action. There is no reinvention of the wheel that allows us to have living wages, retirement, and time off without conflict and solidarity.

One of the key answers is getting folks to stop trying to bring their neighbor down a peg instead of climbing up one and even more the disgusting fawning worship of the wealthy.

As usual, that route will be understood only when most have nothing to lose and no scape goats. This time it will be far more difficult.

[Blue_Tires]

6. I think that framework would still need to have the power of collective bargaining...

[RadiationTherapy]

7. Collective bargaining may also need to take on a new form.

How in the past were businesses coerced (I presume they had to be coerced, maybe not...) to participate in collective bargaining?

[Jackpine Radical]

8. By strikes and the threat thereof, of course.

And that leads exactly to where my thoughts were going as I read this thread.

We need new & creative forms of strike. Maybe like DOS attacks or other sorts of action that would be very hard to disrupt with goons. Hell, I'm too old & technically illiterate to even imagine what a few labor-minded geeks could come up with to discomfit a company without putting any working-class heads on the line. I'd settle for getting a few geeks to start thinking along these lines.

[appal_jack]

4. It's time for the Bill of Rights to extend to the workplace

I am pro-union, but presently working a state job in a right-to-work, anti-union state. While I certainly hope that unions can gain some traction in NC and across the country, I think that better workplace rights are a necessary pre-condition for any progress, whether union-centered or otherwise.

We Americans (hopefully) all embrace the Bill of Rights as a codification of fundamental, inalienable, and self-evident freedoms. Throughout American history, more and more of those freedoms have been 'incorporated' into state law via Supreme Court decisions. States are what charter corporations and issue licenses (dba's etc.) to private businesses. Yet for some strange reason many Americans, including too many here at DU, find it perfectly acceptable that one's right to free speech, one's freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and nearly every other civil right and liberty enshrined in our Constitution end at the workplace door. This is a ludicrous and pernicious notion. As we pursue any other means to gain workplace justice, we ought to always emphasize that our Constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms can and should be exercised at the times and places where we spend the majority of our waking hours: the workplace. A corporation gaining a charter from the state should only be possible with if said corporation agrees to respect the fundamental freedoms of its employees. Indeed, how can a state give a corporation a power which the state itself does not have? If a state must respect the First Amendment, etc., then so must the corporations it charters.

-app

[RadiationTherapy]

5. In the current political climate, this idea is a non-starter.

For the time being, "workers' rights" are coded language for anti-capitalism, class war, and, ironically, scamming the tax dollars of hard working Americans. A new methodology and identity is needed, in my opinion.

[appal_jack]

9. I try to post what's right & just

I try to post what's right & just.

I'll leave the triangulations about what's politically palatable to others.

-app