Relevant Revisit: “Bargaining for the Future: Rethinking Labor’s Recent Past and Planning Strategically for its Future”

Posted in Publications

As labor rises to meet the current moment, revisit “Bargaining for the Future” – the Kalmanovitz Initiative’s 2014 study on new and innovative “forms of
collective action that might be capable of providing leverage for workers in a new bargaining
framework, forms of engagement that do not rely on full-scale strikes”

Excerpt:

“With President Obama’s election behind us, questions about the future direction of
organized labor and its allies have become more pressing. Four years ago, Obama’s election
raised hopes that great changes were in the offing. While significant reform was enacted in the
form of the Affordable Care Act, hoped for breakthroughs in union rights never materialized.
The Employee Free Choice Act was bottled up in the Senate; the White House Middle Class
Task Force proved unable to advance a range of desired administrative reforms; and courts
blocked the significant rule changes that were drawn up by a friendlier National Labor Relations
Board (NLRB). Despite the large role that unions played in turning out the vote for Obama and
Democratic candidates in the Senate and House in 2012, there is little reason to believe that
labor’s successful political work will translate into a successful national legislative or
administrative agenda during the next two years.
In some ways, the lack of a realistic labor law reform agenda for the next two years
provides us an opportunity to think strategically about the future of worker representation, free
from the need to advance a particular piece of legislation. It is this sort of thinking that we most
need to engage in today. In the wake of the attacks on collective bargaining that disrupted the
American landscape in 2011, the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor (KI) set
out to assess the implications of these attacks in ways that could help us see beyond them to the
revival of worker organization in the 21st century. This project was rooted in the KI’s mission to
provide a space to foster innovative thinking about the future of labor and democracy, and it was
undertaken independently, but in consultation with leaders in the American Federation of Labor
and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), Change to Win (CtW), and other workers’
organizations.”