The Founding Fathers believed in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Turns out they were talking about the wealthy slave owners and sea merchants, not the hard-working citizens, slaves or indentured servants.
Workers standing as one to better their working conditions is a no-brainer. That’s why the Founding Fathers hard-wired anti-union language right in the heart of the US Constitution.
Why is it so hard for Labor to beat the corporate class today? The answer’s in our history, explained in Building Unions: Past, Present and Future. The American rebels fought the British King to establish a new democracy with free speech and assembly. Unfortunately, they banned all our basic rights inside the workplace.
If we want to organize and build union power, we must change the fundamental relationships in our society between labor and capital. That means fighting the propertied class for a redistribution of wealth and power.
To win that fight, we need to understand how and why the laws that are hard-wired into the Constitution and into subsequent labor laws were crafted to suppress union organizing.
We need to know our own history.