Labor Law for the Rank and Filer
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4recommend
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2019–2024years
100% recommend
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- There's two podcasts I'd recommend:
1. Working Class History 2. Cool People who Did Cool Stuff
As for how this stuff works, check out the book, Labor Law for the Rank and Filer.
Another option is to contact a nearby IWW chapter or any other union. Union organizers love to talk about organizing.
- Close, but that's not quite right - 30% is the threshold within a "unit" (which can be one department) for a "showing of interest" which can be used to trigger a National Labor Relations Board election. An election is one of the most common ways to get an employer to live up to its obligation to bargain with its employees, but there are several. For an overview, check out "Labor Law for the Rank and Filer" by Daniel Gross.
Legalities aside, if you want to organize a union with your coworkers the first step is to form an organizing committee that is broadly representative of the unit you are trying to organize. You can then either form an independent union, or join an existing one. I'm happy to answer further questions by email (which you can find in my profile).
- Yes, a Hollywood dramatization of a specific incident in the history of American organized labor is definitely the best place to glean this understanding, as opposed to, you know, reading any of the numerous academic works about the history of US or world labor struggle...
Here, by contrast, is a great podcast on the subject spanning many incidents and movements:
https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/
And another recent great book by Alex Gourevitch, “From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century”
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/from-slavery-to-the-coo...
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/alex-gourevitch-labo...
“Labor Law for the Rank and Filer” by Staughton Lynd (who has written many great works of labor history) is the book inspiring many tech organizers:
https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=325
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/business/economy/labor-bo...
- So many arm chair lawyers on HN. The parent is wrong. It's illegal because it violates the NLRA, not whistleblower protections.
"Protected concerted activity".
If you want a good primer, "Labor Law for the Rank and Filer" is a good one.
- The NLRA is pretty complicated and it comes down to what you can get the NLRB to agree about, but this does qualify as protected concerted activity. Anything which is collective organizing in the interests of the employees w.r.t. working conditions is protected. Protesting gender discrimination is literally a text book case. I recommend "labor law for the rank and filer" as a nice introduction to the field.
- It's called "protected concerted activity". It is protected under the national labor relations act. These laws were passed in the context of mine owners hiring armed mecenaries (the pinkertons for example) to break up strikes. I highly recommend "labor law for the rank and filer" as a history and primer on the law here.
