Strikes, Labor Unions, and Political Theory

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

After a long period of decline, strike activity has dramatically increased, labor organizing has enjoyed unexpected success, and unions have seen major increases in popularity. This return of public and political interest in labor questions has not yet found its way into political theory. Strikes and unions have never been topic of sustained inquiry in modern political theory. Unlike neighboring topics – civil disobedience, nonviolence, right to revolution, self-defense, conscientious refusal, just war – there is no developed literature in political theory about strikes or labor unions. The few articles and occasional monograph scattered across six or seven decades of research do not hold together as a tradition of conversation built up recursively over time. One cannot even find a view to characterize as the mainstream or standard one in relation to which other views might develop. The only sustained discussions are to be found from texts in the history of political thought, like those by Rosa Luxemburg, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bill Haywood, Karl Kautsky or, on the other side, among figures like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Some of the richest reflections are found in Marxist and fellow-traveling journals, legal theory, legal history, or in the writings of labor leaders and organizers themselves.

This panel takes small steps to expand the political theory of strikes and labor unions. Steve Klein considers and rejects the two common arguments in favor of labor unions – that they equalize bargaining power or protect workers’ rights in the labor-contract – and proposes a third, democratic defense. Unions are best seen as a democratic form of collective power that workers use to reclaim control over production and investment. Ben Laurence proposes that we understand labor unions as ways in which workers transform themselves by transforming their relationship to economic conditions. By allowing workers to see economic problems as addressable collectively, through voice, rather than individually, through exit, unions transform workers own sense of agency and capacity. Alex Gourevitch argues that workers have a right to strike when workers are properly self-organized - into unions, a broad labor movement, or even a workers party. Being able to organize and coordinate strike activity through universal organizations is necessary for workers to show that a particular strike is rightful or more than the mere exercise of unilateral power by one group of workers over everyone else. Yunhyae Kim investigates strikes in the informal economy of reproduction, arguing that declining birth rates in advanced industrial societies are to be understood as 'birth strikes' or strikes of reproduction. Drawing on feminist movements and literature, she proposes that we see these birth strikes as part of a democratic politics of reproduction, against technocratic approaches to crises of care.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Toward a Democratic Theory of Labor Unions - Steven Klein, King's College London

• The Politics of Reproduction: In Defense of Birth Strikes - Yunhyae Kim, Harvard University

• The Right to Strike and Self-Organization - Alexander H. Gourevitch, Brown University

• Labor Militancy and Self-Transformation - Benjamin Laurence, University of Chicago

Chair

• Alexander H. Gourevitch Brown University

Discussant

• Mie Inouye Bard College