What is the impact on society when most of us spend our waking hours living under undemocratic conditions based on a hierarchy of rights and duties, and doing so not out of choice but out of necessity? We've come to see this as the way things must be. We accept hierarchy. We believe that managers are responsible and sober and must maintain control over workers who are irresponsible and will only work under compulsion.

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) says that the nondemocratic, totalitarian workplace endangers us all. Workers may shake the dust of the workplace off their boots, they may shower off the grease of a fast-food restaurant, they may try to talk away their angst with friends and family, but the reality is that our work lives become incorporated into our intimate physical and mental selves. Over time, the undemocratic workplace grinds away at the belief that we have a right to participate in decisions that affect our lives and societies. The NLRA’s vision of the fundamental importance of democratic principles is accurate. We are increasingly a society more of subjects than citizens. That must change if we are to remain a democracy.

Sadly, with only about 10 percent of workers unionized, we have an enormous citizenship deficit. It's not that only union members are good citizens, but we know that something about union membership creates citizens of a democracy. Union members vote, volunteer and participate in politics and civic life in percentages far higher than unorganized workers. Collective bargaining creates citizens by pushing workers to gain skills that matter as they face issues that matter, such as wages, working conditions, workplace injury and discharge, while getting work done. Bargaining collectively means giving workers the power to say no and the ability to choose to say yes to what an employer wants. With collective power, workers can ask an employer to consider other ideas, goals or methods. Unions can put on the brakes if more time and reflection are needed to solve a problem. Collective bargaining teaches the citizenship skills of assessing needs and goals and creating realistic strategies to achieve them. It teaches workers how to communicate, advocate, make decisions, listen, persuade and compromise. Most important, it develops a sense of empowerment and right to participate.

Are laws wise that treat workers as no more than tools? What sort of society discourages workers from having a sense of responsibility? If workers are told that their participation, involvement and intelligence are not wanted, will they try to increase their participation, involvement or intelligence? Can a democracy exist when this is its raw material?

The NLRA says the lack of workplace democracy is a serious problem. It pushes us to rethink the structure of the workplace and gives us processes that can change our acceptance of the status quo, moving us toward a more democratic society that invites all members to have a seat at the table.

For instance, suppose your employer takes a completely unreasonable stand in negotiations. Do you have the right to go out on strike? Most state governments claim that you can’t strike if you’re a public employee.

During last December’s “Christmas strike” of New York City transit workers, Gov. Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg couldn’t say the word “strike” without sticking “illegal” in front of it. Media outlets from Fox News to the New York Times followed suit. Even union president Roger Toussaint, who likened the strikers to Rosa Parks and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., conceded that they were violating the law. “There is a higher calling than the law,” declared Toussaint. “That is justice and equality.”

Well said. But there is also a higher law than New York’s anti-strike law, and that is the U.S. Constitution. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King did not concede that it was illegal to violate segregation laws, and workers need not concede that it is illegal to violate unconstitutional strike bans like New York’s Taylor law.

When the transit workers struck, they were exercising their most basic labor right: the right to quit work. Nobody denies that this right is guaranteed by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude. But employers argue that the amendment guarantees only the individual right to quit in isolation from other workers. This argument misses the whole point of the right to quit, which is—according to the Supreme Court—to give workers the “power below” and employers the “incentive above to relieve a harsh overlordship or unwholesome conditions of work.” Obviously, most workers cannot obtain any power just by quitting on their own. As CIO general counsel Lee Pressman explained more than a half-century ago: “The simple fact is that the right of individual workers to quit their jobs has meaning only when they may quit in concert, so that in their quitting or in their threat to quit they have a real bargaining strength.” 

During the transit strike, the Rev. Al Sharpton reminded us that when King was assassinated, he was in Memphis to support a strike by black sanitation workers that had—like last year's TWU strike—been declared “illegal.” What Sharpton understandably did not recall, however, is the fact that the Memphis strikers denied that their strike was “illegal.” Their union maintained that workers need not submit to “indentured servitude,” and that as free Americans, they could strike for decent wages and conditions.

When courageous workers strike in the face of unconstitutional laws, public attention is riveted—for a short, precious moment—on the issue of strikes and anti-strike laws. If nobody defends the right to strike, then it dies a little bit. During the first half of the 20th century, labor leaders understood this truth. They publicly defended workers’ constitutional right to strike despite bad decisions from the courts. Even that crusty old conservative Samuel Gompers thundered: “The American Federation of Labor and its president have declared that manifestly unjust decisions of courts must be defied, and there is no disposition to recant.” It is past time to revive that tradition.