For the full episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/antifadas-is-15-77698515
In light of the depressing denouement of last year's railroad conflict, Sean and Matt sit down, in person at last, to discuss the deep history behind how American organized labor got so disorganized and why the labor movement hasn't moved in decades.
Why was it that, in the United States, workers institutions had trouble evolving past the infancy of narrow, sectoral, decentralized craft unionism towards broad-based, nationally-coordinated industrial unionism? How did capital, in the face of militant organizing, help choose the weaker of the two as their partner to bargain with? In what ways is worker self-organization in this country truly, as our enemies always say, anti-American? And importantly what is to be done now that private sector union density is so low, workers institutions so captured and the national labor relations regime has fallen apart?
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