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Labor's Identity Crisis |
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Marion Crain & Ken Matheny |
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| In this Article, Professor Crain and Mr. Matheny assess the consequences of organized labor’s appeal to unalloyed class consciousness in an increasingly diverse workforce. Tracing the historical evolution of labor’s search for an ideology that would reach the hearts and minds of American workers and the public, the authors find that the marginalization of race, ethnicity, gender, and other social identities in labor’s ideology has negatively impacted labor unionism. Labor law reflects and further cabins union ideology by severing social justice issues from class issues. Analyzing court decisions intended either to promote labor’s interest in maintaining broad discretion to protect its workers’ class-based interests or to protect individual minority workers whose interests were not priori-tized by their unions, the authors show how race and sex discrimination were systematically defined as outside the purview of union concern and largely beyond the reach of the labor laws. Cases that undermine union power and split workers’ class identities from their race, ethnic, and gen-der identities by permitting employers to circumvent unions and require workers to sign predispute arbitration agreements waiving their statutory antidiscrimination rights are the inevitable outcome. The authors suggest reforms aimed at centering social justice in union ideology and propose amending the labor laws to add antidiscrimination provisions that would impose an affirmative duty on unions to advocate for racial, ethnic, and gender justice. | |
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Copyright
© 2001 by California Law Review, Inc. |
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