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But a militant labor movement could turn that to its advantage, because militants know that when Trump fires the refs, you don't have to stop the game - you can *throw out the rule book*:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/which-side-are-you-on-2/#strike-three-yer-out
This is the historic opportunity and challenge before us - to occupy our unions, save our workplace democracies, and then save our national democracy itself.
16/
Take the "two-tier contract." As unions lost ground - thanks to changes in labor enforcement under a succession of both GOP and Dem administrations - labor bosses hit on a *suicidal* strategy for contract negotiations. Rather than bargaining for a single contract that covered all the union's dues-paying members, these bosses negotiated contracts that guaranteed benefits for *existing* members, but did not extend these benefits to *new* members:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#shed-a-tier
2/
A two-tier contract is one where *all* workers pay dues, but only the dwindling rump of older, more established workers get any protection or representation from their union. An ever-larger portion of the membership have to pay dues, but get *nothing* for them. You couldn't come up with a better way to destroy unions if you tried.
3/
Thankfully, union workers figured out that the answer to this problem was firing their leaders and replacing them with militant, principled leaders who cared about *workers*, not just a subsection of their members. Radicals in big unions - like the UAW - teamed up with comrades from university grad students' unions to master the arcane rules that had been weaponized by corrupt bosses to prevent free and fair union elections.
4/
Together, they forced the first legitimate union elections in generations, and then the newly elected leaders ran historic strikes that won huge gains for workers (and killed the two-tier contract):
https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/
Corrupt unions aren't the only life-destroying institutions that radicals have set their sights on this decade. Concentrated corporate power is the most dangerous force in the world (indeed, it's large, powerful corporations that corrupted those unions).
5/
Antitrust activists, environmental activists, consumer rights activists, privacy activists and labor activists have stepped up the global war on big business all through this decade. From new antitrust laws to antitrust lawsuits to strikes to boycotts to mass protests and direct action, this decade has marked a turning point in the global consciousness about the danger of corporate power and the need to fight it.
6/
But there's a big, important difference between bad corporations and bad unions: what we should do about them.
The answer to a powerful, corrupt corporation is to take action that strips it of its power: break the company up, whack it with fines, take away its corporate charter, strip its executives of their fortunes, even put them in prison.
7/
This is a small personal instance of Bonfire in the Fediverse.
