The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor Highlight

At that point, we ask a group of people who may have very little money in the bank and who are making very little money and who are thinking mostly about how to pay their own bills and take care of their kids and manage the daily struggles and indignities of being poor to take a big, material risk to their own livelihood based on what can seem like an arcane, ideological desire for a more perfect world. If, based on long life experience, you have concluded that work sucks and the boss will always try to screw you, and that you just need to make the best of it as much as possible if you don’t want to end up broke and starving and homeless, it can seem dubious, bordering on absurd, to imagine that you should put your whole job at risk to undertake an extremely uncertain process that might, months or years from now, produce some undefined gain for you, if you manage not to get fired by then. Maybe if you knew some people who had unions already, who had better wages and better health care and protections from mistreatment at work, who you could use as a mental reference point, you might feel more comfortable making such a bold leap of faith. But do you? Probably not. Especially if you didn’t grow up in West Virginia.