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

There has basically been one single dispute running through the entire history of the American labor movement. On one side are the people who believe that the most urgent task is to organize everyone who doesn’t have a union, because unions are the only tool that can maintain the critical balance of power between labor and capital. On the other side are the people who already have unions, and who believe that the important thing is to protect what they have. Organizing millions of unorganized workers seems to them to be at best a pleasantly idealistic, faraway goal, and at worst a fundamental threat to the style of power that they have cultivated—power that comes from organizing key pockets of skilled labor rather than from organizing everyone.