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

Union contracts are an act of collective memory that is always in danger of fading away. Even in placid times, contract negotiations are an exhausting matter of transmitting and upholding the knowledge of provisions that were created in response to crises that can be easily forgotten as they recede into the past. There are always new problems, and the current problems will always feel the most urgent. Those who have worked somewhere for a long time may be seared with the knowledge of past battles, but newer workers are not. Contracts must be renegotiated every few years, and each time, there will be a temptation to bargain away what once seemed like uncrossable red lines. It is arduous to create, even within a single workplace, a culture in which the history and values of the union are impressed upon everyone and upheld throughout years of turnover. It is harder still to do this with a workforce spread across many locations from coast to coast.