What Solidarity Unionism Also Isn’t (A Reply to Don White)

(Solidarity Unionism) emerged as an alternative model to contract-oriented organizing.

We live in the era of the no-strike clause as baked into the very notion of bargaining a contract with an employer; the same goes for management rights clauses, and binding arbitration as a final step of the grievance procedure.

I believe it’s possible to envision a contract that does not limit workers’ power on the job: a contract that only enshrines our victories without trading away the tools that gave us those victories in the first place.

But this goes against our lived experience . . . a contract devoid of the boss’s right to uninterrupted production goes against our lived experience of how the contract functions on the current terrain of the class struggle.