In December 2005 more than 30,000 New York City Transit Workers walked out over economic issues, despite the State of New York’s Taylor Law, which prohibits all Public Sector Strikes.

Not only did the Workers face the loss of two days’ pay for each day on Strike, but a court ordered that the Union be fined $1 million per day.

Union President Roger Toussaint held firm, likening the Strikers to Rosa Parks.

“There is a ‘higher calling’ than the law,” he declared. “That is ‘justice and equality.’”

The Transit Strike exemplified Labor Civil Disobedience at its most effective.

The Workers were not staging a symbolic event - they brought the city’s transit system to a halt.

They claimed their fundamental right to collective action, despite a statute that outlawed it.

For a precious moment, public attention was riveted on the drama of workers defying a draconian Strike ban.

How did National Labor Leaders react at the time?

The National AFL-CIO president John Sweeney issued a routine statement of support, while most others did nothing at all.

To anybody watching the drama unfold, the message was clear: there is no right to Strike, even in the House of Labor.

About a decade earlier in 1996, Stephen Lerner, fresh from a successful campaign to organize Los Angeles Janitors, had warned in Boston Review that Private Sector Unions faced an existential crisis: density could soon drop from 10.3% to 5% if Unions did not expand their activity beyond the limits imposed by American Law.

He called for Unions to develop broad organizing strategies - industry-wide and regional - and to engage in civil disobedience, but few embraced these radical strategies.

Today, Private Sector Union Density is about 6.5%, not quite as low as Lerner predicted, but down from a high of over 30% in the mid-1950s.

Union decline matters.

For half a century, it has moved in lock step with the increase in income inequality.

According to an International Monetary Fund study of 20 advanced economies, Union decline accounted for about half of the increase in net income inequality from 1980 to 2012.

In the heyday of American Unionism, CEOs made about 25 times the annual compensation of the average Worker.

Today, the multiple is more than 350.

Meanwhile, as Thomas Edsell and others have warned for decades, the decline of Unions has deprived the Democratic Party of its strongest link to White Workers.

The overwhelming majority of Unions continue to endorse Democratic candidates (including Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election), but with ever-diminishing effect.

Until two decades ago it was possible to blame Union Decline on backward Labor Leaders who were so steeped in business Unionism that they could not see the need to organize broadly, much less to ally with other social movements across lines of race, gender, and immigration status.

Since then, however, we have seen continued shrinkage under leaders who are, for the most part, well intentioned and savvy.

Organized Labor is being strangled by laws that block Workers from exercising the rights to organize, to Strike and to act in solidarity.

The problem is structural.

National Union Officials are not well positioned to lead a challenge to corporate power.

Institutions with big treasuries and tit-for-tat relations with establishment politicians cannot be expected to undertake risky and polarizing actions.

Although leaders might see the need to build Working Class Power, the immediate incentives all point toward the narrow needs of their particular Union’s Members.

This constraint is rooted in the American system of exclusive representation, which divides Workers into thousands of bargaining unit boxes, gives Unions property interests in particular boxes, and penalizes Unions for doing anything other than defending existing boxes and acquiring new ones.

The prospects for Union Revival may seem bleaker than ever during the Trump Administration, even as the triumph of right-wing populism makes more urgent what was already apparent: the need to build a Labor Movement that can fight for the interests of the Working Class in the face of corporate power.

But prospects are not as grim as they appear.

To Read The Rest Of This Labor News Story, Go To: http://bostonreview.net/forum/james-gray-pope-ed-bruno-peter-kellman-right-strike