New C4SS Study

Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model

From Tom Knapp's press release:

STUDY: THE MARKET, NOT GOVERNMENT, IS THE WORKER’S FRIEND

September 30 – In the Center for a Stateless Society’s latest study, “Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model,” C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson examines the role of state labor regulation in halting the progress of unionism and explores the real source of pre-Wagner Act gains for labor: Direct action and worker solidarity in the face of combined state and corporate power.

“The predominance of the conventional strike as we know it, as the primary weapon of labor struggle,” writes Carson, “is in fact a byproduct of the labor relations regime created under the Wagner Act. … In the system of labor relations extant before Wagner, strikes were only one part of the total range of available tactics. Unionism, and the methods it normally employed, was less about strikes or excluding non-union workers from the workplace than about what workers did inside the workplace to strengthen their bargaining power against the boss.”

Drawing on the history of unionism from the Knights of Labor to the Industrial Workers of the World and into the modern era, Carson’s study points the way toward a future of labor radicalism aligned with free market anarchism.