Workers do not strike every day, they cannot do that the way they function in the capitalist economy. The way they have to live by selling their labor power makes that impossible.
Interpretation
Workers face limitations in their ability to strike due to economic pressures.
This quote by Ernest Mandel highlights the constraints that workers encounter within a capitalist system, where the necessity of earning a living by selling their labor power restricts their capacity to engage in frequent strikes. It illustrates the struggle between the need for workers to advocate for their rights and the economic realities that make sustained collective action challenging.
In practice
This quote could be used in a labor rights seminar to discuss the challenges faced by workers.
Our labor unions are not narrow, self-seeking groups. They have raised wages, shortened hours, and provided supplemental benefits. Through collective bargaining and grievance procedures, they have brought justice and democracy to the shop floor.
Public employees should have the right to bargain for better wages and working conditions, just like all employees do.
In all the history of organized labor, from the earliest times to the present day, no body of union workingmen ever served in a more humiliating and debasing role than that in which the railway unions appear at this very hour before the American people and the world.
The union miner cannot agree to the acceptance of a wage principle which will permit his annual earnings and his living standards to be determined by the hungriest unfortunates whom the non-union operators can employ.
Safe working conditions, fair wages, protection from forced labor, and freedom from harassment and discrimination - these must become standard global operating conditions.
Speaking of myself, I was made to realize long ago that the old trade union was utterly incompetent to deal successfully with the exploiting corporations in this struggle. I was made to see that in craft unionism the capitalist class have it within their power to keep the workers divided, to use one part of them to conquer and crush another part of them. Indeed, I was made to see that the old form of unionism separates the workers and keeps them helpless at the mercy of their masters.
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