Jeremy Wolf
3/3/08
cleavage between individual unions and the outside world, for lack of a better term. Taft-
Hartley outlawed secondary strikes, making it very difficult for unions to form alliances
with other unions to win strikes, and the NLRA served to naturalize the power
inequalities between workers and bosses to an extent that has made it much more difficult
to make an appeal to the general public on the basis of justice in the context of a labor
dispute. Additionally, unions ability to appeal to a common conception of justice is
limited by their need to maintain a comparative advantage over non-union workers. I will
refer to this as a vertical cleavage, creating a division between unions, and between each
union and civil society outside itself.
The second type of cleavage is that between the rank-and-file membership of
unions and the staff and leadership. The reporting requirements of the NLRA, the logic of
governmentality, liberal subjectification, and the resulting commodification of union
representation have contributed to the formation of an unequal class structure within the
unions themselves. These differentiated classes may have divergent interests that make it
difficult to mobilize both the will of the membership and the resources of the
organization at the same to make a large-scale work stoppage feasible. I will refer to this
as a horizontal cleavage, cutting across union organizations and splitting them in two (or
It is important to reiterate that the tendency of the unions to act in ways that
generate these cleavages is not the result of a force relationship; they are not made to
structure themselves in these ways. Rather, they are encouraged to do so by the
juridical/legal/discursive context within which they operate, and there are deeply
significant discourses that may be brought to bear against them if unions fail to act as
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There may be a secondary horizontal cleavage between the elected leadership and the staff.
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Convention