Tell the Bosses We're Coming. Shaun Richman

to “be better than the boss,” run smarter and tougher campaigns, or find new leaders who will do so.

      I don’t mean to dismiss either camp. There are merits to both approaches. But let me suggest that we have more agency than that. As I said in the first chapter, our nation’s current crisis of democracy and runaway inequality make this moment alive with possibility. We must be adroit and open to experimenting with even more approaches still.

      We have to get past abstractions, and we have to stop conflating our legal rights with our human rights. We must pursue an internal debate that is crystal clear about what we can’t control at the moment—Congress, capital mobility, and our psychotic president’s attention span—and what we can—our strategy, structure, and demands. That is the focus of this chapter.

       Labor’s Bill of Rights

      As soon as I left the American Federation of Teachers at the end of 2015, I began writing and publishing for the first time in years. I soon realized I had a lot of pent-up frustrations about unions’ legal strategies and that I had to vent them.

      Look, union organizers and labor lawyers have probably been butting heads since the dawn of the labor movement, and it’s mostly a healthy tension. Disagreements, after all, can lead to strategic breakthroughs. But a kind of institutional inertia has set in, and at most unions, and in most campaigns, the lawyers get to have the final word on strategic decisions. All too often, it’s without the benefit of a proper debate. And almost always the lawyers, particularly the general counsels and lawyers on retainer at the DC-based international unions, pursue a fundamentally conservative course of action.