As Trump tosses out the TSA union contract, everything is on the line [View all]

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/strike-or-else

The most important thing about a union contract is that it is a contract. It is a legally binding agreement. It is not a passing fancy. It is not an empty promise, a public relations ploy. It is a contract. It is a guarantee. The things that are laid out in the contract are guaranteed, for the length of the contract. Abiding by its provisions is mandatory, not optional.

This is a bedrock principle. It is why working people fight so hard to, first, win a union, and then—more fighting—to win a fair contract. The contract makes all of that effort worthwhile. Why? Because it is the ineradicable manifestation of what you have won. You may have struggled, and marched, and endured threats and retaliation, and poured years of energy into organizing, and a big reason why you kept going through all of those hardships is that you knew that once you won your contract, you would get what is in the contract. For well over a century, workers and bosses have fought bitterly over whether workers can have unions, and what those unions can do, and what is fair or unfair to put into contracts, but all of those battles are framed by a shared understanding that what goes into the contract is very important because contracts, once agreed to, are real.

There are some narrow and well defined scenarios in which a union contract might get tossed out before it expires—for example, certain types of private company sales give the buyer of the company the right not to honor an existing contract. (This was a theoretical possibility when Gawker Media was sold out of bankruptcy to Univision, and we in the union regarded it as such a serious threat that we made it clear we would walk out if Univision chose not to pick up the contract. They picked it up.) Such cases are predictable and rare. Apart from these narrow and well defined instances, union contracts are binding agreements for the length of the contract. If the employer dislikes something in the contract, their remedy is to renegotiate the contract when it expires. Not honoring the contract, or deciding to toss out the contract, is not an option. If it were, “contract” would mean something very different, and unions would be very different entities, and the entire history of organized labor would be different.

The inviolability of contracts does not just apply to the private sector. It also applies to the public sector. Here is a little thought experiment for you: In a nation where control of city and county and state and federal governments regularly changes hands every two or four years, what the fuck would be the point of negotiating union contracts that spanned elections, if any incoming elected leader was allowed to just toss out the contracts they don’t like? There would be no point. Again, the entire landscape of public sector unions would look very different if politicians were allowed to scrap union contracts on a whim. Doing that is not allowed. It is not a thing. Everyone knows that contracts are contracts. Are you happy that city and state and federal employees don’t walk off the job after every election? I bet you are, if you like your trash picked up or your fires extinguished or your drivers license applications processed. One reason workers do not walk off the job when political leadership changes is that they have union contracts that will endure. They know that their terms of employment will be as they are laid out in the contracts. This gives the government stability. It is a good thing. If newly elected politicians dislike the union contracts they inherit, they work it out at the bargaining table when the contracts are renegotiated.

FULL story at link above.