Margaret Levi

Well before President Reagan fired the striking air controllers in 1981, there has been concerted and continuous opposition by employers and politicians to undermine unions.

Employers no longer suppress unions by hiring private armies like U.S.

Steel, Ford, and coal companies did.

Now they hire very high-priced consulting firms to do that work.

Elected officials may no longer call out the police and the National Guard to cart labor organizers off to jail.

Now they pass legislation that restricts union organizing and power.

But workers are beginning to fight back, as the headlines reveal.

They are building solidarity across racial, ethnic, religious, partisan divides.

Martin Luther King exhorted us to enwrap ourselves in a single garment of destiny.

I have observed several unions that I've studied build expanded and inclusive communities of fate in which large numbers of others recognize that their destinies are entwined despite differences and distances.

This doesn't always happen, but it can and it must.

We need, as employees and citizens, to build solidarity through communities of faith that crosses geographies and differences.

But to do that, we need to reimagine labor unions for now.

the labor movement must evolve as it has in the past, even producing possibly alt-unions, alternatives to unions, alternatives to traditional unions.

Workers in gig professions, tech,

don't necessarily want a traditional union, but they do want influence over their wages, working conditions, and even the policies of their companies.

And they are reimagining old approaches and coming up with new ones in order to build worker voice and power.

Some are reconfiguring worker cooperatives, employee-owned businesses,

in which the workers determine wages, working conditions and distribution of profits.

This is not a pipe dream.