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Bloom on Abood’s Mistake in Jacobin

PUBLISHED

Will Bloom is a labor and immigration attorney in Chicago. He is a member of the National Organization of Legal Service Workers, UAW Local 2320, and the Democratic Socialists of America.

Last Tuesday, I argued in Jacobin that, for all the ways in which Justice Alito’s Janus decision was wrong, it made one important point. Justice Alito correctly noted the false distinction drawn by the Abood court between union’s “ideological” work in the electoral sphere and its “non-ideological” work in collective bargaining and contract enforcement. Abood‘s insistence that there was nothing ideological about collective bargaining reinforced and reified a trend towards the depoliticization of American workplaces, which in turn dampened the development of class consciousness and working class power. My piece focused on a key LPE concept: the ability of the law to lock in and even create power dynamics between parties, and the need to denaturalize and challenge those baked-in relationships.