With corporations organized on a multinational basis, effective labor freedom necessarily requires the right to engage in solidarity actions, and to combine across borders. When corporations are permitted to organize multinationally and give assistance to a struck firm, while workers are limited to local protests and only permitted to engage in action against the immediate employer because of artificial corporate boundaries, then corporations become arrogant masters while workers are reduced to dependent slavery. Under current law, workers freedom of labor is subordinated to employer property rights. When an employer has the power to punish workers for exercising their fundamental rights, the employer is acting as a master and the employee is a slave whose rights mean nothing. Ultimately, a rights approach may help remind us where labor s power comes from.
Rights are only words.
They have little power on their own. They are not self-exercising. Free to Assemble. Free to Organize.