It’s actually something that railway workers sort of “won” way back in the 1920s almost a decade before the passage of the NLRA. Basically railway workers were so powerful that strikes and lockouts became too detrimental to commerce so Congress stepped in and decided that they would regulate labor relations in the industry. I think airlines were interpreted to fall under or encoded in the law a few decades later.
This is the thing that liberalism fundamentally obscures. A small proletarian victory is transmogrified into a win for bourgeois society in general. It’s taken as a feature of capitalism that it endows workers with rights, rather than such rights being only a tentative moment in the struggle between labor and capital. To the extent that the average liberal admits that labor had to fight for those scraps, it’s believed that today’s capitalists have come-to-Jesus, in the same way that those same capitalists suddenly realized that slavery is wrong only a century or two ago.
It’s actually something that railway workers sort of “won” way back in the 1920s almost a decade before the passage of the NLRA. Basically railway workers were so powerful that strikes and lockouts became too detrimental to commerce so Congress stepped in and decided that they would regulate labor relations in the industry. I think airlines were interpreted to fall under or encoded in the law a few decades later.
This is the thing that liberalism fundamentally obscures. A small proletarian victory is transmogrified into a win for bourgeois society in general. It’s taken as a feature of capitalism that it endows workers with rights, rather than such rights being only a tentative moment in the struggle between labor and capital. To the extent that the average liberal admits that labor had to fight for those scraps, it’s believed that today’s capitalists have come-to-Jesus, in the same way that those same capitalists suddenly realized that slavery is wrong only a century or two ago.