Rights that workers need can be divided into two kinds. The first group of rights are "individual rights," by which I mean rights that one person can exercise without the help of other people. Of course there are many, many such rights. Those to be discussed in this book are: the right to pass out leaflets (and to wear buttons, talk union with the friend at the next machine, etc.); the right to refuse unsafe work; the right to have a representative like a union steward present at a pre-disciplinary interview; the right to be fairly represented; the right to equal treatment; the right not to be sexually harassed; and the right to be radical.
Individual rights are the kind of rights about which a person feels "I got my rights" and "You can't push me around."
Don't misunderstand me. Individual rights will always be more protected if many people exercise their individual rights together. Many leafleters are less likely to be harassed than one person leafleting alone. If all the women in a department tell the men to stop passing around dirty cartoons, they are more likely to be successful than if one woman acts alone. But what I call "individual rights" are rights that you can exercise all by yourself if necessary.
In contrast, "communal rights" are rights that workers can only use effectively when they act together. A one-person strike, a one-person sitdown, or a one-person boycott, is unlikely to get much accomplished This book will discuss the following communal rights: the right to engage in concerted activity for mutual aid or protection set forth in Section 7 of the NLRA, and what it means in practice; the right to strike; "inside strategies," including the rights to work to rule, to sit down, and to sit in; the right to boycott; the right to receive promised fringe benefits; the right to a job, meaning, the right and duty not to work overtime when brothers and sisters are laid off; the right to a job, meaning, the right to do something about it when the company tries to leave town.
I shall try to describe what the law says about each of these fourteen "individual rights" or "communal rights" at the time I am writing, the end o. February 1993. I shall talk not only about statutes, where there are statutes, but also about important court decisions. (The word "law" is used in two ways. Sometimes it means a particular law passed by a legislative body, such as the NLRA. Sometimes it means what a court is likely to decide about a matter, based both on laws passed by legislative bodies and on the cases interpreting them. A "Statute" is a particular law passed by a legislative body.) Please remember all the things said earlier about the danger in reading a statute as if it meant what it said unless you also know the cases interpreting the statute. Keep clearly in mind that by the time you use this book the law may have changed, and it will be your responsibility to try to figure out what those changes have been.
