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Women led the battle for industrial democracy — even before they won the vote. However, women’s contributions to and leadership of the organized labor movement, though lionized within the movement itself, have largely escaped public consciousness.

Employers prefer to deal with their workers one on one. But workers have shown throughout history they will not abide by this unfair practice. They organize, they work together, and, when their employers refuse to deal with them all at once, they strike. Workers engaged in, and prospered from, collective action long before passage of the National Labor Relations Act. The law merely sought to regulate this action for the public good, to replace strike with negotiation, conflict with cooperation. History is now repeating itself; labor strife is increasing, thanks in part to the rise of legal contracts that force workers to settle disputes in a rigged system of arbitration rather than an impartial court of law.