Explore "White Collar" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
No matter what unionism may mean to the individual white-collar worker, organizationally it brings the white-collar strata into labor as an interest group. Unless white-collar unions develop a distinctive program of their own-and there seems to be no tendency in that direction-or unless the meaning of unionism to them becomes politically distinctive-and it apparently does not-white-collar unionism will carry the same meaning as wage-worker unionism. Therefore, what white-collar unions mean for America depends on what U. S. unions in general mean.
So far, that meaning has been felt mainly in the economic sphere, and there is no doubt that unions for white-collar workers will increase their chance to have a voice in their conditions of work and levels of pay. But the larger meaning of unionism involves the question of democracy and labor unions, that is, the question of whether the unions are to become a movement, or whether they are going to become another vested interest, an agency of political regulation at an economic price. Or, in the words of Lionel Trilling, whether ‘the conflict of capital and labor is a contest for the possession of the goods of a single way of life' or a ‘culture struggle.'