Labor unions transformed industrial exploitation through collective action

Evidence

Facing these impossible conditions, several generations of social activists, organizers, theorists, and front-line agitators struck back, organizing new kinds of social solidarity to resist these novel forces of unprecedented human power, and the dehumanizing exploitation they engendered (alongside the irreversible and welcome innovations they allowed). The labor movement and trade unions emerged as new forms of collective social action, and these powerful constellations of cooperative thought and practice genuinely transformed the world of the “satanic mills”—and the political life of the last century across much of the world. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 212