Washington, DC

Barbara Ehrenreich and Thomas Geoghegan, in "Lighting Labor's Fire" [Dec. 23], point to ways to help workers realize the value of unionism and the rights that labor law promises but doesn't deliver. The core of labor's work, however, must be a concerted effort by the AFL-CIO, unions and organizational and political allies to fire up all workers about the need for collective- bargaining rights. Without such rights, the future for our children and our democracy is bleak.

Most managers, while negotiating their own excessive compensation plans, respond to workers' campaigns for bargaining rights with a ferocity that often exceeds their response to their competitors. Collective bargaining, not so much union membership or individual rights, is key to workers' social and economic gains. But the rate of private-sector collective bargaining in the United States is about one-fifth of every other industrial democracy's. Among US public-sector workers, it's one-third.

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