First, a little cheat. @MosheMarvit & I landed an op-ed in the @nytimes a few days before New Years last year. American Workers Need Better Job Protections https://t.co/qZwf2VdmSL — Shaun Richman (@Ess_Dog) December 27, 2018
Is there a German word for when a presumptive scab confirms your lowest expectations? The writers and editorial staff at New York Magazine have formed a union, joining a veritable organizing wave in digital and traditional news media. Nearly 80 percent of the workers have signed union cards and are asking management to voluntarily recognize their union. Longtime columnist Jonathan Chait did not sign a union card, and rushed to Twitter this week to lick management’s boots, because of course he did. The liberal-in-his-own-mind columnist has spent the last few years—before Fox News inevitably invites him to be one of its resident “liberals,” where he can ride out his shambles of a career—lazily defending neoliberalism and Nazis’ rights to free speech. Less than 24 hours after throwing his colleagues under the bus, Chait took again to Twitter to whine that only three scorching hot takes had published about his profile […]
Voters on Staten Island—long the only Republicn corner of New York City—have turned their Republican Congressman Dan Donovan out of office. New York’s 11th District—which the island shares with a couple of neighborhoods across the Verrazanno Bridge in Brooklyn—was the last part of the city to be represented by a Republican in the U.S. House. Although Democrats in the district outnumber Republicans by a 2-to-1 margin, Donald Trump won 58 percent of the vote there in 2016. The President retains some popular support on the island, his policies less so. The surprising victory of Democrat Max Rose signals that Staten Island is genuinely a swing district—something that New York Democrats have precious little experience with. The combination of gerrymandering and “big sort” demographic shifts created a sort of district-by-district one-party domination in New York State that has resulted, at least within the city, in neither party knowing how to run […]
Workers’ power is rooted in the work we do and our occasional refusal to do it. But, until recently, that refusal had become rare: Work stoppages have declined to historically low levels over the past four decades. There were 187 major strikes in 1980, involving 795,000 workers. In 2017, there were just seven, with 25,000 workers. How then do we revive the strike when so few workers have seen one, let alone participated? For one, that may be changing. Teachers in West Virginia shut down all of the state’s public schools for nine days in February and March, winning a 5 percent pay increase, stopping proposed healthcare cuts, and inspiring statewide teacher walkouts in four more states and Puerto Rico. Fourteen thousand AT&T technicians then walked off in May, followed by strikes by thousands of other telecommunications workers against Frontier in Virginia and Spectrum in New York. There are ongoing […]
Many obituaries have been written for labor. The anti-union Janus vs. AFSCME Supreme Court decision is already being followed by a dark money campaign to convince workers to quit their unions. In the private sector, employers evade the reach of workplace-based union contracts by off-shoring, sub-contracting and freelancing jobs. Despite occasional bright spots like Missouri voters’ rejection of right-to-work, this is labor’s lowest point in a century. The parallels between today and the 1920s are striking. Like then, unions faced existential threats and structural challenges with no obvious solutions. Yet that nadir was quickly followed by the wave of sit-down strikes, the passage of laws protecting workers’ rights to organize and an unprecedented half-century of shared prosperity. This begs the question: what were union activists and allies doing in the 1920’s that set them up for such a dramatic reversal of fortune? And is there similar under-the-radar work we should […]
[This article was co-authored by Moshe Z. Marvit.] It is time for the labor movement to campaign for a “Right to Your Job” law. With anti-union Republicans in control of Washington, this might not seem like the best time to think and plan about workers’ rights. But to surrender to a mere survival mentality would be a mistake. We are on the verge of a major opportunity for labor renewal. Among congressional Democrats, there is a growing recognition that a strong labor movement is vital to building a constituency for progressive change, and that delivering tangible wins for workers is vital to gaining and maintaining office. As one small example, the official labor bill that the Senate Democrats are currently offering is essentially a repeal of Taft-Hartley.[note]Moshe Marvit, “‘A Better Deal’ Ensures Long- Overdue Worker Protections,” The Century Foundation, November 3, 2017, available at https://tcf.org/content/commentary/better-deal- ensures-long-overdue-worker-protections/.[/note] This could be opposition […]
The horrific death of Carlos Gabrielli on a Westerleigh construction site should shock us all to the core. His throat slashed by an electrical saw after a slip and fall, he died in an ambulance after his coworkers frantically tried to stanch the bleeding with the shirts off their backs in the immediate aftermath of the gruesome accident. As the Advance notes in its coverage, this was only the second of three dreadful workplace accidents in Staten Island last week. One day later, a crane collapsed at the construction site of a new Amazon warehouse in Rosebank. One worker’s leg reportedly “snapped in half.” Three days before that, a 25-year-old electrician was knocked unconscious at a construction site in Bloomfield after a small panel explosion exposed him to a 500 volt arc of electricity. These kinds of workplace accidents, unfortunately, are not rare. On average, thirteen workers die on the […]
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN A MOMENT OF TRIUMPH. The writers at DNAinfo and the Gothamist network had voted to form a union. But a few days later, on Nov. 2, 2017, their sullen jerk of a CEO decided to fold operations in perfectly legal retaliation. Our peculiar labor relations system bases whether or not you are protected by a union contract on whether you can survive a campaign of threats, harassment and outright lies to prevail in a winner-take-all vote. Even then, a union contract can still be voided by a crybaby boss picking up his marbles and offshoring, subcontracting or “shutting down” operations entirely. A workers’ rights system that can be so baldly circumvented by billionaires and soulless corporations is clearly and inalterably broken. Many of the best ideas currently on the table for labor law reform transcend workplace-based contract unionism. We could revive the New Deal model of […]