Happy Striketober. Let’s Restore the Legal Right to Strike.
The United States is experiencing a wave of worker militancy and a White House administration that actually wants to take concrete actions to defend and grow labor unions. That strange sensation you’re feeling is optimism about labor’s prospects, reflected in the giddiness of #Striketober. Let’s take this opportunity to restore the legal right to strike. A moment in which tens of thousands of workers are on strike — at John Deere, at Kellogg’s, at Warrior Met Coal—might seem like a strange time to talk about a “right” to strike. But a legal right to strike must include the right to return to the job when the strike is over — win, lose or draw — and U.S. workers haven’t had that right since corporations and Ronald Reagan’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) conspired to weaponize a long-dormant Supreme Court decision to legalize union-busting. Strikes are contagious. The example set by one group of workers going on strike and returning to their jobs with their heads held high (and their […]
What we owe gig workers
Labor advocates and allies in Albany are feuding over a draft bill that aims to grant some union rights to precarious workers who toil at irregular hours and less regular wages for app-based “gig” employers like Uber and Lyft. This family feud is all the more frustrating because there’s a perfectly reasonable New Deal-era state law still on the books for when workers slip through the cracks of a patchwork of worker protections and fissured workplaces. The current bill purports to do the same by creating a system of “sectoral bargaining” for gig workers, while severely restricting the number issues they can bargain over, outlawing their ability to strike and robbing them of their unemployment insurance by replacing their statutory protections as workers with an opportunity to collude as a guild of “entrepreneurs.” Everywhere from the House-passed PRO Act, which would amend the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to make the […]
“The Amazon Workers in Bessemer Would Already Have Their Union If We Had the PRO Act”
The April union election loss at an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama has been treated in the media as a signal event for the labor movement in the Biden era. But what exactly it signaled remains subject to debate. Kim Kelly is a freelance writer who covered the Amazon election on the ground for More Perfect Union. Shaun Richman, program director at SUNY’s labor center, previously directed the American Federation of Teachers’ charter school organizing division. Here they discuss changing worker attitudes, labor law, media coverage and organizing strategy as possible lessons to take from the loss in Bessemer. Shaun Richman: Biden’s statement on the Amazon campaign in March, from a historical perspective, was the strongest pro-union message from any U.S. president. The Franklin D. Roosevelt quote that the CIO put on organizing posters, “If I went to work in a factory, the first thing I’d do would be to join a union,” almost has an unspoken, but I would never work […]