- A Brief History of the U.S. Government’s Targeting of Left-Wing Immigrants (9/3/2020) - On September 8, 1947, federal agents walked into the midtown Manhattan office of the Hotel, Restaurant & Club Employees & Bartenders Union Local 6 and arrested its president for being an “undesirable alien.” Michael J. Obermeier had been organizing hotel workers into a succession of scrappy independent unions since he arrived in New York as a German immigrant around the time of the first World War. By the time of his arrest, he led 27,000… …
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- If “Cancel Culture” Is About Getting Fired, Let’s Cancel At-Will Employment (7/29/2020) - [This article was co-authored with Moshe Marvit.] You know what should be canceled? The legal right of most bosses to fire you for a “good cause, bad cause, or no cause.” That status quo is so widely accepted that some progressives don’t think twice about appealing to the authoritarian power of bosses in the pursuit of social justice: Many high profile social media campaigns have been employed to get people who are caught on video committing racist… …
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- The Powerful Movement To Micromanage and Defund Public Schools Has Been Awfully Quiet About Police (7/10/2020) - Police are violently suppressing street protests across the country in mutiny against community demands for democratic accountability and respect for human rights. Their brutal rejection of basic demands for greater oversight and penalties has fueled larger demands for defunding police departments, if not outright abolition and replacement with other bodies. In this context, some activists are calling for a crackdown on police unions, which they say protect police from democratic accountability. That these calls are… …
- Yes, Unemployment Insurance and Welfare Encourage People to Quit Lousy Jobs. That’s the Point. (5/22/2020) - Do we have a right not to work? The answer is we don’t if Democratic leaders stubbornly try to keep the “era of big government” confined to the 20th century. Think of a barista right now in Georgia. She’s home collecting unemployment and watching her two kids while the schools and the cafe where she worked are closed. Her boss says they’re reopening next week even as the coronavirus continues its deadly spread, but schools won’t. Governor Kemp, along with other… …
- Kick the Boss Out of the Doctor’s Office (5/15/2020) - Is the ability to negotiate healthcare benefits with employers a source of strength for unions, or an insidious trap? The Covid-19 health crisis and ensuing economic meltdown probably answers that question, but it’s still worth dissecting for those naive optimists who think there is some semblance of the old normal that we can return to when the pandemic is finally behind us. Medicare for All was a central issue in the Democratic presidential primary. Among… …
- Usher in a new day for labor: The courts can’t be counted on to protect workers anymore; Congress needs to pass new laws (10/11/2019) - As the Supreme Court prepares to decide whether the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay and transgender people from workplace discrimination, it seems, at least to me, unlikely that a bench dominated by five very conservative men will protect gay employees. This should be a wake-up call: We cannot count on the courts to protect our rights in the workplace. We need a Congress that will actually pass laws, and high on the list of… …
- The Powerful New Idea in Elizabeth Warren’s Labor Platform (10/4/2019) - On Thursday, Elizabeth Warren released her long-awaited labor platform, titled “Empowering American Workers and Raising Wages.” The plan provides unions with a long wish list of badly needed reforms and new powers. It also makes a solid case that, like Bernie Sanders, she would be the labor movement’s biggest booster in the White House in generations. Several other candidates, including Julián Castro, Beto O’Rourke and Amy Klobuchar, have also recently put out lengthy labor plans,… …
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- Bernie Sanders’ Labor Plan Could Put a Union in Every Workplace in America (8/22/2019) - Bernie Sanders released his Workplace Democracy Plan on Wednesday. His campaign’s labor platform makes the strongest case of any of the candidates so farthat he would be unions’ best ally in the White House in generations. At a time when the Democrats’ official labor law reform proposal, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, would essentially overturn the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, the race to the left for labor’s support in the primaries demands bolder… …
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- On Labor, a Tale of Two Cities’ Mayors (with Presidential Ambitions) (7/26/2019) - It was a tale of two cities’ mayors (with presidential ambitions) this week. South Bend, Indiana’s Pete Buttigieg and New York’s Bill de Blasio—the two active-duty mayors among the 20 Democratic presidential candidates still on the debate stage—released their labor and workers’ rights platforms. Both mayors include fairly robust proposals to overhaul and modernize our nation’s main labor law, the National Labor Relations Act. But that should no longer be considered good enough. Given that… …
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- Rats have speech rights, too: Unions, protests and balloons (7/8/2019) - Outside a strip mall on Staten Island, a giant balloon rat lies deflated. I can’t imagine a less auspicious scene for the free-speech fight of the century. But it’s here the Trump administration has chosen to argue that free speech is for corporations — and not for workers. And it’s here that unions have an opportunity to reverse decades of anti-union legal dogma. Last month, the National Labor Relations Board sought an unprecedented injunction against… …
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