Give Mayor Adams a No Confidence Vote
New York has a fugitive from justice occupying Gracie Mansion, and no clear plan for eviction. The City Council must pass a non-binding resolution declaring Eric Adams unfit to lead and unwelcome to remain as mayor, adding to yesterday’s call for him to resign from Speaker Adrienne Adams. Only then will those who still retain power over him have the ethical high ground and democratic consent to remove him.
Adams was already unfit to lead after he was indicted under federal bribery and campaign finances charges. But with no impeachment provisions in the City Charter, it looked like his fate would be determined by a jury of his peers and, separately, a million or so New York voters. Ever since Adams cut his quid pro quo deal with the Trump administration to hold his indictment in abeyance while he cooperates with the president’s unpopular mass deportation drive, the city has been in a democratic crisis.
The one person with the legal authority to remove Adams is Gov. Hochul. While Hochul catches all kinds of political heat for her long, drawn-out hesitation, she’s not wrong to be concerned about the precedent she would set by removing a democratically elected mayor from office.
“Democratically elected” is doing some heavy lifting in these abstract concerns. We should not forget that among Adams’ alleged crimes, he stole tax money earmarked for fairer elections by making large foreign donations look like qualified, small donations from actual New York voters. The result, one could argue, was a stolen election in 2021. But, as urgently as Adams needs to become an ex-mayor, removing him from office will set a precedent fraught with the potential for abuse.
Why has nobody in the Council thought to take up a “vote of no confidence” in the mayor? Universities are no stranger to unaccountable executives and occasional unethical behavior from our leaders. And while we have a degree of representative governance, usually in the form of a faculty or academic senate, our powers are often as toothless as the City Council’s is in this case.
But a “vote of no confidence” — a bill of particulars outlining the ways that a leader has disappointed the community and violated its norms — still holds enormous moral authority, as well as public embarrassment. So much so that the mere rumor of a drafting document has been known to inspire an embattled provost or chancellor to “return to the faculty” to avoid the black mark of censure on their reputations.
Some college presidents decide to weather the storm, hoping to placate enough constituents so that the motion fails for a lack of votes. Those who stick around and suffer a formal censure from their governing academic body usually — but not automatically — face removal from office by a higher power (typically the university’s board of trustees, or the state’s governor).
The practice of demonstrating that a leader has lost majority support is derived from parliamentary systems, where a formal “no confidence” vote is proof that the leader cannot govern; that the government must be dissolved and new elections scheduled. In those cases there is always a ceremonial president or king whose sole purpose is to act on a no-confidence vote.
We will be in uncharted waters if a group of clear-eyed Council realists begin circulating a resolution condemning the mayor and calling for him to resign or be removed. I have few allusions that Adams can be shamed. His alleged crimes were so tawdry and clumsy that a normal politician would be tempted to flee the country out of pure embarrassment. And the spectacle of being Donald Trump’s plaything, Adams’ very freedom predicated on how quickly and enthusiastically he can agree with the wannabe dictator makes one wonder just how bad could minimum security prison be.
But if Adams continues to stubbornly hold out, even after he has officially lost the confidence of the City Council that he needs to effectively govern, then Hochul will be on much firmer ground in using the power vested in her to finally get him out of Gracie Mansion. Better still, the Council will have essentially created the precedent that the governor does not have the authority to unilaterally remove a mayor from office; that she can only do so after a local legislative body has officially denounced and condemned its executive.
In any event, it is time for the Council to assert its authority.
[This post originally appeared at New York Daily News.]
Making Sense of the 1950’s Teamsters
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955, with big talk and high hopes for organizing the remaining non-union strongholds in the nation’s economy. Three years later, they were laying off organizers on staff and settling into a routine, on the way to a long, slow decline towards a loss of power, influence and bargaining power.
In New York City, though, the newly merged federation approached new union organizing with something like messianic zeal–pioneering new union organizing in the public sector and in health care, and fighting for a labor college and statewide system of socialized medicine–at least until the fiscal crisis. Continue reading “Making Sense of the 1950’s Teamsters”
AUDIO: ON the Rick Smith Show Talking Amazon JFK8 Union Victory
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 process for forming a union fairer and available to misclassified freelancers, to the California legislature’s attempts to plug the holes in the current NLRA by properly classifying gig workers as statutory employees with rights, the app bosses try to codify a third class of worker lacking both the agency to set their own price and hours of labor like a traditional independent contractor and the ability to form democratic unions of their own choosing to bargain — and, potentially, strike — over the working conditions that the app bosses dictate.
What’s crazy is that, unlike the newly passed California law that Uber circumvented through a massively expensive — and deceptive — ballot initiative, New York has had, this whole time, a functioning state agency that will protect the right to organize and certify a union for any private-sector workers that federal labor law leaves behind. Because the Supreme Court had a track record of overturning any protective legislation for workers when New York Sen. Robert Wagner drafted the NLRA, he decided to justify the law’s constitutionality in Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce. In 1935, that was defined far more narrowly than today.
For example, a hotel standing entirely within a state’s borders did not count. Therefore, New York passed a so-called “baby Wagner Act” that created a similar regulatory framework for private-sector workers left out of the New Deal. Most of the first 20,000 workers that the Hotel Trades Council won the right to bargain on behalf of in the 1930s and 40s were organized through elections — and card check certifications — conducted by the NY State Labor Relations Board. Stuck with the bizarre constitutional framework of arguing that human rights are rooted in protest activity’s impact on the economy, the civil rights movement expanded NLRB jurisdiction to retail, hospitality and service industries. By the mid-1960s, unions stopped turning to the state Labor Relations Board and in 2010 its responsibilities were assumed by the Public Employment Relations Board. Most people that know of PERB think of it as the state agency that punishes public sector teachers and subway workers for going on strike, but it actually can be an engine for private-sector worker organizing.
Legislative progressives, or a governor willing to exercise some leadership, could settle the gig worker controversy by directing PERB to aggressively protect and encourage the right to organize for all private-sector workers under their jurisdiction. And as the Biden administration wrests control of the NLRB from Trump’s anti-union appointees, we could have two labor boards competing for who offers workers a better deal.
This was the dynamic when I directed the American Federation of Teachers’ charter school organizing division during the Obama years. In blue states like New York and Illinois, we got public-sector labor laws that gave the workers a right to organize through card check. When the NLRB staked a claim to the jurisdiction, the federal agency touted its more robust right to strike. It was a compelling argument.
We live in a time when billion-dollar companies will spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours to resist their workers’ attempts to win a couple more bucks an hour. As a campaign director, I struggled with the impulse to strike a deal when a powerful boss signaled a desire to negotiate. And Uber like so many of the gig economy digital platforms — hemorrhaging investors’ dollars, struggling to maintain a workforce with pitiful wages, breaking all kinds of laws — are under enormous pressure to make peace with anyone who will take a settlement. With deep respect and solidarity to the organizers and legislators who are working with Uber on this deeply flawed bill, a better deal is possible if you start from the position that the actually existing labor laws should apply to these digital scofflaws.
[This article originally appeared in the New York Daily News.]