Sabotage as a Tool of Solidarity
Striking waiters spent a week in January 1913 throwing fistfuls of asafetida in the fancy dining rooms of New York City hotels. The spice, commonly used a pinchful at a time in Indian cuisine to replace entire onions, has a powerfully fetid odor and cleared most dining rooms (save for a few customers, the New-York Tribune joked, who were “suffering from severe colds”). The workers were on strike since New Year’s Eve – their second city-wide walkout in six months – and the playful act of sabotage raised workers’ spirits and became a frequent laugh line at union rallies.
The Right Believes It Has the Supreme Court Votes to Entirely Overturn Labor Law
The foundational 1935 labor law protecting workers is unconstitutional, according to major corporations and right-wing zealots who believe they have enough votes on the Supreme Court to overturn it. In the latest sign that anti-union forces will doggedly press the matter, a federal judge for the Northern District of Texas enjoined the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from processing any allegations of employer violations of workers’ rights. The National Review hailed the decision as “A Welcome Blow to the NLRB.” Continue reading “The Right Believes It Has the Supreme Court Votes to Entirely Overturn Labor Law”
Misjudging Labor
On June 13 the Supreme Court once again sided with a multibillion-dollar corporation over its workers. The case of Starbucks Corp. v. McKinney concerns seven employees, now known as the Memphis Seven, whom Starbucks fired in February 2022 as they tried to unionize their store in Tennessee. (Because federal law prohibits employers from retaliating against organizing, the company naturally claims they were let go for violating workplace policies.) The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency tasked with guaranteeing workers’ rights to join unions and negotiate contracts, was quick to intervene. Directed by the Biden-appointed General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, NLRB staff filed for a preliminary injunction to force Starbucks to reinstate the fired activists while the case was fully litigated.
Such requests are rare. The NLRB only makes them when companies glaringly violate labor law and the agency is confident that courts will decide the case in the workers’ favor. In August 2022 a lower-court judge agreed and granted the injunction.
That six-month wait for a modicum of justice was blazing speed by the standards of United States labor law. It was too fast for the Supreme Court, which, in an 8-1 decision, reversed the injunction. The justices ruled that when courts consider the NLRB’s injunction requests, rather than using a legal standard specific to labor disputes that gives the board relative deference, they must use a more restrictive standard known as “the traditional four-factor test,” as articulated in the 2008 case Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. Among the factors considered are the “balance of equities” (meaning that the ruling is fair to both sides) and that an injunction serves the “public interest.” Both factors are a matter of opinion. Put simply, the Court is placing its own views over the expertise of the NLRB’s professional staff, in the name of a “traditional” test that’s as old as a teenager. Continue reading “Misjudging Labor”
Independent Unions Can Help Break Through the Economic Crisis and Labor’s Paralysis
In a period of extreme social and economic crises, when the major labor unions have reduced their organizing programs to a fraction of what they once were and the courts stand athwart any effort to protect workers’ interests, scrappy new independent unions raise hope against hope that maybe — just maybe — workers can fight back and win. I’m writing, of course, about the early 1930s. A newly published book finds some surprising parallels between that era and our own.
An eleventh volume in the prolific Marxist labor historian Philip S. Foner’s History of the Labor Movement in the United States has just been published, after it was discovered that Foner had completed the manuscript before he died in 1994. Subtitled The Great Depression 1929–1932, the book covers a period in which the established unions of the American Federation of Labor were not conducting many organizing campaigns or strikes and had little idea how to successfully contest for power in the large mass production industries that played a dominant role in American life. Continue reading “Independent Unions Can Help Break Through the Economic Crisis and Labor’s Paralysis”