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 […]
Usher in a new day for labor: The courts can’t be counted on to protect workers anymore; Congress needs to pass new laws
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 legislative priorities should be a “just cause” law that would protect every employee from unfair terminations. Common as a legal standard of employment across much of the industrialized world, and here routinely negotiated into union contracts, “just cause” is the principle that no employee can be fired without a legitimate, serious, work-performance reason. Such a legal standard would empower workers to speak out about pay disparities, to combat sexual harassment and to complain about unsafe […]
Rats have speech rights, too: Unions, protests and balloons
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 Laborers Local 79 in Staten Island to stop them from inflating a rat balloon. Previously, agency staffers leaked word that Peter Robb, Trump’s NLRB general counsel, “hates” the rat and was determined to exterminate it. The NLRB is a federal agency tasked by statute to protect the rights of workers. But under Republican administrations, it does the opposite. Now, by taking aim at the inflatable rodent, the NLRB invites a First Amendment challenge. Conservative jurists […]
A history lesson on saving labor: Look to how unions rebounded in the 1920s for insight on how they can make progress today
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 […]