On Labor, a Tale of Two Cities’ Mayors (with Presidential Ambitions)
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 Congressional Democrats’ official proposal right now, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, essentially overturns the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, adds card check under some circumstances and imposes meaningful financial penalties for employers who violate their employees’ rights, woe to the candidate who doesn’t propose to outdo it. Only one mayor, de Blasio, breaks new ground with his proposal; the other, Buttigieg, offers a survey course of think tank white papers and moderate reforms. I’m […]
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 […]
Fighting Against Racism—And For a Better Paycheck—On the Docks
“Dockworkers have power.” With that simple statement, Western Illinois University professor and In These Times contributor Peter Cole kicks off his compelling new history, Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (University of Illinois Press). The story of the west coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), its legendary founder Harry Bridges, and the 1934 San Francisco general strike he led is broadly familiar to Americans who enjoy romantic stories of derring do from the labor movement’s past. Less familiar may be the union’s struggle for anti-racist hiring and layoff policies on the docks, and its crucial allyship in various civil rights struggles. Cole pairs their history with that of black South African docker organizing that presaged the struggle against apartheid by decades, and created an early and durable institutional stronghold of black power in South Africa. The similarities between the two unions don’t end with the struggle for their black […]
“The Class Idea” (And How to Get It)
Many progressives in the United States are prone to making gloomy jokes about moving North whenever conservative forces grip our national institutions. After all: Canadians have unions! They have health care! They don’t pretend that everyone’s middle class! Why, people wonder, are the politics and labor movements of the two countries so different? In his new book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada, sociology professor Barry Eidlin grapples with this question. His explanation not only illuminates the history but suggests some ideas about a course correction for the U.S. labor movement. Following World War II, Eidlin tells us, Canadian unions won battles with company owners and consolidated legal power, just as American unions had done previously. But beginning in the 1960s, their fortunes diverged. In the United States, the percentage of workers in unions steadily declined, and unions’ political influence within the Democratic Party was […]
Can the Courts Strike Down Right-to-Work?
Last week, in a move that’s as likely to baffle union activists as it is to encourage them, a West Virginia judge struck down key portions of the state’s “right-to-work” law. The Kenawha County judge’s ruling may amount to no more than a temporary hiccup in West Virginia Republicans’ war to destroy unions. But it’s another example of how hotly provisions of the 1947 federal Taft-Hartley Act are being contested in the courts as it becomes clearer that the anti-union impact of the law has contributed to an era of massive inequality that threatens our democracy. West Virginia’s “right to work” law was rammed through on a party-line vote prior to 2016’s presidential election and the recent statewide teachers strikes. It had survived a Democratic gubernatorial veto and a previous injunction based in part on its ridiculously sloppy drafting. Last week, however, siding with a coalition of unions that included the building […]
Will Trump’s Labor Board Say Workers Have No Right to Float a Balloon?
Union activists eager for a free speech fight after the Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME attack on union rights may have found one in the form of a giant inflatable rat. Bloomberg reported last week that Trump-appointed General Counsel Peter Robb wants to issue a rule making it illegal to engage in any protest activity in the company of a balloon rat. Cartoon rats—often with nasty red eyes, gnarly teeth and occasionally suitcases and neckties—have been a feature of worker demonstrations in the United States for almost 30 years. Initially conceived as a way to circumvent the Taft-Hartley Act’s restrictions on unions coming to the aid of fellow unions during a strike, they have since become a routine presence at legal picket lines and protest rallies. When not nicknamed “Scabby,” a rat is often named in ways that satirize an unfair boss. Many workers who find themselves in tough fights are warmed by […]
The Rise of Feminist Labor Unions in Japan
A good union is a feminist organization. We reduce the gender wage gap, fight for family-work-life balance and non-discriminatory promotion standards and sometimes literally sound the alarm on workplace sexual harassment and assault – among many other ways that working women use their union membership to fight for equality. For a time, Japanese labor unions fell far short of that standard. Although there are very strong labor protections and anti-discrimination laws on the books in Japan, they are often evaded through the proliferation of contingent employment and ignored with lame appeals to “cultural traditions.” Female workers routinely experience sexual harassment, workplace bullying and lack of career advancement. The traditional enterprise unions that are common in Japan had a pretty bad track record of even seeing these practices as wrong, let alone standing up for their female members. Starting in the 1990’s, a group of activists started new women-only unions to compete […]
You’re a Sad Scab, Mr. Chait
Is there a German word for when a presumptive scab confirms your lowest expectations? The writers and editorial staff at New York Magazine have formed a union, joining a veritable organizing wave in digital and traditional news media. Nearly 80 percent of the workers have signed union cards and are asking management to voluntarily recognize their union. Longtime columnist Jonathan Chait did not sign a union card, and rushed to Twitter this week to lick management’s boots, because of course he did. The liberal-in-his-own-mind columnist has spent the last few years—before Fox News inevitably invites him to be one of its resident “liberals,” where he can ride out his shambles of a career—lazily defending neoliberalism and Nazis’ rights to free speech. Less than 24 hours after throwing his colleagues under the bus, Chait took again to Twitter to whine that only three scorching hot takes had published about his profile […]
America’s Great Strike Waves Have Shaped the Country. We Can Unleash Another.
Workers’ power is rooted in the work we do and our occasional refusal to do it. But, until recently, that refusal had become rare: Work stoppages have declined to historically low levels over the past four decades. There were 187 major strikes in 1980, involving 795,000 workers. In 2017, there were just seven, with 25,000 workers. How then do we revive the strike when so few workers have seen one, let alone participated? For one, that may be changing. Teachers in West Virginia shut down all of the state’s public schools for nine days in February and March, winning a 5 percent pay increase, stopping proposed healthcare cuts, and inspiring statewide teacher walkouts in four more states and Puerto Rico. Fourteen thousand AT&T technicians then walked off in May, followed by strikes by thousands of other telecommunications workers against Frontier in Virginia and Spectrum in New York. There are ongoing […]