Category: the labor movement

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, which provide examples of how (and how not) to stand out from the pack when the baseline position of most Democrats in repealing the Taft-Hartley Act.

The biggest innovation in Warren’s platform is a private right of action in the federal courts against employers who violate the National Labor Relations Act.

Currently, only employers are able to take their complaints directly to the federal courts, against a union picket line, boycott action or other alleged violation of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. Warren would enable a union or an affected employee to sue an employer who commits an unfair labor practice (say, cutting a union activists’ hours, making threats or spying on secret union meetings) and seek injunctive relief—and even compensatory damages. Such a change would even the playing field in a significant way.

Warren is also proposing some activist anti-trust strategies to empower workers who are deemed to be independent contractors to better organize—and to shut down corporate mergers that will harm employees’ pay and work rules.

In the platform, Warren also reiterates her proposal for employee representation in corporate governance. A Warren administration would aim to make billion-dollar corporations set aside 40% of their executive board seats for employee representatives. While not new to her platform, it is a surprisingly radical idea that hasn’t received enough attention.

Like Sanders, Warren calls for a new federal framework for sectoral bargaining. The goal is to give unions the tools to equalize wages and benefits across multiple firms in an industry. Since individual employer-based collective bargaining is a huge part of the self-image of members and leaders alike of what unions do, both candidates are intentionally vague about the specifics of their proposals, and they are equally clear that unions will have a strong role in shaping the final legislation.

Still, the labor proposals from Warren and Sanders each signal their preferred approach.

I read Sanders platform as an embrace of wage boards, a throwback to an early New Deal model in which tripartite industrial boards voted on wage and working standards, and imposed them on all employers across an industry. As I’ve written previously, this is a framework that could put a union in every workplace in America, but, to be clear, it is not collective bargaining as we know it.

Warren’s proposal seems to be adding an overlapping representational structure to the NLRB process. Workers at individual workplaces might still vote for union representation at their firm only and negotiate collective bargaining agreements as we currently do. Meanwhile, certified unions could utilize some new process to certify a sectoral bargaining unit that would force employers to negotiate together over a specified scope of bargaining. This change would enhance union power (and unions may prefer it), but—even with card check and beefed-up NLRB enforcement—it would remain difficult for unions to dramatically expand their reach into many new workplaces.

The biggest disappointment of Warren’s labor plan is her studious avoidance of a just cause right to your job, as Sanders has proposed. A just cause law would put the onus on an employer to justify a termination. Just cause would give workers the power to say no to requests that fall outside the bounds of their duties or propriety, and it would give unions new tools in organizing and new modes of representation.

Instead, she proposes to amend the law in at least nine sections to outlaw non-compete and forced arbitration clauses and some of the most egregious forms of gender and wage discrimination. The fact that her platform contains a ridiculously long list of categories of workers whose protections against workplace discrimination belie the notion that universal protections are not essential.

Moreover, if a Warren administration successfully passes anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ and pregnant workers, the law would still put the onus on the worker who suffered the discrimination to prove that their termination was for discriminatory reasons and not one of the many other excuses an employer will offer in defense.

In essence, this is the difference between the two most pro-labor candidates in the Democratic field. Elizabeth Warren approaches the issue of rights at work as a problem solver, and wants to enhance the institutional role of worker representation to restore a degree of macroeconomic balance. Bernie Sanders aims to radically alter the balance of power in the workplace.

Both platforms are excellent, and largely overlap on the remainder of reforms to the NLRA and other federal agencies that are supposed to protect workers from corporate exploitation, and both candidates can clearly be relied upon to prioritize workers’ rights issues once in office.

As for Castro, O’Rourke and Klobuchar, they also agree on an emerging consensus around fighting employee misclassification and overtime protection, raising the minimum wage and passing  the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would essentially overturn the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, add card check under some circumstances and impose meaningful financial penalties for employers who violate their employees’ rights

Castro makes a major issue out of granting union rights for farm and domesticworkers—racist exclusions from the NLRA that cast a pall over the New Deal. Granted, almost every other candidate also supports this, but Castro stands out in terms of emphasis.

Klobuchar, on the other hand, is demonstrably going through the motions on workers’ rights. She endorses a long list of other people’s bills with no emphasis and nothing original. This shouldn’t come as a surprise from a politician who apparently thinks it’s funny to treat her own employees poorly. For readers who are worried that the candidates are just paying lip service to unions during the primaries but won’t follow through, Amy Klobuchar is what a Democrat who really doesn’t care about workers looks like. Compare and contrast with the others.

The biggest surprise is O’Rourke, who has one of the best labor platforms in the field. Like Pete Buttigieg, O’Rourke has clearly been taking advice from some of the smartest thinkers on how to restore union power, but unlike that other centrist from central casting Buttigieg, O’Rourke embraced some of the boldest solutions. Most interestingly, on the choice between wage boards and certified sectoral bargaining, O’Rourke’s team asks, “Why choose?” Under his formula, the wage boards would address big-ticket items across entire industries and take them out of competition, while the sectoral bargaining would empower unions to negotiate over the detailed minutia that workers also want to address in a contract.  O’Rourke’s plan would give unions multiple strategies to end the corporate race to the bottom over pay and working conditions.

The “Yes and…” Labor Platform

Warren’s proposal for a private right of action in ULP cases is the biggest new addition, and should remain on unions’ reform agenda no matter who wins the nomination. But it is not without controversy. The federal courts have historically been where the most damage to workers’ rights have been inflicted, and many union attorneys will be apprehensive about losing control of strategy over marginal cases that could produce bad case law. I would argue that we’ve been fighting this anyway (and not exactly producing a stellar track record of wins), so why not cut to the chase and fight for our rights in the courts? Why let a Republican NLRB add layers of obstruction?

Beto O’Rourke’s “yes and” approach to sectoral and industry-wide worker representation should also inspire us to think about the opportunities of a new president and Congress differently. Labor activists have tended to approach previous opportunities for reform as a narrow window to win one thing, and the arguments over which ‘one thing’ will save us have been paralyzing.

But the crisis of economic inequality and its corrosive effects on our democracy require a host of reforms, and even centrist Democrats get that. We need overlapping systems of worker power, union representation and employee protections. The labor movement has now been presented with a rich collection of reform proposals. We should say yes to all of them.

[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]

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 policies. Bernie Sanders does not disappoint.

The stand-out measures

Where Sanders’ labor platform is most exciting is its proposal for new workers’ rights and forms of union representation that transcend the National Labor Relations Board framework of enterprise-based contract bargaining.

One is a “just cause” legal standard of employment, which would mean that non-managerial workers—whether they are represented by a union or not—could only be fired only for a legitimate, serious, work-performance reason. This has been a causethat In These Times has long championed, and as Moshe Marvit and I explained elsewhere, “would open up new pathways to organizing.” Bernie Sanders is the third candidate (so far) to embrace the reform, but he’s the first leading contender for the nomination to do so.

But the best proposal in Sanders’ platform is what he refers to as “sectoral collective bargaining” but others in the academic and think tank world have been calling “wage boards.” Basically, he proposes to work with trade unions to construct new industrial standards boards—with representatives for the employers, workers and possibly that nebulous concept, “the public”—that can set minimum standards for wages, benefits and hours across entire sectors of the economy thereby taking those issues out of competition. This is essentially the framework of the First New Deal legislation, which the Lochner-era Court overturned, and which the National Labor Relations Act was initially meant to operate alongside of.

Sanders’ wage board proposal was clearly influenced by the Center for American Progress’ David Madland’s and University of Michigan’s Kate Andrias’ dogged research and advocacy for reviving the wage board model. It’s also not insignificant that a revived wage board is how Service Employees International Union (SEIU) local 32BJ won a $15 minimum wage for fast food workers in New York state, and that SEIU is rather bullish on expanding and exporting the model.

This is possibly the most important labor law reform that a Democratic president (with a Democratic Senate willing to nuke the filibuster) could achieve. It’s that one that could put a union in every workplace in America on day one. Because if unions had the legal reach to improve wages and working conditions across an entire industry, workers would join and support the unions that were fighting for them—particularly if we made it easy for them to make voluntary paycheck contributions—even before they win a collective bargaining election at their specific workplace.

The man with the plan

Sanders also offers a laundry list of good and overdue reforms. His proposed amendments to the outdated and ineffective National Labor Relations Act—like most of the candidates’ plans—improve upon the PRO Act in several ways. It adds card check recognition and the right to a first contract for new unions, which were provisions of the failed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) that did not get carried over into the current Democratic bill.

Sanders also proposes to fully restore workers’ right to strike and to engage in solidarity activism. In the case of the latter, that means wiping out more provisions of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act; in the former, it means overturning an obscure 1938 Supreme Court decision, NLRB v. Mackay Radio & Telegraph Co., that allows employers to permanently replace workers who go on strike over economic demands. Employers increasingly took advantage of this decision during the Reagan administration.

Banning permanent replacements was the labor movement’s top legislative priority in the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. The Cesar Chavez Workplace Fairness Act of 1993 was the EFCA of its era, and similarly died of a filibuster in the Senate. Now it is increasingly becoming a consensus position among Democratic candidates.

There are also some policies and procedures of the NLRB that Sanders would change. These may be done through legislative change, or Sanders may be considering executive orders and strict directions to his future Board appointees. One is to protect existing collective bargaining agreements when a unionized employer is merged into a new company. Current NLRB rules on successorship allow an employer to tear up the contract and then bargain a union to impasse over concessions. Sanders used his campaign infrastructure to support workers represented by the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America at a locomotive plant in Pennsylvania this past February.

Sanders also wants to ban “management’s most important weapon” in anti-union campaigns, mandatory captive audience meetings. The courts have ruled that employers have a First Amendment right to express their anti-union views, and employers use the power of the paycheck to force employees to listen to them. Bernie Sanders says that workers should have the right to walk out on a presentation.

One very attention-grabbing plan responds directly to Joe Biden’s bad-faith arguments that a Medicare-for-All system would be unfair to unions who have historically traded higher wages for employer-sponsored health insurance. Sanders’ NLRB would support unions reopening their collective bargaining agreements in order to recoup as much of an employers’ cost savings from taxpayer-funded health care as possible as new wage gains. His platform implies that a unionized employer that does not share financial data and agree to sharing its cost savings would be charged with committing an unfair labor practice.

Finally, like many of the candidates in the crowded Democratic field, Sanders proposes to fix an original sin of the NLRA—its racist exclusion of domestic and farm workers from the protections of the Act.

Sanders also prioritizes legislation that would accelerate and codify badly needed regulatory reforms that got bogged down by right-wing judicial activism and corporate opposition during Obama’s second term. These include the Browning-Ferris joint-employer standard, which curtail corporations’ ability to hide behind franchise relationships to avoid bargaining over working conditions that they dictate in reality. He also calls for an expanded “persuader rule,” which would force employers to disclose the names of their hired gun union-busters and give union organizers equal access to workers during an organizing campaign. A proposal to end the practice of misclassifying workers as “supervisors” and “independent contractors” in order to avoid paying benefits and overtime is lacking somewhat in detail, but let’s just assume that Bernie co-signs whatever Elizabeth Warren proposes.

In the public sector, Sanders’ platform also calls for expanding the union rights of federal workers—including the right to strike and to bargain over wages. Ronald Reagan’s infamous termination of striking air traffic controllers in 1981 was a signal event in corporate America’s assault on unions. Ironically, that strike was sparked by the federal government’s refusal to bargain over wages. The right to bargain and strike—long denied to federal labor unions—would likely make strikes over routine collective bargaining matters less likely. But they would, as Sanders was quick to point out, empower federal workers to use their labor power to put an end to routine government shutdowns.

He also pledges to sign the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which was introduced by Representative Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.) and Senator Maize Hirono (D–Hawaii) in June and which would extend union rights to all state and local government employees as well.

Never waste a crisis

The turf of U.S. politics shifts beneath our feet like quicksand. This is a moment of great possibilities and existential threats. One of our biggest challenges as a labor movement is that too many of us—leaders, rank-and-filers and leftist critics alike—view things as static, as stuck in a moment in time, whether that be 2009, 1993 or 1978; That real change won’t happen without a crisis.

But we are already in a crisis.

The crisis right now is the threat of fascism, domestic terrorism and ethnic nationalism. These are all problems that have been made possible by the systemic corporate attack on union rights and a yawning gulf of economic inequality. Centrist politicians and shapers of public opinion who have hardly been friends to the working class are slowly waking up to the role that unions play in political education and voter turnout.

So even if Bernie doesn’t win the nomination—if it’s Elizabeth Warren or Kirsten Gillibrand or even Kamala Harris—we still probably have a candidate and a growing portion of the Democratic establishment who recognize that they have to deliver real wins for working families if they don’t want to get turned out of office all over again in 2022 by a racist and demagogic death cult.

As a labor movement, now is the time to demand more. Much more. Let’s take the issue of “just cause,” which is a basic human right enjoyed in much of the world and the lack of it is one of the foundational problems that keeps most workers from pushing back on employers’ unreasonable commands.

Elizabeth Warren hasn’t even put out her full labor platform yet. I fully expect it to be full of robust proposals to restore the legal rights and power of workers with some delightfully wonky detail. If she joins Sanders in endorsing just cause, the issue—which wasn’t on any union’s agenda—could be on the fast track to the Democratic party’s 2020 platform (as long as the candidate isn’t someone who promises that “nothing would fundamentally change”).

Good ideas that are put on any primary candidate’s agenda should remain on labor’sagenda in the years to come. When it comes to ideas for restoring the legal powers of workers, our approach should be “yes, and!” SEIU President Mary Kay Henry has the right approach for these times. The union released its own list of labor law demandson the same day as Sanders, and challenged every candidate to release a detailed labor plan “explaining how they will make it possible for all working people to join unions.” The political moment, says Henry, “is no time for minor tweaks to our broken system.”

Let the primary of ideas continue!

[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]