Bernie Sanders’ Labor Plan Could Put a Union in Every Workplace in America
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.]
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 actually uncharacteristically optimistic that we may get the PRO Act—or something close to it—if the Democrats win big in 2020. However, we won’t end our country’s crisis of economic inequality and creeping fascism without a legal framework that puts workers’ rights and union power into every workplace on day one.
This may be hard for union leaders and activists who have been in the political wilderness for four decades to understand. Most of us have experienced begging for scraps like card check and banning permanent replacement scabs as the best we could expect Democrats to meekly fight for (and then fail to deliver). Now the stakes are higher, the essentiality of unions to working-class political education and voter turnout is obvious, and overturning Taft-Hartley is the consensus position of Democratic leadership across the political spectrum. Which means that putting the labor movement’s foremost political demand of the last 70 years in your platform is suddenly Not. Good. Enough.
Fine. This is Fine.
Buttigieg’s platform attempts soaring rhetoric with a preamble about “the verge of a new American era” calling for “a fundamentally new and different approach to fix our broken political and economic system.”
Good, fine so far. The solution, Buttigieg says, requires going “above and beyond existing legislative proposals like the ‘Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act.’” But instead of doing that, Buttigieg’s labor platform goes sideways with extra footnotes.
He wants to plug holes in the law that allow employers to mischaracterize workers as independent contractors and fix the weak “joint employer” standard that allows large corporations like McDonalds to avoid bargaining with hundreds of thousands of their employees. He proposes to correct one of the original sins of the National Labor Relations Act by finally expanding its protections to farm and domestic workers (whose exclusion was a racist concession to Dixiecrats), and to improve upon the Act by imposing multi-million dollar penalties “that scale with company size” for violating workers’ organizing rights, giving unions a right to “equal time” on during election campaigns and creating a certification process for industry-wide bargaining.
He endorses the Paycheck Fairness Act and a host of other anti-harassment and gender discrimination bills that were already on the shelf, waiting for a government that will finally pass them.
He also has a pretty detailed proposal for paid sick and family leave. Actually, it’s virtually identical to Bill de Blasio’s proposal (which I’ll get to below), except that he must feel some supernatural neoliberal impulse to refer to it as “access” to those things. That’s a red flag for me. And if those of us who wave the red flag were to engage in a drinking game that called for doing shots every time a politician proposed “access” to a vitally important thing that should be a “right,” we’ll all be hammered for the duration of the primaries if we don’t die of alcohol poisoning first.
But, in general, Pete Buttigieg’s “New Rising Tide” labor platform is … fine. It’s clear that he got a lot of really good advice from a lot of the smartest people trying to tackle the problem of the legal restrictions on workers’ rights and the economic inequality that results from it. But it’s equally clear that he glommed on to the narrowest, most technical tweaks to a broken system and studiously avoided a more radical rethink of our labor relations system.
Buttigieg’s presence in the race as a media darling is slightly annoying. It’s as if the D.C. establishment convinced themselves of their own nonsense that the reason so many voters supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries was because he’s a white guy, and if only they could find a younger, charismatic white guy (with just a twist of diversity) that they can garner enough votes for the status quo ante.
It’s nice that he reads books (in self-taught Norwegian, no less!) and speaks “in lucid paragraphs.” But most of his actual contributions to the discourse–like every candidate who’s in the race to thwart popular demands to expand government services–wind up questioning the value of living in a society at all. Take his opposition to free college. “As a progressive,” he explained to an audience of undergraduates in Massachusetts, “I have a hard time getting my head around the idea of a majority who earn less because they didn’t go to college subsidizing a minority who earn more because they did.” There’s nothing remotely progressive about a “hOw d0 Y0u PaY fOR iT?” argument that could just as easily conclude, “Why have any public education at all?”
Bill de Blasio’s presence in the race is also annoying. He has no shortage of critics at home who point to our crises of mass transit, affordable housing and police accountability as campaigns the mayor should be running to the state capitol to fix. But he also has an impressive track record of delivering wins for New York’s working families and, we learned this week, an impressively bold workers’ rights agenda for the nation.
The right to have workplace rights
De Blasio begins his 21st Century Workers Bill of Rights with an issue that’s near and dear to a lot of us here at In These Times: The Right to Due Process at Work. Simply defined, due process at work, or “just cause,” is the principle that an employee can be fired only for a legitimate, serious, work-performance reason.
In last August’s special issue, “Rebuilding Labor After Janus,” Bill Fletcher proposed a labor movement for just cause laws as a way to “end the tyranny of the non-union workplace,” one that “actively disrupts the strategy of corporate America and its right-wing populist allies.”
And in a recent piece marking ten years of the magazine’s Working blog, Jessica Stites noted that I’ve been using this platform to wage a lonely crusade on this issue for four years now.
Fellow ITT contributor Moshe Marvit and I carried that crusade into an op-ed in the New York Times in December of 2017. We were building support for an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act that then-Rep. Keith Ellison was drafting. (If any presidential candidates who are currently serving in Congress want to see a copy of that bill, slide into my DM’s…)
Although Ellison’s move to the Minnesota Attorney General’s office has momentarily orphaned a federal bill for a “right to your job,” the crusade was revived by a New York City Council push for fast food workers that progressive city council member Brad Lander is doggedly shepherding to Mayor de Blasio’s desk. (The bill’s true champion was SEIU local 32BJ’s recently departed and dearly missed president, Hector Figueroa.)
To be sure, de Blasio happened to propose my hobbyhorse. But the reason I’ve been arguing for Right to Your Job law is that it is a reform on another scale. It would increase the bargaining power and legal rights of every worker in America. It has the potential to put union representation in every workplace and gives unions new and creative ways to organize.
The rest of de Blasio’s platform is similar to Buttigieg’s except for one key distinction: A number of proposals highlight concrete improvements that the city of New York has made in the lives of low wage workers during de Blasio’s two terms as mayor.
Like Buttigieg’s, De Blasio’s labor platform includes a right to paid time off, including paid sick days, paid family and medical leave and the right to at least two weeks of paid vacation per year. Buttigieg proposes something similar, but de Blasio actually implemented a paid sick leave law that entitles workers to up to 40 hours a year of sick time, paid through an insurance fund.
De Blasio also proposes a fair scheduling law—modeled on one that fast food and retail workers won in New York—and a $15 minimum wage and new protections for gig workers.
Labor wants more!
Unlike many on the left who are in the “Bernie or Bust” crowd, I don’t have a horse in this race—yet. We’re months away from the Iowa caucuses and I won’t even have a vote in New York’s April 2020 primary (I’m registered in the Working Families Party).
But I’m enjoying the race to the left on policy, and watching candidates like Buttigieg reveal the emptiness at the heart of business-friendly centrism.
No one can doubt Bernie Sanders’ labor bona fides. He has been on the front lines of workers’ struggles for half a century, and the way that he has used his 2020 campaign infrastructure to lift up specific organizing campaigns and strikes and to use his bully pulpit to pressure massive corporations like Amazon and Walmart to raise their workers’ pay should be a model for all the candidates. But he is a blunt force instrument, and his indifference to policy details is frustrating on issues as complicated as how to restore the legal rights and collective power of workers.
Elizabeth Warren’s whole stock in trade is that “she has a plan for that.” As a Senator, she bucked the “think tank industrial complex” by developing a team of experts on her staff who reached out far and wide to progressive thinkers for policy ideas. Her staff have been picking the brains of In These Times writers on policies to tip the scales in favor of workers for years. She would enter office with a slew of policies to empower unions and worker centers to carry out the Robin Hood role the economy needs.
Any other candidate who wants to appeal to voters on labor issues has to propose bold solutions to even be noticed, standing next to Bernie and Warren. Pete Buttigieg has fallen short of that mark. Bill de Blasio has introduced a bold new workers’ right that no candidate was talking about. He’s earned your $3 donation to keep him on the debate stage, if only to ask the question: Why should your boss be able to fire you for no reason at all?
[This piece originally appeared at In These Times.]
The de Blasio Paradox
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio launched his bid for president last week, amidst protests and jeers.
On Good Morning America, where he was having what should have been his first softball interview as a candidate, chants of “LIAR” could be heard from a rally outside the Times Square studio. The anti–de Blasio protest somehow united the local cop union and Black Lives Matter protestors, along with housing advocates and anti-poverty activists.
While New Yorkers greet de Blasio’s quixotic campaign with hostility or befuddlement, distant observers might wonder how this is more outrageous than, say, Beto O’Rourke or any number of red-state Democrats with thin records throwing away their shot at statewide office for similarly doomed runs at the White House.
Overlooked in all the grousing is Hizzoner’s actual achievements: Bill de Blasio is one of the best mayors that New York City has ever had. But he lacks that easygoing charm with voters (the kind that mainstream political commentators call “likability” when discussing women candidates). And his candidacy is a victim of the rising expectations of the resurgent progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Ironically, his own successful 2013 campaign for mayor—with its Occupy Wall Street–inspired “Tale of Two Cities” rhetoric—helped nurture a political climate that has rendered his race dead on arrival.
None of which is to say that being one of the city’s greatest head honchos is a particularly high bar. We’ve had mayors literally flee the country to avoid prosecution. But for the last half-century, almost every Big Apple mayor who managed to get re-elected left office with delusions of La Guardia–like status and presidential ambitions. De Blasio, by contrast, actually has progressive bona fides that ought to eclipse less-accomplished mayors like Pete Buttigieg and Julian Castro, who are also currently tilting at presidential windmills.
Take the singular achievement of de Blasio’s first term: the introduction of universal pre-K. Studies show that early-childhood education pays remarkable dividends in student achievement for years. And, as Katha Pollitt noted in a remarkable piece of advocacy in The New York Times, market-rate child care “is one of the biggest costs a family faces.” That expense averages $14,144 per child in New York, which can diminish both family wealth and women’s career progress for years.
When de Blasio launched a universal tuition-free pre-kindergarten program, he made a revolutionary improvement in the lives of 70,000 children and their families. His achievement was twofold: First, he found the money to fund it, establishing a massive program of wealth redistribution. Second, his administration mastered the logistical challenges of expanding the country’s largest public-education system by an entire grade level.
Under de Blasio, New York City did it in two years. Rather than take the extended victory lap that most politicians would for lesser achievements, de Blasio followed up by expanding the program by another grade level. Universal “3K”—preschool for three-year-olds—is in the pilot stage in neighborhoods around the city.
The older of my two kids turned three in January. She’ll be going to school tuition-free in September. Bill de Blasio saved my family approximately $56,546 over the next three years! That’s exactly the kind of “free stuff” politicking that Democrats can run on in 2020.
The de Blasio administration has served as an incubator of progressive policy, and not just his own. Freed from a Republican mayor who believed that the most important quality in a City Council Speaker is “keeping legislation that never should have made it to the floor … from ever getting there,” today the City Council often drafts the first versions of future congressional bills.
Just cause for terminations, banning urine tests, and criminal background checks for employment, and mandating paid vacations: These are just some of the reforms getting a dress rehearsal in New York before they become federal initiatives.
As free child care has become a signature issue of Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign, so too could any of these de Blasio reforms become national campaign issues.
The de Blasio administration also pioneered universal free lunches (without the stigma of means testing) in public schools, a fair workweek law, and round-the-clock service on the Staten Island Ferry. It curtailed the police department’s stop-and-frisk policy.
That last policy—combined with his balanced statement about the 2014 death of Eric Garner—provoked an unprecedented mutiny from the Police Benevolent Association. In the least effective job action in our country’s otherwise inspiring recent spike in strike activity, officers stopped ticketing for minor nuisances. Quality of life in the city briefly surged, while 80 percent of New Yorkers thought the union was “too extreme.” Still, de Blasio—who is the father of two mixed-race children and made racist police misconduct a signature issue in his first mayoral run—has mostly backed off from being critical of police actions. He’s remained sidelined on one of the major progressive causes of our time, the demands of the black community for respect and police accountability.
That the police officer who killed Eric Garner is only now facing a semblance of due process—five years after Garner’s killing and at the exact time that de Blasio is presenting himself as a progressive hero on the national stage—partly explains the left’s deafening yawn in response to his candidacy.
There’s also the subway system’s ongoing breakdown, which is not technically the mayor’s responsibility but is often uppermost in the mind of every sweaty, late-for-work straphanger who might rightly resent the mayor for not making this his new campaign. Then there’s the city’s public-housing authority, which is leaving its residents in such squalor that even the TrumpWhite House has to respond. And de Blasio’s failure to challenge entrenched real-estate interests has helped spin a tale of one city for the rich while the rest of us are moving to the boondocks because the rent is too damn high.
Compounding his failure to meet the heightened expectations of progressives, there’s also this: He’s a lousy retail politician. He lacks whatever that “it” is that makes voters like a pol. Being a jerk to a press corps that follows him around and hangs on his every word hasn’t helped either. A New York mayor who actually enjoys his job can hold court on a daily basis with dozens of reporters from around the world and advance his political philosophy and naked ambition. Or he can be defensive, brittle, and petulant and inspire those same reporters to dig a fresh grave for him every morning.
It’s not hard to look at the fawning media coverage of a small-town mayor who’s read a lot of books and an ex-congressman who lost an election to Ted Cruz and view de Blasio’s presidential campaign as an act of spite. If these punks get to set our national agenda, he’s probably thinking, why not me?
Term-limited as mayor, de Blasio has just two more years in City Hall. As a lame duck he has little power to whip votes for another landmark progressive victory, as he did for Councilman Brad Lander’s bill to require a “just cause” for discharging fast-food workers or Rafael L. Espinal Jr.’s bill to forbid bosses from making their employees check their work email after clocking out.
Basically, the mayor is bored. Campaigning for a new office is his way of making his daily rounds fun again. Besides, due in part to that deficit of likability, he lacks the political capital to contest either Senator Chuck Schumer or Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2022 Democratic primaries, though progressives clearly yearn for candidates to take them on. The Intercept has published fan fiction masquerading as speculative analysis about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez getting redistricted out of her House seat so that she simply has to challenge Schumer. And the Working Families Party had to recruit a TV star to run against the vindictive and still unpopular Cuomo last year.
De Blasio is New York’s mayor because in 2013, no other left-winger thought it was possible to beat back the city’s developers and real-estate interests and whomever they would anoint to perpetuate Michael Bloomberg’s dubious legacy. Still, he was a long shot in 2013, too—until former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s and former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s campaigns both ran aground (for very different reasons). So who can blame the man for thinking he’s got a shot this time, too? But also, who can really blame him for finally taking a victory lap for having re-injected rich vs. poor rhetoric into Democratic politics—two years before Bernie Sanders first ran for president—and putting issues like universal pre-K on the national agenda?
This May Day, It’s Time to Cut Work Down to Size
[This article was co-authored by Leo Gertner.]
Every year, the rest of the world marks the first of May with worker celebration and protest. American unions that sprung up in the years after the Civil War picked the day to launch their inspirational campaign for a better balance between work and life, captured in their slogan: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will.”
Back then, the average manufacturing worker toiled 100 hours a week. Conditions have improved, but we’ve hardly achieved the eight-hour day. Today, half of all Americans report working more than 50 hours a week, while millions of “involuntary part-time” employees at corporations like Walmart scramble to find enough hours of paid work to survive.
Even Republicans recognize this crisis, with their recent belated proposals for paid family leave. These ask working people to fund their time spent caring for their families by taking loans from Social Security, cannibalizing their retirements. They’re not wrong in principle, just in scope and methodology. Working families just deserve far more control over their own time—and many fewer years working—than most policymakers are ready to admit.
As productivity grows and automation produces new gains, fewer and fewer work hours are needed to provide for the material needs of global humanity. As a result, a concept often associated with science fiction has gained traction: “post-scarcity”—a world where abundance exists with little labor, due to advances in technology, making ideas like the four-day workweek possible.
Accordingly, there has never been a better time to equitably share the work that humans must still do, but at reasonable hours and adequate pay that do not result in increased risk of injury and illness. To get there, though, workers must control when and how they must devote themselves to paid labor.
Reducing the hours in the day, the days in the week, and the years in a life spent working for someone else has long animated worker organizing, while employer resistance to shorter working hours has been a through line in U.S. history.
The first recorded strike for shorter hours—an unsuccessful effort by Philadelphia carpenters to win a ten-hour day—occurred during George Washington’s first term as president. The first May Day strike in 1886 infamously climaxed with a violent confrontation in Chicago’s Haymarket Square; its leaders were martyred on the gallows in a frame-up that caused an international sensation.
Prodded by unions, states and even the federal government enacted shorter-hours laws throughout the 19th century, but these were quickly rendered null and void. The 1905 Supreme Court case that symbolizes the pre–New Deal era when the courts vigorously resisted government regulation of private industry, Lochner v. New York, specifically overturned a law that limited the working week for bakers to 60 hours. The Court’s position was that the law interfered with workers’ “right” to “agree” to work longer hours. In 1902, the National Association of Manufacturers campaigned against a federal short-hours law for what it termed workers’ “right to work more than 480 minutes of a calendar day.”
Where laws combined with strikes and boycotts to briefly win a shorter working day, employers routinely reduced wages along with hours. The very concept of hourly wages is a by-product of 19th-century fights for “ten hours pay for eight hours work.” We still measure compensation in units of time because time and money are inextricably linked, and because employers have spent centuries chipping away at whatever gains in personal time workers have managed to win.
In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act purported to settle the hours question. It set a weekly maximum of 40 hours of work—not a daily maximum of eight or fewer that unions had long demanded—and made the main enforcement mechanism a requirement to pay time-and-a-half on overtime work. Far from being a stick to punish companies that didn’t hire enough employees to avoid having to pay the overtime premium, it proved more of a carrot to entice employees to overwork. At one of the first meetings of the newly merged AFL-CIO, a 1956 Conference on Shorter Hours, the first speaker to follow Federation President George Meany flatly declared, “Workers are eager to increase their income, not to work for fewer hours.”
Workers’ need to put in extra hours was exacerbated beginning in the 1970s, when wages lagged productivity and inflation ate whatever material gains workers had won through collective bargaining. The rising costs of employer-paid health insurance also held down wages, making a bad situation worse.
Our current system—pegging benefits like health care and retirement to individual jobs and employers—warps employers’ hiring incentives. Full-time jobs cost more to create because of the additional costs of benefits. Employers try to squeeze as much time as possible from these workers to make up for the higher costs. Conversely, other parts of the workforce are kept part-time and temporary to avoid paying any benefits at all.
Hence, if an employer wants 60 hours of work to be done, it has two choices. Split the job into two 30-ish-hour jobs with no benefits and unpredictable schedules, or create one full-time job with 20 hours of overtime to get the biggest bang for the buck for the additional cost of benefits.
Whether they work too much to live or not enough to survive, workers can suffer burnout and mental illness, reduced life expectancy, and a whole range of undesirable outcomes.
This current state of affairs is hardly the eight-hour day that the original May Day strikers fought for. American workers once made republican arguments that reducing the workday was essential for full participation in a democratic society. As well, an early theory of the short-hours movement was that the extra leisure would drive up consumer demand in ways that would more than make up for the initial loss of corporate profit. Giving people the money they’ve earned and the free time to spend it has usually been healthy for the economy.
But the hopes of the original May Day demonstrators haven’t come to pass. Average annual hours have steadily crept up in the United States since the 1970s. Today, Americans work an average of 1,780 hours a year, less than South Korea’s 2,024 but substantially more than Germany’s 1,356 (a difference of ten full-time weeks). And yet, German unemployment stands at 3.4 percent, lower than in the U.S., and the nation has similar levels of productivity and a substantially larger middle class. Why can’t we dream bigger?
Our modern problem of striking a meaningful work-life balance is so complex that there’s no one law that could reduce our lifetime obligation to work for wages. But we should start with wages, knowing that they can alleviate poverty, if not solve inequality. As corporations adopt a $15 minimum wage, it’s become clear it’s the bare minimum. By 2024, a single adult without children will need $31,200 ($15 at full-time hours annually) to maintain an adequate standard of living anywhere in the United States. If the wage is not indexed to inflation, it will immediately lose its value again. If 1968’s $1.50 minimum wage had kept up with inflation, it would be close to $12 today and nearly $21 if matched with growth in productivity.
The overtime protections in the Fair Labor Standards Act need to be rethought as well. Right now, salaried employees like social workers and administrative office staff can essentially work unlimited hours without overtime. Obama’s Department of Labor tried to fix this by raising the salary threshold for overtime eligibility from $23,660 to $47,476, but conservative states and business groups successfully sued to block it. Trump’s Labor Department recently lowered the proposed threshold to $35,000, leaving half the affected workers behind. Even when employers are required to pay overtime, it hardly acts as a deterrent to hazardous levels of work.
We should cast aside the 40-hour week altogether—it is an arbitrary and antiquated formula, leaving plenty of room for employers to impose 12-hour days, split shifts, “clopens,” and all kinds of on-call assignments that deprive a worker of the space to be fully human when she’s finally off the clock. Why not six-hour days! Four-day weeks? Would that be so horrible?
But even doubling or tripling overtime pay would not fully discourage employers from overworking their employees so long as the cost of health care is factored into payroll. One less-discussed benefit of Medicare for All is the freedom it would grant workers to walk away from jobs they hate and extra hours they’d rather not work. Employers would lose the perverse incentive to either underwork a large workforce or overwork a smaller one in order to avoid insurance obligations. Medicare for All would enable us, as a society, to spread the work around a bit more evenly.
Social Security is also an important component of striking a better work-life balance. For that reason, we need to expand its coverage to public-sector, domestic, and agricultural workers who don’t currently benefit from a guaranteed federal pension—funding that expansion by taxing incomes above $132,900. Lowering the retirement age would create a better work-life balance too.
Paid vacation and sick leave are also a part of the equation. We are dead last when it comes to guaranteed paid time off. Countries like South Korea, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Chile all guarantee employees over 30 days off, while the U.S. won’t even guarantee pay for federal holidays. New Jersey and Washington are among the states leading the way by offering some form of parental leave, largely through temporary-disability insurance. Ten states and D.C. now provide paid sick days. New York City is even considering a paid-vacation law. These policies make employment less unstable for millions of workers and provide needed rest without risking job loss or savings.
The federal government could build on these local efforts by creating a new supplemental Social Security paid-leave fund. Setting it up as an insurance fund everyone pays into helps ensure that workers actually use their earned time off. Those who don’t raise families could use the time off for other pursuits, like returning to school, or even as a bridge to earlier retirement.
In our age of inequality, we are constantly hustling for advantages to meet the spiraling cost of living. Our current work culture tells us if only we got more money or hours, maybe ends would magically meet. Experience, however, makes clear that for the vast majority of working Americans, this time-and-money trap falls short of creating the conditions for a good life. What really would help is more control over our time.
It’s time we cut work down to size.
[This article originally appeared at The American Prospect.]