SCOTUS Is on the Verge of Decimating Public-Sector Unions—But Workers Can Still Fight Back

On Thursday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Janus vs. AFSCME, the case that will likely turn the entire public sector labor movement into a “right-to-work” zone. Like a lazy Hollywood remake, the case has all the big money behind it that last year’s Friedrichs v. CTA did, with none of the creativity.

In Friedrichs, the plaintiffs argued that interactions between public sector unions and government employers are inherently political. Therefore, the argument went, mandatory agency fees to reimburse the union for the expenses of representation and bargaining were forced political speech, violating employees’ purported First Amendment right to not pay dues.

The case ended in a 4-4 deadlock in March 2016, following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, who had appeared poised to vote against the unions’ interests.

Much like Friedrichs, the Janus case has rocketed through the federal courts. The National Right to Work Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs, petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case in early June. All briefs will likely be submitted by mid-January 2018, meaning SCOTUS could hold hearings almost exactly a year to the date that the Court last heard the same arguments.

The defendants may argue for procedural delays, which could potentially kick the decision into the following court term in 2018-2019. And it’s possible that in the meantime Justice Anthony Kennedy could die of a heart attack, or Sam Alito could forget to look both ways while crossing First St. and get run over by a bus. And the Democrats might take back the Senate next year, preventing the Trump administration from naming any more conservatives to the Court.

That’s the kind of magical thinking we’re left with, because the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is clearly determined to tilt the power of the country in favor of big business and against unions for at least a generation, and they care little about how just or fair their decisions appear to the public.

“Right to work” laws, currently on the books in 27 states, strip the requirement that union members pay union dues. Unions claim this creates a “free rider” problem, allowing workers to enjoy the benefits of union membership without contributing a dime. This deprives unions of crucial funding, but also—and this is no small consideration for the right-wing—every union family that drops their membership becomes one less door that union members can knock come election season.

Most national unions have been preparing for this eventuality since the first time the Roberts court took up the issue of public sector union fees in 2014’s Harris Vs. Quinn case. (If you’re keeping score, yes, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court have spent three years in a row trying to break the backs of unions).

Much of this preparation has focused on making sure that unions have a shop steward in every department and that every new hire is asked by a living breathing human being to actually join the union. But, as I wrote earlier this month, the bigger threat once workers have the right to evade union fees is the direct mail and phone-banking campaign that is already being run by Koch Brother-funded “think tanks” to encourage workers to drop their union membership and “give yourself a raise.”

As I wrote then, “The slick ‘give yourself a raise’ pamphlets will do the most damage in places where members think of the union as simply a headquarters building downtown. … But where members are involved in formulating demands and participating in protest actions, they find the true value and power of being in a union. That power—the power of an active and involved membership—is what the right-wing most fears, and is doing everything in its power to stop.”

There is a certain irony in conservatives applying the First Amendment to collective bargaining, a principle that conservative jurists have studiously avoided for two centuries. If every interaction that a union has with the government is a matter of speech, then we have a stronger argument for instituting a Bill of Rights for labor to protect workers and their right to demand fair treatment on the job.

Unions are already oppressively regulated. They are told by the National Labor Relations Board whom they can picket, when they may march and what they might say on a flyer. And they face steep fines if they disobey. Workers are forced to attend endless hours of anti-union presentations before a union election with no right to respond or boycott.

If every interaction the government has with a union is a matter of political speech—as a ruling in favor of Janus would imply—unions must respond by forcefully arguing that the rules of the system have been unfairly holding workers back, violating of our rights to free speech, due process and equal protection.

[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]

The Right Wing Has a Vast, Secret Plot to Destroy Unions for Good. Here’s How to Fight Back.

The vast right-wing network of Koch brother-funded “think tanks” is now plotting to finish off the public sector labor movement once and for all.

In a series of fundraising documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy of Madison, Wis., and published in the Guardian, the CEO of a cartel of 66 well-funded arch-conservative state capitol lobbying outfits promises funders a “once-in-a-lifetime chance to reverse the failed policies of the American left.”

Tracie Sharp, the leader of the States Policy Network (SPN), goes on to explain that the pathway to permanent right-wing victory is to “defund and defang” unions that rely on the legal protections of state labor law.

Though less well-known, the SPN is something of a sister organization to the American Legislative and Exchange Council (ALEC), which writes cookie cutter “model legislation” for right-wing state legislators.

SPN affiliates, like Michigan’s Mackinac Center and Ohio’s Buckeye Institute, promote ALEC’s agenda in the public sphere and attack organizations that are opposed to it. Both networks have effectively nationalized the conservative agenda in state legislatures.

The One Percent Solution

What’s fueling this drive is a combination of the vast sums of money that flow into elections in the Citizens United-era along with the gerrymandering that has helped rig elections in favor of Republicans. The result has frequently been “triple crown” GOP-led state governments that hold little accountability to voters but tremendous debts to their corporate masters.

University of Oregon professor Gordon Lafer has documented the rise of the corporate legislative agenda in all 50 states in his new book, The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time.

Lafer found that state bills pushed by ALEC and the SPN, along with more traditional business lobbyists like the Chamber of Commerce, generally fall into four broad categories.

The first, and most obvious, are efforts to constrain or destroy institutions that empower working people to fight back, such as labor unions.

Second are efforts to privatize public services. Lafer found these efforts were primarily intended to diffuse the responsibility of providing these services. “If no public authority is responsible,” he writes, “demands become customer-service issues rather than policy problems that must be addressed by democratically accountable officials.”

Third are efforts to block—or preempt—rebel cities from passing living wage or fair scheduling laws, thereby foreclosing on the ability for localities to defend and advance progressive goals.

Finally, through tax cuts for the wealthy and austerity-driven cuts to vital public services, Lafer found that this corporate agenda seeks a downward shift in what people come to expect for a basic standard of living.

In other words, the One Percent’s solution is to convince the rest of us, as the Dead Kennedys song goes, that soup is good food; that each new indignity is simply our new standard of living and that we shouldn’t expect more.

“Give yourself a raise”

If the States Policy Network does really strive for this One Percent goal outlined by Lafer, then it’s no wonder that the group has been most dogged in pursuing its union-busting agenda. SPN and ALEC have long understood what many Democratic politicians are only just beginning to realize: strong unions help keep right-wing politicians out of office while protecting the social safety net.

SPN and ALEC have aggressively pursued so-called “right-to-work” legislation as a means of bankrupting unions and knocking out a key component of their opponents’ get-out-the-vote operation. Twenty-eight states now have these anti-union laws on the books. Five of them—all former bedrocks of union power—were passed this decade as a part of the anti-union drive described in the documents released by the Center for Media and Democracy.

That’s hardly the extent of the role of these “think tanks” in busting unions. Flush with cash, they’ve begun volunteering their efforts as union avoidance consultants where no one has asked for their services.

In 2013, I was part of a drive to organize the workers at Chicago’s United Neighborhood Organization Charter School Network, under the terms of a neutrality agreement. The employer was getting rocked by a financial and insider dealing scandal that was a daily cover story in the local media. The schools’ employees joining the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (ACTS) was the only positive headline they had to look forward to when we launched the card drive.

That didn’t stop an SPN affiliate, the Illinois Policy Institute (IPI), from harvesting teachers’ email addresses and spamming UNO’s e-mail lists with condescending admonitions to “not sign any union petition or authorization card unless you are certain that you want union representation.”

These union busters seemed to assume that the “launch” of our card drive meant a bunch of beefy goons were about to descend on the schools to strong-arm teachers. In fact, the public launch of the card drive was the union organizing equivalent of a touchdown dance. The representative, democratic organizing committee we had spent weeks training, educating and empowering signed up over 90 percent of their colleagues in time for a May Day card count certification.

The Illinois Policy Institute is better prepared for the upcoming Supreme Court case, Janus vs. AFSCME. Originating from Illinois, the case is a blatant do-over of the craven attempt to turn the entire public sector labor movement “right-to-work,” previously pushed in the Friedrichs case.

Should the Supreme Court vote to make union fees voluntary, the IPI and its sister organizations are prepared to run the mother of all “open shop” drives. They will likely FOIA the names and as much contact information as possible of every union-represented public sector worker and inundate them with glossy materials encouraging them to “give yourself a raise” by quitting the union.

How to fight back

The revelation of the SPN’s nakedly partisan agenda should open every one of its affiliates to challenges over their status as tax-deductible educational charities. These challenges are worth pursuing, if only to delegitimize their role in public debates. But this won’t really affect their bottom line—their funders have so much money they hardly need the tax breaks for donating to their favorite political causes.

In preparation for the post-Janus attacks, public sector unions should behave more like Chicago ACTS and confound the SPN’s moldy old assumptions about the source of union power. To do this, we need to greatly increase members’ democratic involvement in their unions. The slick “give yourself a raise” pamphlets will do the most damage in places where members think of the union as simply a headquarters building downtown. If that’s the extent of their interaction, workers could fall for the cheap trick of blaming the union for the stagnant wages and reduction in benefits that are actually the direct result of the GOP’s corporate agenda.

But where members are involved in formulating demands and participating in protest actions, they find the true value and power of being in a union. That power—the power of an active and involved membership—is what the right-wing most fears, and is doing everything in its power to stop.

[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]

Trump Wants To Privatize Air Traffic Control. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Promising “cheaper, faster and safer travel,” the Trump administration announced a plan this week to privatize the nation’s air traffic control system.

The announcement Monday marked the first day of the administration’s “infrastructure week,” a series of publicity events around one of the only areas of the president’s agenda that has intrigued some union leaders and Democratic legislators.

What they had hoped for was an increase in public spending to create good jobs and repair our nation’s transportation systems. What Trump wants is to give public assets away to corporate interests, while reducing pay and benefit standards for workers.

The official justification for privatizing air traffic control is to speed the conversion from a radar-based system to a more accurate GPS one. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been converting the system, but it does not anticipate finishing the job until 2020. An actual investment in infrastructure could give the FAA the resources it needs to do it faster, but if Republican politicians have any true religion, it is belief in the magic of the “free” market.

Unfriendly skies

The Trump administration’s announcement comes at a time when the public has historically low levels of confidence in our unregulated, private, for-profit air travel industry. An incident in April in which a physician was dragged off of an overbooked United flight aroused public outrage and fairly common agreement that flying in America has become, to borrow from Stephen Colbert, “a trip up the Devil’s butthole in a flying aluminum suppository.”

While always privately operated, the airline industry was once heavily regulated by federal authorities who determined which airports each airline could serve and even how much they could charge customers. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 was touted with similar promises of being somehow better and cheaper and offering more options.

Private sector corporations’ first priority is to turn a profit—not to serve the public. The deregulated airlines have been accused of colluding to jack up fares and fees and limit service to unprofitable locations. They routinely overbook flights and bump paying customers off of flights. Seat size and legroom rapidly approach Lilliputian proportions, unless one is willing to pay more for an “upgrade.” Indeed, the unregulated airline industry has so successfully monetized its greedy refusal to ensure basic levels of passenger comfort that if they all instituted a $25 “No Face-Punch Fee” tomorrow, many of us would sigh, shrug and pay it.

And Trump wants to hand these jackals the control over where, when and how quickly planes can move from point A to point B, when their primary motivation will be saving two minutes and $10 with each decision?! No thanks.

Echoes from the past

Trump’s mad plan to wreck the air traffic control system brings to mind the last time a feckless actor threatened everyone’s safety with a wanton disregard for the professional skills and experience of air traffic controllers. It also happened in the first year of his presidency.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan inherited an unsettled contract dispute with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). Finding the Carter administration—the same one that deregulated the airline industry—to be a stubbornly recalcitrant employer, PATCO actually endorsed Reagan in the 1980 election (hey, he was a former union president). Reagan’s administration repaid that favor by dismissing the union’s demands for more reasonable hours and better equipment.

So PATCO went on strike. As federal employees, they had no legal right to strike—a fact that the new president reminded them of with an order to return to work within 48 hours or be fired.

Reagan’s firing of the striking air traffic controllers was a signal event in labor relations. Private sector employers soon followed suit by bargaining their unions to impasse over concessionary demands, forcing them out on strike, permanently replacing the workers and finally decertifying their bargaining units.

Air traffic controllers eventually organized a new union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), which was certified 30 years ago this month. But the work of air traffic controllers remains incredibly stressful and understaffed. If Trump’s plan is successful there is no guarantee that the new private operator will retain the current workforce. Indeed, there is a good deal of incentive to hire few of the workers, tear up the union contract and lower pay and benefits for new, less experienced workers.

But, if NATCA could rebuild from the PATCO debacle then it seems likely that some union would organize the privatized air traffic controllers. If that happened, the workers would find themselves in an ironic and auspicious position. A privatized workforce would find itself regulated by a set of laws that entertain much more of a formal right to strike. If pushed too far by the privatizers on low wages, low staffing and technology that doesn’t keep up with the times, employees could go on strike—for their own working conditions and, perhaps, for the safety and dignity of air passengers everywhere.

[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]

What the Big May Day Strike in a Small Pennsylvania City Teaches Us About Organizing

The first May Day of the Trump era saw scores of major actions in cities across the United States, but perhaps the most impressive demonstration of worker power took place in the small city of Reading, Pennsylvania. There, 127 stores—about three-quarters of the businesses in the city—shut down in protest, and an additional 500 mostly agricultural and construction workers participated in the general strike, according to organizers. The protest even spread to nearby Allentown, where two dozen more stores closed for the day.

Spearheaded by Make the Road Pennsylvania, a community group that organizes working-class Latinos, the strike was a protest of the county sheriff’s plan to authorize his deputies to act as immigration agents, in cooperation with the Trump administration’s assault on immigrants. While Berks County is one of the economically depressed areas that carried Trump to a win in Pennsylvania, the people of Reading are as unlikely to support his vision for “making America great again” as they are to agree that “America is already great.”

Although the majority of Reading’s residents are Latino, and another significant percentage of the population is African-American, Reading’s mayor and city council are almost entirely white, thanks to a combination of gerrymandering and the political donor class. That’s where the idea of hitting decision-makers in the wallet developed.

“No sales means no sales tax,” says Make the Road Pennsylvania director Adanjesus Marin. “Most of their revenue comes from the communities they’re attacking.”

According to Marin, organizers spent four weeks getting workers and businesses to commit to the May Day strike. Stores that agreed to participate had signs in their windows and flyers near their registers to make visible the growing movement. Many of Make the Road’s activists come from Central America, he says, and have experience in their home countries’ labor movements, so the idea of a May Day action was quickly embraced.

Although the international day of workers’ celebration and protest on the first of May originated in Chicago in the 19th century, for generations since the Cold War, Americans were more likely to associate the holiday with Soviet military parades than with workers’ rights. What May Day events did get organized were often small rallies for dozens of faithful dissidents.

Then, in 2006, May Day came roaring back with the first major “Day Without Immigrants” strike. More than a million immigrant workers and allies struck and staged major rallies to protest the last Republican president’s “get tough” posturing. May Day has been a day of activism and protest—sometimes larger, sometimes smaller—ever since.

As important as reviving International Workers’ Day is in the United States, the actions of Reading’s shopkeepers contribute to something even more essential: reviving the strike. Major work stoppages, those involving 1,000 or more workers, have declined by approximately 90 percent over the past four decades, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That period has been marked by a sustained anti-union offensive by employers. Beginning with the Phelps-Dodge strike in 1983, companies dusted off an obscure Supreme Court precedent that gutted the legal right to strike by taking away workers’ right to return to the job when the strike is over. Companies hard-bargained over pay freezes and benefit reductions, dared their unions to go out on strike and hired scabs to take the strikers’ jobs and vote the union out.

As a result, strikes today are seen by union leaders and members alike as very risky propositions, and job actions have declined accordingly. That is a problem that compounds itself. Our greatest power is still the work we do and our occasional refusal to do it. But if workers don’t see examples of other workers going on strike, what is going to get them thinking about their power and how to exercise it?

What are particularly needed are examples of work stoppages that don’t look like traditional union strikes. The majority of American workers want to be in a union, but our rigged system makes winning a legally certified bargaining unit damn near impossible. If the 90 percent or so of workers who don’t have a union are to protest to demand a better life, a strike is not going to look like bargaining to impasse, printing up picket signs and marching in a long line or a protest pen in front of a factory. But it could look like Reading’s May Day general strike.

Most of the businesses that closed—lunch counters, small grocery stores, cleaners—were single proprietorships or family businesses employing less than five people. “They don’t do better than workers who sell their labor in a traditional way,” says Make the Road’s Marin. Our nation’s labor laws don’t even treat most of them as employees who have rights; many are treated as employers under the law. But they are workers and their strike is an example of a bigger, broader labor movement that fights for more than just wages, hours and working conditions. A labor movement that stands up for the whole community, with the whole community, can inspire more workers to weigh and wield their power. Let Reading be an example.

[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]