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 […]
A New Bill of Rights for Workers: 10 Demands the Labor Movement Can Fight for and Win
ON A CLOUDY AFTERNOON IN APRIL 2006, ROGER TOUSSAINT LED A PROCESSION OF UNION WORKERS ACROSS THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE. Toussaint, president of Transport Workers Union Local 100 and an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago, was on his way to surrender himself to the authorities to serve a 10-day jail sentence. His crime? He led the largely Black and Latino union membership in a 60-hour strike the previous winter, shutting down the city’s subway and bus system in violation of a judge’s injunction and New York’s 1967 Taylor Law, which bans public-sector strikes. The court also slapped the union with a $2.5 million fine and suspended its ability to collect dues for a year. Individual strikers were fined two days’ pay for each day on strike. Punishments this draconian are rare outside the world of labor law. Toussaint saw more jail time than any of the top bank executives responsible for […]
The Right to Organize at Work Deserves Constitutional Protection
On Labor Day, alongside stories about parades and final trips to the beach, we can expect to read the usual depressing statistics about the decline of labor unions in the United States. The problem with this coverage isn’t the facts, which are undeniable — it’s the tone of inevitability. Today, less than 11 percent of workers, including just 7 percent in the private sector, are members of a union — a dramatic drop from the 1950s, when more than one-third of the workforce was unionized. The recent loss by the United Auto Workers at a Mississippi Nissan factory, where workers voted by a three-to-one ratio against union representation, is just the latest in a long string of defeats for the labor movement. And this decline has a real effect on families’ financial security: Researchers have shown that nearly half of the decline in middle-class incomes is due to the shrinking […]
The Cost, not the Cure
Chris Brooks has an excellent piece in the new issue of New Labor Forum that grapples with the question of whether unions should cede exclusive representation if the country goes “right-to-work.” As the title of his article, “The Cure Worse than the Disease: Expelling Freeloaders in an Open-Shop State,” suggests, he’s against it: Ceding exclusive representation to “kick out the scabs,” as Richman would have it, might be okay for a high-functioning local with high union density, but a union with 60 percent membership is likely to create an entrenched, adversarial minority. A union representing Geoghegan’s “40 percent, or 30, or fewer” can easily succumb to being nothing more than a marginal minority. So long as unions are treated as third-party vendors of services, as Fisk and Sachs describe them, then it will be easy for yellow unions to provide the same insurance, professional development, and discounted movie tickets at […]
Want to Really Help Workers? Protect their Speech!
When does free speech stop being free? At the entranceway of one’s job, apparently. That was the implication of a ruling this month from the Eighth Circuit Court, which found that the sandwich conglomerate Jimmy John’s was within its rights to fire six employees for making signs that protested the company’s policy of forcing workers to come to work when ill. While the decision came as a surprise to many, the logic underlying it—that employees have few, if any, free speech protections on the job—has had devastating impacts on American workers for decades. Indeed, the dramatic drop in union representation is due in part to the fact that our court system regulates employees’ ability to organize by the impact of their organizing on businesses’ bottom line, devoid of any concern for the free speech or civil rights of workers. Until we ensure that freedom of speech extends to the workplace, […]
Labor’s Bill of Rights
These are dark times for labor. The Republican majority that now controls all levels of the federal government has made it clear that they plan on rolling back labor and employment protections, while also not funding and enforcing the currently existing laws. Judicial conservatives have regained their fifth vote on the Supreme Court and a new case challenging the constitutionality of public sector fair share agreements is at the Court’s footsteps.[note] Moshe Marvit, “Labor Opponents Already Have The Next ‘Friedrichs’ SCOTUS Case Ready to Go Under Trump,” In These Times, January 4, 2017, http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/19776/will_trumps_supreme_court_reverse_fair_share_fees_unions_foes_hope_so.[/note] House conservatives have introduced a national right-to-work amendment to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA), and other restrictions on union activity are likely to be moved in the House.[note]“House Resolution 785,” 115th U.S. Congress, 2017, https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/785.[/note] All of this will come at a time when the power and reach of organized labor is at […]
How Union-Busting Bosses Propel the Right Wing to Power
U.S. bosses fight unions with a ferocity that is unmatched in the so-called free world. In the early days of the republic, master craftsmen prosecuted fledgling unions as criminal conspiracies that aimed to block their consolidation of wealth and property. During modern times, corporations threaten the jobs of pro-union workers in over half of all union elections—and follow through on the threat one-third of the time. In between, bosses have resorted to spies and frame-ups, physical violence, court injunctions, private armies of strikebreakers, racist appeals and immigrant exploitation. The labor question has never been a genteel debate about power and fairness in America. A new book from the University of Illinois Press’ “The Working Class History in American History” series offers a broad survey of how bosses have historically engaged in union-busting. Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism is a collection of scholarly essays edited by […]
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 […]
Republicans Will Turn the NLRB into a Force for Union Busting. We Can Turn It Back.
Here comes the anti-union crackdown. According to a recent Bloomberg report, Donald Trump has submitted the names of two anti-union lawyers to the FBI for vetting. This is a precursor to nominating them to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by June to cement a Republican majority that will reverse many of the pro-worker decisions and policies that the federal agency has advanced in recent years. Marvin Kaplan works for the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission. William Emanuel is a lawyer at the union-busting firm, Littler Mendelson. Either of these garden-variety union-haters could have been appointed by Jeb Bush, John Kasich or whatever bland man in a navy suit the Republicans might have nominated if the reality TV star hadn’t bumbled his way into the GOP nomination and presidency. On the potential chopping block are the board’s expedited election rules, the organizing rights of graduate employees and workers at […]
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 […]