How US Labor Law Constrains Unions’ Political Activity / by Stephen R. Keeney

_{^{UC Santa Cruz members of UAW Local 4811 and pro-Palestinian protesters carry signs as they demonstrate in front of the campus on May 20, 2024 in Santa Cruz, California. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)}}

A growing number of unions have taken a stand against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Yet US labor law throws up major obstacles to unions using their leverage to press political demands, including the demand for a cease-fire

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

As university encampments have become the center of American popular resistance to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the most powerful voices in the country calling for a cease-fire continue to be labor unions. For many, the logical next step after endorsing a cease-fire would be for unions to take more concrete actions to press this demand. The problem for unions is figuring out how to maximize pressure on the corporate and political classes who enthusiastically (and profitably) support Israel’s apartheid regime and genocide in Gaza, given that US labor law intentionally restricts the ability of unions to use workplace actions for political ends — like striking to stop a war.

The difficulty is that US labor law generally only protects workplace actions when there is a nexus between what is being protested and the working conditions of the employees taking action. Generally, rights to free speech and political expression stop at the workplace door. In this respect, bosses have greater control over workers than the elected government does over citizens, because the Constitution restricts governments but not private actors. (Even government agencies have more power to restrict expression when they are acting as employers.) This means that, with few exceptions, bosses can easily squash their workers’ political expression and speech.

A History of Making Effective Methods Illegal or Unprotected

The difference between an illegal activity and an unprotected activity is important, but often it makes little difference for workers. If an activity is illegal, then there are legal repercussions for doing it, like criminal charges or liability for damages. These exist on top of any employment repercussions. If an activity is not protected by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), then it means that workers can be fired for doing it and have no legal recourse for getting their jobs back. This vulnerability stems from the absence of constitutional rights in the workplace.

US labor law has a long history of taking tactics that unions use successfully and making them illegal or unprotected. After the passage of the NLRA in 1935 gave workers and unions legal rights to organize, strike, and bargain collectively, unions stepped up political donations to worker-friendly candidates. In 1943, Congress lumped unions in with banks and corporations as entities forbidden to donate to federal candidates. The sit-down strikes that were so effective in the late 1930s were soon declared illegal by the Supreme Court. A similar fate befell intermittent strikes, which are not illegal, but were determined to be unprotected.

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), which established a minimum wage and overtime pay for hours over forty, put so much money into workers’ pockets that it had to be reined in. In 1946, the Supreme Court held that “time during which an employee is necessarily required to be on the employer’s premises, on duty or at a prescribed workplace” counted as work for FLSA purposes. Within six months, unions and employees had filed 1,500 lawsuits seeking $6 billion ($93.67 billion in 2023 dollars) in unpaid wages.

Congress scurried in to defend capital by enacting the Portal-to-Portal Act in 1947, which excluded most “work-adjacent” time by only counting “principal activities” as work that requires compensation under the FLSA. It also prohibited unions from bringing FLSA lawsuits on behalf of their members. The pendulum has swung so far the other way on this issue that, in 2014, the Supreme Court unanimously held that an Amazon contractor could legally force its employees to stand in line for twenty-five minutes for a security screening at the end of their shift without paying them for that time. (If anyone besides your employer did this, we would call it false imprisonment.)

As we’ve seen over the past few years, a strike is the most powerful workplace action a union can take, and a credible strike threat one of its most powerful bargaining chips. That is why most collective bargaining agreements have “no-strike clauses,” in which the union agrees not to call a strike during the term of the contract in exchange for other benefits (often binding arbitration). It is illegal for a unit with a “no-strike clause” to go on strike unless the employer commits “serious” unfair labor practices.

Other steps can also be powerful, especially if they put pressure on supervisors who are stuck between the workers and management. But these actions are only protected under certain conditions.

Restrictions on Workplace Actions as Political Speech

In the context of action on something like the genocide in Gaza, the most important restriction on unions is the ban on “secondary boycotts.” A secondary boycott is when a union uses concerted action (strikes, picketing, boycotts, etc.) to either pressure someone besides the primary employer into action, or to pressure the primary employer to take action against another party. The only exception is that employees are allowed to honor a lawful strike or refuse to cross a lawful picket line.

What makes this ban so important is that not only are secondary boycotts illegal — but they are the only unfair labor practice I’m aware of that allows someone to bring a case directly to court instead of going through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This is a huge thumb on the scale in management’s favor.

So under Supreme Court precedent, a labor union refusing to handle goods or striking until an employer divests from Israeli companies or war manufacturing would be illegal and put the union on the hook for damages. In Longshoremen v. Allied International, for instance, the International Longshoremen’s Association refused to handle cargo coming to or from the Soviet Union in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Allied was a company that imported goods from the Soviet Union; Allied had hired a shipping company called Waterman to ship its goods, and Waterman hired John T. Clark and Son, which was under a contract with the longshoremen, to unload its ships. The Supreme Court held that the longshoremen’s actions were an illegal secondary boycott, and that the union had to pay damages to Allied.

Less than three months later, however, the court held that a boycott of white businesses by a local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branch seeking equal rights in the community was a valid exercise of First Amendment activities. Under US law, the First Amendment simply does not exist within the employer-employee relationship.

If a union today refused to handle goods (including war materials) heading to or from Israel in protest of its genocide of Palestinians, there is no doubt the court would reach the same conclusion it did in Longshoremen. This means that, while the refusal or strike may send a powerful message in the short term, the companies profiting from the genocide would ultimately suffer no loss — their bloodstained profits would be covered by the legal damages and paid for by union-member dues.

There are, of course, less dramatic — and typically less powerful — actions that unions can take. But while the NLRB is generally more protective of workers than the Supreme Court, the board still requires a nexus between working conditions and what workers are protesting. In Eastex, Inc. v. NLRB, the Supreme Court upheld an NLRB ruling that a union distributing a flyer that included political messaging (opposing right-to-work laws and condemning President Richard Nixon’s veto of a minimum-wage increase) was protected by the NLRA. The court held that these issues were related enough to employees’ working conditions to be protected.

Earlier this year, the NLRB issued a decision in Home Depot that held that employees putting “BLM” (for “Black Lives Matter”) on their company-issued uniform aprons was protected activity because there was a nexus between the BLM movement at large and the racial discrimination by management and supervisors that employees were protesting. This is the most expansive ruling yet on what messages employers must allow employees to express at work — and even then, the expression was allowed only because it was related to specific working conditions at that store.

The Path Forward

There is little hope that unions will be legally able to directly engage in broader politics via workplace actions anytime soon. Passage of the PRO Act would make secondary boycotts legal, but that does not mean they would be protected — employers could still legally fire employees who participate in them And while in Eastex the court gave an opening for unions by saying that workers are protected when they seek to change conditions for workers generally or when they act on behalf of other workers to build solidarity for future disputes, it is hard to see many courts applying that logic to Palestinian workers.

But there are other ways unions can support the people of Palestine, which some unions have made use of. When universities use force against protests that include workers, they may be turning a geopolitical issue into a workplace one. UAW Local 4811, which represents forty-eight thousand grad students and academic workers in the University of California system, has gone on strike in response to the working conditions created by the university’s crackdown on the peaceful protesters. The local’s strike vote announcement cited unsafe work conditions caused by the university failing to stop mob violence against the protesters and calling in the police to violently disperse their encampments.

Other unions have filed unfair labor practice charges based on unilateral changes in work rules and policies (like changes to free speech and expressive conduct policies aimed at the antigenocide protesters) and the creation of unsafe work conditions. These charges, if upheld by the NLRB, would be massive wins for unions. Strikes against unfair labor practices have a special status in labor law: while a worker engaged in an economic strike can be permanently replaced, a worker striking over unfair labor practices must be reinstated even if the employer hired a permanent replacement for them during the strike.

US labor law outlaws and discourages unions from acting on issues bigger than the workplace. Still, if the last few years have taught us anything, it is that labor can find a way. When an effective tactic is outlawed, unionists can develop new tactics. But one thing that has never changed is that capitalists need workers a lot more than workers need them — and when workers find ways to wield that collective power, they can win big changes.

_{Stephen R. Keeney is a former union staff representative who currently works as a union-side labor lawyer at Doll, Jansen & Ford in Dayton, Ohio, where he is a member of the Union Lawyers Alliance.}

Unions Support Student Protestors Against Campus Administrators and Police / by Caitlyn Clark

_{^{United Auto Workers members at the University of California marched in Oakland. Attacks on campus occupations have led to unfair labor practice charges and even a strike vote. Photo: UAW Local 2865}}

_{Reposted from Labor Notes}

As campus protests—and violent police repression—continue to roll across the country, some unions are getting involved.

More than 2,700 protesters have been arrested on 64 college campuses since the initial arrests at Columbia University in New York on April 18. Encampments have appeared at 184 campuses worldwide. The protesting students are calling for full disclosure of their universities’ finances and divestment from all financial ties to weapons manufacturers and Israel’s war on Gaza.

Unionized academic workers are demanding decision-making power over their work and what it’s used for. For instance, academic workers in the astronomy department of the University of California Santa Cruz have organized to refuse to apply for or accept funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, weapons manufacturers, and military contractors.

In an open letter published by the magazine Science for the People in January, they wrote, “UC has received $295 million in research funding from the Department of Defense in FY 2022 alone… Technology that astronomers have developed for science is being misused to surveil and target people both within and outside the U.S.”

For others, the police assaults on protestors and university administrators’ attacks on campus free speech have become issues of contract violations and workplace safety. Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4811, representing 48,000 academic workers across the University of California system, filed unfair labor practice (ULP) charges against their employer over violent police attacks on the UCLA student encampment.

“UCLA unilaterally changed its workplace free speech policies without providing notice or bargaining,” Local 4811 said in a statement. “In so doing it violated its policy of content neutrality toward speech by favoring those engaged in anti-Palestine speech over those engaged in pro-Palestine speech.”

The local will hold a strike authorization vote over the ULP May 13-15. The vote could lead to thousands of academic workers striking for free speech and in solidarity with the student movement for Palestine.

DEMOCRACY BUILT CONFIDENCE

At UC Santa Cruz, organizing within departments brought union members out on a single-day wildcat walkout on May 1. The idea was first raised at a monthly membership meeting a week before.

“No one came into the meeting thinking, ‘This is the proposal and we want to get it passed.’ It was more like, ‘Let’s talk about how we as unionists can meet the moment,’” said Sarah Mason, a sociology department steward.

Ideas were thrown out for single-day walkouts, strikes until the student demands for divestment and disclosure were met, and answering the Palestinian Federation of Trade Unions’ call for a global work stoppage on May Day. But with only 75 members present out of 1,000, they knew they couldn’t make the decision there.

Instead, stewards called department meetings to hold open-ended discussions. Out of 33 departments, 23 held meetings—a sign that the union has developed a robust steward structure.

The night before the proposed walkout, 300 union members attended an emergency meeting, 150 in person and 150 over Zoom. “Stewards were lining up to give report-backs on what the meetings were like in their departments,” Mason said. “It was an incredible thing to see.”

They decided on a single-day walkout the next day, and formed a committee to determine longer-term demands and discuss future strikes.

Mason credits a six-week strike in 2022 for helping embolden Santa Cruz workers to walk out again. Transparency in the decision-making process was important. “Every step of the way, people were discussing and deliberating respectfully, talking about things like strategy and risks,” she said. “Having that really clear picture produced confidence in people.”

POLICE VIOLENCE AT WORK

“This is a moment where we’re seeing the importance of the student-worker labor movement in advancing political causes,” said Joanna Lee, a department organizer at the Student Workers of Columbia, UAW Local 2710. “It hasn’t been part of the broad consciousness in the labor movement to think in these internationalist terms, but we’re seeing a shift right now.”

SWC represents 3,000 graduate and undergraduate academic workers at the university. The union voted to join the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition in November 2023 after two student organizations, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, were banned from Columbia’s campus.

Lee said that when Columbia called police, who violently attacked student activists—many of them union members—it helped show other union members why this was a workplace safety issue for the union.

SWC has since filed grievances and ULP charges due to police violence against its members. A Columbia Spectator report described the April 30 arrests, including a student who fell down the stairs after allegedly being pushed by police. An NYPD officer accidentally fired his gun while clearing the occupation of Hamilton Hall.

SWC members coordinated with Columbia unions representing post-docs and faculty while at this year’s Labor Notes Conference in Chicago, Lee said.

During the coordinated NYPD sweeps of camps at Columbia and City College of New York, 282 protestors were arrested. But new campus protest encampments have been springing up across the country. According to Students 4 Gaza, there have been student encampments at least 184 college campuses across the world. Some have won some or all of their demands, like the open bargaining sessions being held by hundreds of student protestors at San Francisco State University with their university president.

In the UAW, there has been action from both the rank-and-file and union leadership. UAW Region 9A held a “Stand Up for Gaza” solidarity rally on April 26, gathering faculty and students from NYU, Columbia, and The New School in support of protesting students. The rally ended with a march to the student encampment at NYU.

UAW Region 9A director Brandon Mancilla said in an interview with Jacobin: “This is a student issue, it’s an academic free-speech issue—but it’s also a labor issue, because our members have made it so and have exposed how much it affects the rights of everyone on campus, not just their own bargaining units.”

FIGHTING CONTRACT VIOLATIONS

Some union members have taken action by simply pointing to their union contracts. City bus drivers organized with TWU Local 100 refused to transport arrested protestors to jail at an April 23 Jewish Voice for Peace protest—a Passover “Seder in the Streets” outside of New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s home.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) had commandeered city buses to take the protestors to jail. Six TWU Local 100 members walked off the job instead, stating that the task was outside of their assigned routes and not part of their union contract.

The NYPD eventually found police officers with commercial drivers’ licenses to drive the buses, but arrestees reported dangerous conditions as the drivers sped, hit several curbs, and got lost, according to The Nation.

JUSTICE AT HOME AND ABROAD

“The systems that deprive workers here from better working conditions, from fair wages, and from equality, are the same systems that fund and prop up the Israeli occupation,” said Taher Dahleh, a rank-and-file member of Communications Workers Local 1109 in Brooklyn, and organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement. “The same repressive tools developed by Israel are bought and used by oppressive regimes to target organizers of all kinds, including labor.”

Through his union, Dahleh has been able to have difficult conversations with coworkers about the importance of fighting for justice in Palestine. Dahleh said one coworker who comes from a politically conservative background and was initially uncertain about what he was seeing on the news. “We have worked closely on work and union issues, and he trusts me as a coworker and fellow union member. This trust allowed me to share personal stories about things that family members and loved ones in Palestine experience.”

“I asked him, ‘Why is it that every single time we sit down to bargain with Verizon, we have to fight them for raises to keep pace with the cost of living….when this country clearly has the money to pay for our needs?’”

This coworker joined Dahleh and other CWA 1109 members at a Palestinian Youth Movement march. “This was my friend’s first ever protest, and he left saying that next time he’s going to bring his son and wife!” Dahleh said. “We have always been at our strongest when we fight for broad movements for justice and against oppression.”

_{Caitlyn Clark}_{is a Teamsters for a Democratic Union organizer and a Labor Notes writing fellow.}

Don’t Let Fabricated Outrage ‘Distract From Genocidal Violence in Gaza,’ Says Naomi Klein / by Julia Conley

_{^{Author and rights advocate Naomi Klein speaks to the media before an event on December 12, 2019 in Berlin, Germany | Photo: Carsten Koall/Getty Images}}

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

(This post has been updated with information about the House investigation into antisemitism on college campuses.)

“Keep sharing reports from Gaza,” said the author and activist. “Israel is freaking out at the implications, which is why the distraction machine is in overdrive.”

Author and rights advocate Naomi Klein warned late Wednesday that supporters of a permanent cease-fire in Gaza must stay focused on one thing—Israel’s mass killing of civilians in the blockaded enclave, a violation of international law—and resist efforts to distract the public from the issue at hand.

“The distraction machine is in overdrive,” said Klein on social media after more than a day of commentary and outrage directed at the presidents of three top universities after they testified before the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee at a hearing titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.”

Republican members including Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) demanded to know whether the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) would discipline students for “calling for the genocide of Jews.”

The university leaders suggested that their schools typically do not punish students for speech alone—in accordance with the U.S. Constitution, Penn president Liz Magill said in a video posted later—but said such calls could qualify as harassment if they were “directed and severe, [or] pervasive,” and could be punished if it “crosses into conduct.”

Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, said she had “not heard calling for the genocide of Jews on our campus.” Stefanik replied that “chants for intifada”—a call for an “uprising” which is not inherently violent—have been heard at the school.

Videos of students holding an anti-war protest at University of California, Los Angeles were widely circulated in October, with some influential pro-Zionist celebrities and commentators asserting that students were proclaiming, “We want Jewish genocide.” The protesters were actually addressing Israeli officials and saying, “We charge you with genocide.”

“Can someone point me to an example of a student group calling for the genocide of Jewish people?” asked Mari Cohen, associate editor of Jewish Currents. “Why are we having this conversation?

The hearing wasn’t the first to confront speech on college campuses since Israel began its U.S.-backed onslaught in Gaza, which has killed at least 17,177 Palestinians in just two months. Last month the House Judiciary Committee invited student leaders of conservative and pro-Zionist groups to testify about “hostility towards certain points of view” on campuses, and the hearing was interrupted by pro-Palestinian rights students who demanded to know whether their speech should also be protected.

Klein said Wednesday that the repeated hearings on the topic “are smoke and mirrors to distract from genocidal violence in Gaza.”

Klein suggested that it has not gone unnoticed by Israeli officials that journalists and residents in Gaza have continued to widely share information about the reality on the ground, where dozens of Palestinians were killed Thursday in Israeli air raids on a home in Gaza City. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) escalated attacks on the city of Khan Younis in the south—previously a relatively safe refuge for people who fled northern Gaza—with “multiple residential buildings and units… flattened,” according to Al Jazeera.

“The occupation is trying to destroy all residential buildings in the eastern areas of Khan Younis,” reported the outlet on Thursday.

Gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases as well as hepatitis have also begun spreading due to blockades on medical supplies, fuel, and safe drinking water, leading the World Health Organization to warn last month that disease could ultimately kill more civilians in Gaza than the bombs the U.S. has helped to provide for Israel.

“Congress should be working towards a lasting cease-fire to end Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza, a hostage exchange, and a path to equality, justice, and safety for all Palestinians and Israelis,” said the Jewish-led Palestinian rights group IfNotNow on Wednesday, responding to a House resolution that claimed anti-Zionism and antisemitism are one and the same. “Not wasting precious time using antisemitism as an excuse to shut down free speech.”

On Thursday afternoon, Stefanik announced that the committee was launching “an official congressional investigation with the full force of subpoena power” into the three universities and other schools regarding antisemitism on campus and administrators’ responses.

“This investigation will include substantial document requests, and the committee will not hesitate to utilize compulsory measures including subpoenas if a full response is not immediately forthcoming,” said committee Chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.). “Other universities should expect investigations as well, as their litany of similar failures has not gone unnoticed.”

The student newspaper of the University of Pennsylvania, The Daily Pennsylvanian, noted that the school’s rules governing hate speech state that the university can only discipline students if their “inflammatory speech intentionally and effectively provokes a crowd to immediately carry out violent and unlawful action.”

“Universities can invest their efforts and resources in educating their members and in creating spaces and contexts for productive dialogue, but they cannot legitimately punish members—students, staff, and faculty—who choose not to participate in those, or who profess bigoted and other hateful views,” the policy states.

_{Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.}

McCarthyite Laws Targeting Leftists Are Still on the Books Across the Country / by Liza Featherstone

_{^{Senator Joseph McCarthy (left) during the Army-McCarthy hearings, with Pvt. G. David Schine (center) and Roy Cohn (right), June 7, 1954, in Washington, DC. (Bettmann / Getty Images)}}

_{Originally published in Jacobin on June 20, 2023}

Communists were excluded from an Oklahoma Pride festival recently based on an old McCarthyite state law. The incident is a reminder of how easily the Red Scare’s mechanisms for state repression can be revived in 21st-century America.

It’s LGBTQ Pride parade season all over America, but not for communists in Oklahoma City. This year, the Communist Party of Oklahoma was denied a booth at the Oklahoma City Pride festival because of a 1955 McCarthyite law declaring Communist Party membership illegal in the state.

The incident was troubling for obvious reasons: Pride celebrations put inclusivity of marginalized people at their heart. Even more alarming, with anti-communism on the rise, and with Donald Trump and other far-right politicians constantly calling for repression and violence against socialists and communists, many other states also have such laws on the books. The Right is ready and willing to use them. This coercive legal infrastructure stems from the McCarthy era as well as earlier Red Scares, but today’s political climate makes it newly relevant.

Oklahoma’s law makes membership in the Communist Party illegal, as well as membership in any group that might “advocate, abet, advise, or teach . . . any activities intended to overthrow, destroy or alter . . . the government of the United States, or of the state of Oklahoma . . . by force or violence.” It declares that members of such groups don’t have any rights.

Indeed, under the 1955 law, any individual who “contributes to the support of” the Communist Party could be fined $20,000 and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Note the broad wording of “contributes to the support of”: What does that include? Party membership? Financial support of a Communist Party campaign? Retweeting the Communist Party’s Martin Luther King Day or Fourth of July greetings? Signing a petition for a racial justice campaign that the party’s members are organizing? The law’s language could justify undemocratic crackdowns on a wide range of action or expression.

Historically, laws like this were often connected to efforts to repress the civil rights movement as well as communism, since the links between the two (both real and, in the fevered imagination of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and white supremacist Southern politicians, imagined) were so intertwined. Breathlessly proclaiming that civil rights agitation was being carried out by Moscow puppets, some states tried to ban the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Alabama did so successfully in 1956. Arkansas’s governor denied state employment to NAACP members through 1959. In 1958, the US Supreme Court ruled that the NAACP had a right to exist and that such laws violated Americans’ rights to freedom of association.

Courts have declared laws against communism unconstitutional. President Dwight Eisenhower’s Communist Control Act of 1954, which criminalizes Communist Party membership (and even, like Oklahoma’s law, support of the party), was deemed unconstitutional by a federal district court in Arizona in 1973. Before that, the US Supreme Court ruled the same way on Washington State’s law forbidding members of the Communist Party to work in the public sector or even to vote. California’s 1950 law requiring public employees to sign loyalty oaths disavowing radical beliefs was ruled unconstitutional by a six-to-one vote of state Supreme Court judges in 1967.

Despite such rulings, anti-communist laws remain on the books throughout the country. The Communism Control Act has never been repealed, and similar laws still exist in many states including New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Alabama, California, Washington, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Tennessee, and Virginia. Despite the Supreme Court ruling against Washington’s law, a 2012 legislative effort to repeal it failed. Despite the 1967 Supreme Court ruling against it, California’s law, too, has remained on the books.

Fifty years after that court decision, in 2017, then Alameda, California, assemblyman Rob Bonta ended up apologizing for even trying to repeal the law. Bonta told the Sacramento Bee at the time that the bill caused “real distress and hurt for honorable people. For that I am sorry.”

The court rulings haven’t eradicated the ability of modern-day McCarthyites to use the state bureaucracy to harass dissenters. In 2008, under California’s unconstitutional law, a Quaker teacher was fired from California State University, East Bay, for attempting to amend her loyalty oath.

In 1967, a New York law banning communists from teaching in the public schools was declared mostly unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The New York Times cheered the end of “the last legal vestiges in New York State of the unedifying era of witch hunts, guilt by association and loyalty oaths for teachers and other public employees.”

Yet in 2017, a half century later, the city investigated Brooklyn school principal Jill Bloomberg for “communist activities” after she complained about segregation and racial inequalities in the school system. Her diverse school, Park Slope Collegiate, shared a building with a predominantly white high school, which she said was given far more resources for sports. She was also critical of the racist overpolicing of her students, especially the presence of police officers and metal detectors.

Bloomberg was officially cleared of the communism charges but is no longer working at Park Slope Collegiate. The investigation, cheered on by the right-wing New York Post, was clearly intended to intimidate a righteous critic of the public-school system.

Despite these and many other stains on the United States’ civil liberties record, the country also has civil liberties traditions that have helped the Left fight such laws. In addition to the court rulings declaring the McCarthyite laws unconstitutional, some Americans have fought them at the legislative level. In 2003, Arkansas repealed its 1951 law requiring members of the Communist Party to register with the state police or face fines or prison, on the grounds that it was of “dubious validity under the First Amendment.” New Hampshire still has a law banning schools from teaching either communism or socialism, but Democrats in the state have attempted to roll back restrictions on what teachers can teach about issues like race and gender.

The Oklahoma City Pride incident should serve as a reminder of the lasting damage McCarthyism and previous Red Scares have inflicted on our political culture. It’s also a warning to be vigilant against anti-communism in all its current forms; leftists who aren’t communists might think such laws don’t apply to them, but they can be broadly interpreted, especially in this climate, with Trump using the word “communist” nearly every day to refer to progressives or even Democrats. And just last month, Florida senator Rick Scott issued a “formal travel advisory for socialists visiting Florida,” stating that “any attempts to spread the oppression and poverty that Socialism always brings will be rebuffed by the people of Florida.” The situation calls for solidarity among all left and progressive groups. As the far right increasingly mobilizes against us, those of us who believe in basic free speech rights will have to push back.

_{Liza Featherstone is a columnist for Jacobin, a freelance journalist, and the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart.}