Sandwich cafe workers at Homegrown, a Seattle chain, struck over the heat indoors. In their first contract with UNITE HERE Local 8, they won something innovative: heat pay. After an hour above 82 degrees in the shop, they earn 150 percent wages for the rest of the shift; above 86 degrees, double wages or the right to leave work with no punishment. Photo: Maris Zivarts
If you’re dreading summer on the job this year, you’re not alone.
Every month last summer was the most scorching on world record. Trapped under heat domes, dozens of metro areas busted their longest streaks ever of highs over 100 degrees. Phoenix afternoons were over 110 for a month straight.
On asphalt yards nearly hot enough to melt, bonus-hungry managers forced workers to keep up the usual pace. The results were lethal.
In 2022, the latest year for which we have data, 43 U.S. workers lost their lives to heat on the job. That’s up from 36 in 2021, and we can expect this cruel number to keep climbing.
But from warehouses to coffeehouses to construction sites, workers using solidarity and creative action—even without the protection of a union contract—have won shop floor fights to keep their co-workers safe and cool.
WEEKLY CHATS
Nosebleeds and heat exhaustion had become eerily normal at the massive Amazon San Bernardino air hub, east of Los Angeles. Outdoor workers on the tarmac had it worst. But when even an indoor worker was taken away in an ambulance last year, that was the final straw.
“The on-site medical department tried to say he just had lingering effects of Covid,” said warehouse worker Anna Ortega. “The paramedics told him it was heatstroke. That really kicked us off. We didn’t want it to get any worse, because people can even die from heatstroke.”
Workers were starting an organizing drive as Inland Empire Amazon Workers United, with support from the Teamsters. Before the day of the ambulance, “we had already made our own kind of health and safety committee,” Ortega said. “We’d meet weekly or biweekly, after work, and talk about what’s going on at the facility, what our co-workers are experiencing and saying to us.”
They realized the bosses weren’t following their own safety rules, like allowing workers to take short breaks if they felt early symptoms of heatstroke. “A lot of times, management announces these changes just once, and doesn’t keep track of who they need to get the information to,” Ortega said.
After the indoor worker collapsed, the committee realized enough people were ready to act. “We handed out flyers to co-workers on breaks. We marched on the boss with over 20 people. It was after that they finally installed fans.”
But workers wanted more than fans—they wanted those safety breaks. They kept up the breakroom conversations and public flyering, and they put in a complaint to the state job safety board—which sent inspectors and eventually cited the company for unsafe heat exposure.
“We won breaks and cold drinks,” Ortega said. “Our annual training got updated to say if we’re feeling symptoms of heat, we have the right to take a five-minute break. That’s something we pushed forward. It showed that we really could win, that they could have done it from the beginning. They didn’t have to wait until something terrible happened.”
MANAGEMENT NEGLECT
Bosses ignoring their own safety rules is a problem across industries. In steamy Jacksonville, Florida, the Electrical Workers (IBEW) won contracts that require bosses on construction sites to supply cool water all day. But contractors often conveniently forget.
When managers brought no water to a job wiring a Navy hangar last summer, tempers boiled. “One journeyman told the foreman he wasn’t working until there was water—and did so publicly in front of the entire crew,” said an apprentice from the site, who requested not to be named. “The crew refused to work. [The foreman] immediately folded and left to go get some.”
Meanwhile at a Starbucks in Prosser, in eastern Washington, overheating became the spark for a union drive.
Managers claimed the AC had been fixed, but “we put a fridge thermostat out on the counter and it’s reading over 80 degrees,” said barista Anthony Warwick. “This was in March, not the height of summer. It was hotter inside than it was outside, because we have 500-degree ovens, water boilers going all the time, fridges giving out heat. It goes up exponentially.”
His Starbucks co-workers (called “partners” in company lingo) were hesitant to come out in open conflict with management, but last August “the heat of the moment” changed everything, Warwick said.
Soaring temperatures were combined with severe wildfire smoke, even inside their cafe: “We were all choking, wearing masks but still suffocating as we worked. I talked to other partners, and we decided we couldn’t work.”
A callous store manager struck the final blow. When she came in to respond to workers’ request to close at least half the shop, Warwick said, “her first thing was to call out one of our partners for wearing something off-code. That’s when partners started walking out.
“There was nothing she could do. It was very spur of the moment.”
Since they all walked out together, “nobody got a write-up,” Warwick said. “That got people realizing, we don’t have to suffer through unworkable conditions.”
The group won a union authorization election the following month—and the manager finally hauled in fans.
HEAT PAY
For the budding union at Homegrown, a Seattle chain of sandwich cafes and caterers, heat was the clear unifying issue
In organizing committee meetings, “we found out every single person working can feel the heat, in front or back of house,” said Kai Ortiz, who preps pastramis and runs the register up front. “People going back home after a long day in the heat, you’re totally exhausted. Nobody wants to live like this.”
So the workers started using creative tactics to make management sweat. “At my store, we did a march on our boss,” said Ortiz. “We did flyering [of customers outside the store] on our breaks—in front of our managers. Pretty badass. We did sidewalk chalking. We asked an industrial hygienist to come to check out our conditions, and they set up a medical station in front of the store to interview people.”
Homegrown sandwich cafe workers brought in an industrial hygienist, who set up a medical station in front of the store to interview people about the dangerous heat inside. Photo: Mike Rodriguez
Homegrown sandwich cafe workers brought in an industrial hygienist, who set up a medical station in front of the store to interview people about the dangerous heat inside. Photo: Mike Rodriguez
After Homegrown managers responded with “Gatorade, visors, cut fruit, and a few more breaks,” Ortiz recalled, “we said, ‘That’s not enough.’” After a near-unanimous strike vote, in August 2022 they shut down the stores with a series of one-day strikes over heat.
Getting to that unanimous vote took time. “Workers who were on the fence, we brought them in,” Ortiz said. “These were intense conversations, not the easiest. We’ve got high schoolers and college students working in front, then often immigrants, older folks, and people with undocumented status working in back.”
The committee had to build enough trust among these groups to take a big risk together. And while heat was a unifying issue for the store workers, it turned out the catering workers already had decent AC and fewer ovens in their production area.
Still, they joined the strike wave after adding a demand to end a pay gap between distribution and catering drivers with similar jobs—“equal pay for equal work.” “Our student workers came out of school to cheer them on,” Ortiz said.
In the strikes, the workers won their most ambitious demand: the discretion “to close the stores if we had to, to keep us safe—if it got too hot, or smoky from wildfires.”
That fall, Homegrown workers won union recognition with UNITE HERE Local 8. And after a long contract battle and a three-month strike to reinstate a fired co-worker, they finally won their first union contract this March.
The contract locks in an innovative idea: heat pay. After an hour above 82 degrees in the shop, they earn 150 percent wages for the rest of the shift; above 86 degrees, double wages or the right to leave work with no punishment.
The point is to make management “cave and give AC so they don’t have to give double pay,” Ortiz said. And if management doesn’t, “we won the right to picket, flyer [customers] even [while we’re] under contract—to take the fight to the public.”
Those might be the most important wins, since these battles aren’t going away. “The company can get AC, but heat waves are going to get hotter and hotter,” Ortiz said. “Wildfires are going to get worse. This is going to be a workplace issue forever.”
IOWA CITY, Iowa—On June 3 the workers of Bruegger’s Bagels in Iowa City and Coralville filed papers with the National Labor Relations Board to be represented by Bruegger’s Workers United.
This week, People’s World interviewed Juniper Hollis, a representative of the workers in the Iowa City location, to talk about what led them to organize a union.
The impulse to organize started when Hollis asked co-workers about what their wages were and whether they were happy with what they were getting paid. What she found was that pay varied from worker to worker, with some struggling to survive on an unlivable wage and others going years without a pay bump.
“Many told me after years working with the company they had never received a raise,” she said. After discovering the conversations she was having with co-workers, management responded with typical union-busting tactics.
Some of the signs carried by Bruegger’s Bagels picketers. | Michael Powers / People’s World
“They started sending someone to the stores not to do any work or assist the store management but simply to watch the workers and report back about unionizing efforts,” Hollis recalled.
She and others started posting flyers about union activities and hearings next to the work schedule. In an attempt to scare the workers, management claimed it wasn’t allowed. “Another tactic used by management was to talk privately to some employees behind their co-workers’ backs in an attempt to scare or lie about the ones leading the union effort.”
The bagel workers were already feeling unfairly treated by management even before the talks about a union started. Hollis recalled a time when management told a worker to return to the store immediately after receiving health treatment at the hospital emergency room.
And as for Hollis herself, Bruegger’s Bagels has rewarded her with termination for her effort in trying to organize co-workers into a union.
The full list of demands the workers plan to put forward is still forming, but Hollis says better wages, better treatment from management, a fairer division of work responsibilities, and the ability to earn PTO after three months rather than six are all on the agenda.
The workers also have a pending lawsuit against the company for their unfair labor practices. Hollis said the workers have “not yet considered going on strike, but they will continue with building community support via protests outside shop location and fight against the union-busting tactics being used by management.”
Community support shown far in their early stages has been from workers at the only unionized Starbucks in Iowa, located in the downtown area of Iowa City, as well as from local activists. “More community support will help” in the fight for recognition and to force management to listen to the workers’ demands, Hollis said.
SAN FRANCISCO—In what may be the biggest joint grievance complaint in years—as opposed to a monster class-action suit several years ago by Wal-Mart workers charging job discrimination—some 15,780 Amazon drivers jointly filed grievances against the retail/warehouse monster over pay.
“We have no idea,” yet, how much the drivers lost in total, their lead attorney, Steven Tindall, said. Tindall and a partner at the pro-worker Gibbs law firm in San Francisco spent years gathering the drivers’ complaints. The drivers are from California, Illinois, and Massachusetts, where state laws are more favorable to such cases. Approximately 7,000 are from Illinois, Tindall said in a phone interview.
In California, even gig economy workers—except Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash drivers—legally must be paid time and a half for any hours over eight per day, just like federal law. Amazon didn’t pay for its drivers’ overtime.
And the California Department of Labor has spent years reclassifying “independent contractors,” particularly port truckers in Los Angeles-Long Beach, as “employees,” covered by state and federal labor laws. Those laws include, especially, the right to unionize. The Teamsters have been in a long campaign to organize the port truckers.
Amazon hires the drivers under its “Flex” program and pays them a set amount daily no matter how far they drive or how many deliveries they make. As a result, “some of the drivers drove thousands of miles,” unpaid, Tindall said.
Instead, Amazon monitored the drivers’ “delivery blocks,” according to the four years of complaints Tindall and his partner collected. Those blocks cover mileage driven and packages delivered. The drivers’ grievances say the set amount Amazon pays doesn’t cover the work they do.
The grievances are all for that. Meanwhile, gasoline, insurance, tires, and wear and tear are all supposed to be covered by a basic payment of 60 cents per mile, the Internal Revenue Service rate. The only way a driver could get more is if the driver kept every single receipt and document. Few do.
And individual drivers often don’t sue because it’s too expensive for them to do so. Few attorneys take such individual cases because, even if they win for their workers, arbitrations can take so long that the attorneys wind up breaking even, at best.
The Amazon drivers can’t sue as a class because they all signed—as a condition of being hired—agreements mandating arbitrators decide any conflict between the driver and Amazon or between the driver and the subcontractor Amazon hires to contract with the driver, Tindall notes.
Tindall expects hearings on the mass grievances to start this year, but he has no idea when there will be a conclusion. One problem is that the American Arbitration Association, the largest such firm in the U.S., literally does not have enough arbitrators to handle all the Amazon grievances.
Tindall, a veteran union- and worker-side labor lawyer in the Bay Area, has one more conclusion from this mass grievance case: The drivers would be a lot better off if they could unionize.
“This one of those examples of what individual workers undergo if they’re not represented by a union,” he says.
Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.
Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, speaks at The Sanders Institute Gathering in Burlington, Vermont on Saturday, June 1, 2024 | Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute
“Why are working class people apathetic about politics? Because politics is completely dominated by corporations.”
If there is a chicken-or-the-egg question as it regards working class politics in the year 2024 and beyond, some of the boldest labor leaders in the United States have a very unified response: organized workers come first and then—and only then—can the progressive vision of a healthier democracy and more equal nation that meets the material needs of all its people finally come to pass.
“What we have to organize around,” says union leader Sara Nelson, “are the issues that really matter.”
President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA), Nelson argues that what constitutes those specific “issues that really matter” has not changed very much since Franklin Delano Roosevelt promoted his Economic Bill of Rights nearly 80 years ago: a living wage and dignity at work, decent and affordable housing, universal healthcare, quality education for all, retirement security, and a life with recreation and leisure not just toil and labor.
“Stop doing bullshit applause lines and do real work on workers’ rights.” —AFA president Sara Nelson
While the Republican Party remains the chief political obstacle to achieving those goals, says Nelson—currently at the bargaining table representing her members in contract negotiations with several major airlines carriers—the Democrats also have a long way to go. Meanwhile, the corporate interests that pump massive amounts of money into both major parties can only be challenged by a more cohesive and strategically-minded working class.
“Democrats in general,” she says, “need to get back to talking about that Economic Bill of Rights fundamentally across the board. And that is what is going to attract people to the party—not just talking about it, but fighting for it and having actual demands.”
In a series of discussions during and after The Sanders Institute Gathering that took place in Burlington, Vermont on the first weekend of June, Nelson explained how being “pro-labor,” regardless of party affiliation, “has to be more than just not killing labor every single day.”
“It has to be more than that,” she told Common Dreams during a lengthy interview, “and it has to be more than politicians going to a rally and saying the same tired applause lines that they’ve been saying for 80 years—things like: ‘We like labor because you gave us the 8-hour work day.'”
“I promise you, politician,” she continued, “that the vast majority of people in the audience listening to you no longer have an eight hour day. Same with the line about the how it was labor who delivered the weekend. I promise you, the vast majority of people in the audience do not have their weekends off anymore. ‘Oh, labor that gave us sick leave and vacations!’ Same thing again. Stop doing bullshit applause lines and do real work on workers’ rights.”
In Vermont, Nelson explained to attendees at the Sanders Institute event that “the labor movement”—especially in a nation that is 90 percent non-unionized—”is the entire working class, not just people who currently have a union card.”
Sara Nelson: Let's not divide ourselves further from a corporate class who has been trying to divide us since the beginning of time…the labor movement is the entire working class. It is not just people who currently have a union card. [applause] @FlyingWithSarapic.twitter.com/JiQPaYNF3T
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
Saru Jayaraman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and president of the advocacy group One Fair Wage, which she co-founded, explained to those at the Gathering how the approximately 13 million restaurant and food service workers her group represents are on the front lines of a largely non-unionized worker movement focused like a laser on improving the material conditions of individual, families, and the wider working class.
During her earlier organizing with the Restaurant Opportunity Center (ROC) in the decade after Sept. 11, 2001, Jayaraman said that workers wherever she went—”from California, to the Deep South, to the Midwest, and to the Northeast”—would all say the same thing: “It’s my wages, it’s my wages, it’s my wages.”
With a new book, titled “One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America,” and state-level ballot fights for wage increases this election season in Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, Jayaraman says the organizing of workers making less than $15 in real wages is vital within the nation’s “absolute largest” private employer sector, the restaurant and food service industry.
Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and president of One Fair Wage, speaking during the Gathering in Burlington, Vermont on Saturday, June 1, 2024. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and president of One Fair Wage, speaking during the Gathering in Burlington, Vermont on Saturday, June 1, 2024. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
After a show of hands from audience members in Burlington who had at one point worked in a restaurant, Jayaraman reminded them how “one in two Americans has worked in the industry at some point in their lives.”
“It is the largest private sector employer of women. It is the largest private sector of young people,” she said. “It’s the largest private sector employer of immigrants, formerly incarcerated individuals, people of color—pretty much everybody—but it is the absolute lowest-paying employer in the United States of America.”
With the lobbying power of the National Restaurant Association, founded in 1919—”we call it the other NRA,” Jayaraman noted—owners and investors in the food industry have generated massive profits for themselves by paying poverty wages and forcing tipped wages on their employees “for generations.”
What this “other NRA” has been able to achieve over the course of its existence, she said, is ensuring that millions of restaurant workers across the country are forbidden from earning more per hour than the $2.13 that such tipped worked currently receive.
.@SaruJayaraman: We are on the cusp of an incredibly historic moment and we decided it was time to go huge…We are going to raise 3.5 million workers wages because guess what, when minimum wage is on the ballot it never ever fails. Ever. pic.twitter.com/0TKWqmNmLK
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
In her book, Jayaraman writes, “Subminimum wages are subhuman. They are reflection of the value America has placed on the humanity of the people” who work in those sectors.
Those receiving this paltry hourly wage, still the law in 43 U.S. states, she said in Burlington, is “not some niche group. It’s where all of us worked, our kids work. It’s the largest employer in America, and it gets to pay $2 an hour because we’ve let it.”
And the current outrage among restaurant workers isn’t restricted to that. In context of the Covid-19 pandemic that shook the nation and the world in 2020, Jayaraman spoke with fury about the thousands of food industry workers who “died—no, the 12,000 workers who were murdered—because they were forced to go back to work before it was saved into an industry that the CDC named as the most dangerous place for adults to be during the pandemic.”
“They died because they were poor,” she roared. “For those that survived, 60% told us that tips went way down and the women, more than half of women told us harassment went way up. They said, I’m regularly asked, ‘Take off your mask so I can see how cute you are before I decide how much I want to tip you.'” Reports like that from workers, she said, are endless and continue to this day.
“The only way it’s going to work is that we are going to have this huge base, the ability to mobilize them, but it’s got to be a thousand flowers blooming.” —Saru Jayaraman, One Fair Wage
It’s for these reasons and more that tipped workers are fighting for the Raise the Wage Act, a bill which passed the U.S House in 2021 but failed in the U.S. Senate despite support from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other Democrats. After House Democrats lost their House majority in 2022, Sanders reintroduced the bill in the Senate last year, but it has no hope of passing until Republican opposition is vanquished.
Again, Jayaraman pointed to the restaurant industry lobby as the key villain in the workers fight.
“They’re the major opposition in every state,” she said. “They’re the major opposition at the federal level. And there can be no change at the federal level until we defeat the ‘other NRA’ and we are on our way.”
What she sees in her work among non-unionized restaurant workers fighting to destroy sub-minimum wages is that it’s workers that must lead.
“We are not trying to mobilize these hundreds of thousands of people in the same way,” Jayaraman told Common Dreams. “The only way it’s going to work is that we are going to have this huge base, the ability to mobilize them, but it’s got to be a thousand flowers blooming. That is how this moment of worker power has happened.”
It was workers on their own, she explained, who “started walking out of their restaurants and putting up signs saying: ‘We all left. The pay is too low.’ Nobody gave them a sign and trained them how to do that. There was a moment of power where they all collectively felt ‘I’m worth more’ and walked out.”
“There’s no humanity in capitalism, it’s only about extracting as much profit as possible from the entire machinery, which includes human beings.” —Sara Nelson
Like Jayaraman, Nelson spoke about the lessons she learned after seeing corporate bosses willing to sacrifice the safety, and even the lives, of workers at the altar of profit.
Speaking passionately about her career in the airline industry—including close colleagues killed on the hijacked planes used in the 9/11 attacks—Nelson describes the AFA as a union that centers the needs of its members, but also one that recognizes its role in the broader fight for economic equality and the common good.
In the years after 2001, she saw firsthand how the industry exploited the horrific tragedy of 9/11 to undermine worker power while protecting owners and investors through a bankruptcy process.
“For me, that was real people, those were my friends and it was my friends who died too,” she explained to Common Dreams. It was painful, she said, “coming to grips with the fact that there’s no sympathy, there’s no humanity in capitalism, it’s only about extracting as much profit as possible from the entire machinery, which includes human beings.”
While the union fought to protect their pensions during that time, executives were clamoring for unlimited compensation packages, Nelson recounted. It was during those battles, she said, “that I got a firsthand experience in the four D’s of union busting: divide, delay, distract, and demoralize. And I saw workers go through all of those very divisive tactics.”
“So the first question is, why aren’t we winning? And the answer is we don’t have a working class base.” —Les Leopold, Labor Institute
What Nelson, Jayaraman, and Leopold all argued in separate interviews with Common Dreams during and after the Gathering is that organized workers need to be at the center of fighting for their own economic wellbeing. A more unified and coordinated working class is also the key missing ingredient if the broader progressive agenda—from voting rights and democracy protection to the climate fight and economic battles over healthcare and housing—is ever to be won.
“There are all these organizations and we’re fighting all these good fights on all these issues,” Leopold said on the edge of the three-day event, referring to green groups, healthcare advocates, and organizers on a range of social justice issues gathered in Burlington. “So the first question is, why aren’t we winning? And the answer is we don’t have a working class base.”
Without workers in the fight in a deep and organized way, Leopold argued, progressives can’t win—”or can’t win substantially”—and that means new structures are needed to galvanize workers. In his book, Leopold identifies years of mass layoffs, driven in large part by stock buybacks and leveraged buyouts by private equity and other powerful investors, as evidence of the battering workers have taken from their corporate bosses and neoliberal capitalism.
The Labor Institute’s executive director Les Leopold addresses the audience in Burlington, as he called for a ban on compulsory mass layoffs for companies with federal government contracts. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
The Labor Institute’s executive director Les Leopold addresses the audience in Burlington, as he called for a ban on compulsory mass layoffs for companies with federal government contracts. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
“As Wall Street has routinized the financial strip-mining of productive enterprises,” Leopold writes in the book, “more than 30 million of us have experienced mass layoffs [over recent decades]. And even more have felt the pain and suffering as our family members lost jobs.”
Despite that, he says, the occurrence of mass layoffs has “become so commonplace, so normalized, so routinized, that for-profit and nonprofit executives alike do not hesitate to slash jobs whenever they feel it necessary.” But with a working class fractured and pummeled from the decades long corporate crusade against unionization, Leopold told Common Dreams in Burlington that he believes a fight against mass layoffs could be a way to help turn the tide.
“Why are working class people apathetic about politics?” asked Leopold. “Because politics is completely dominated by corporations and they’re totally alienated from that. We’ve got to fight the class war around politics. We have got to get working class control over politics.”
“The working class is going to save the working class. It’s never going to be a party.”
Nelson echoed that, saying the policies passed in Congress “are not going to be the policies we need until we extract money from our politics.”
Getting corporate money out of politics, can’t be won in Congress “because we don’t have the politicians in office that can vote it out because money is still controlling it,” Nelson said. “So the only way to get at it, the only way to change our politics is to have workers in a massive way organize their unions and take the money from capital so that they don’t have it to spend in our politics.”
In Leopold’s mind, a worker-centered politics and a “class war” framework is something “we can sell anywhere.” It can work with organized workers already with labor unions like Nelson’s AFA, the United Auto Workers (UAW), and other major trade unions. It can also be the linchpin for workers who are not yet organized within unions, like Jayaraman’s approach with One Fair Wage.
It can work for “Trump people” that have looked to the far-right because they saw Democrats year after year not fighting for their interests, he said, and it can work for “not Trump people,” who are simply looking for allies to stand with them in the demand for better wages, job security, healthcare, housing costs, and more.
(From left) Sanders Institute co-founder Jane O’Meara Sanders, AFA president Sara Nelson, the Labor Institute’s Les Leopold, and Saru Jayaraman of One Fair Wage pose for a picture together at the Gathering in Burlington, Vt. on Saturday, June 1, 2024. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
(From left) Sanders Institute co-founder Jane O’Meara Sanders, AFA president Sara Nelson, the Labor Institute’s Les Leopold, and Saru Jayaraman of One Fair Wage pose for a picture together at the Gathering in Burlington, Vt. on Saturday, June 1, 2024. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
Offering a concrete example for workers to rally around, Leopold proposed in Vermont—something he has written about extensively in recent months, including for Common Dreams—is the idea of putting a target on mass layoffs and stock buybacks by large employers to help galvanize working-class power.
What he’s calling for is a provision which would prohibit any company that receives a government contract from carrying out a compulsory mass layoff—defined as the termination of 50 jobs or more at one time.
“Think about how easy it is to add one sentence to a federal contract, which says: ‘If you take this contract, no compulsory layoffs, no stock buybacks,” Leopold told Common Dreams. Having calculated the amount of money flowing through such contracts for large corporations at about $700 billion, he admits it’s not clear exactly how many jobs that could save—but it would be a significant number.
“Well, $700 billion worth of no layoffs is a lot of no layoffs,” he said, but even more important is this: “It would be a fight.” And if the Democratic Party was willing to put such a proposal into its 2024 platform it would be a signal that the party was willing to go to bat for working people in ways it has not done in a very long time.
“If they fight for that plank, people will hear them,” said Leopold. “It would show there’s a fight going on in Democratic Party on behalf of the working class. Then labor can rally. Then progressive organizations can rally. But there has to be a fight.”
“You’re going to conduct a mass layoff or spend billions on stock buybacks while there’s layoffs, then you don’t get the federal contract. The federal government has a lot of power with the purse strings that they need to use.”
Last week, Leopold wrote an op-ed calling for President Joe Biden to intervene on behalf John Deere workers facing mass layoffs by the owners of the iconic tractor company. “Come on Joe, go to bat for these workers,” Leopold wrote. “Put the heat on John Deere and show the working class that you’re tougher than Trump when it comes to saving American jobs.”
And Nelson agrees that the onus is on the Democrats to be much bolder than they have been.
“The Democratic Party has to put working peoples central to its platform and put in its platform things like Les Leopold’s idea on mass layoffs,” she told Common Dreams.
“It’s a very simple idea,” Nelson continued, but it’s exactly on the right track. “You’re going to conduct a mass layoff or spend billions on stock buybacks while there’s layoffs, then you don’t get the federal contract. The federal government has a lot of power with the purse strings that they need to use.”
Despite the hopes for big labor’s abilities to get something dramatic accomplished in the coming months and years, both in their own contract fights and building up their own unions, Leopold said they also need to use their size and resources to help build “an organization for unorganized workers.”
Leopold happens to think the mass layoffs could be a vehicle for that, though he admits it’s not been tested and would need a much larger buy-in as a strategy before it could be proven effective. Jayaraman noted in her discussion with Common Dreams that low wages is a more likely issue for the broader working class to organize around.
“If we’re waiting for the law to change, we’re just going to keep waiting until we’re completely extinct.”
Nelson recognized the value of a number of approaches, and said unions and the unorganized workforce must go much further than they’ve gone since Reagan busted the PATCO strike in 1981.
“We have to organize like never before,” she said, noting how large established unions like the UAW have been putting resources and energy into helping non-unionized works in the south, including Tennessee and Alabama, win recognition. “That’s important,” Nelson explained, “but it’s also not enough if we’re really going to do the kind of organizing that can truly put a check on capital and change the political environment.”
When it comes to the Pro Act, or Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would enhance workers rights and that Democrats tried but failed to pass during the first half of Biden’s term, Nelson said it is very much “a chicken and egg situation.” The legislation, she said, “is not going to come before we organize more workers” in order to tilt the political scales that would make passage possible.
“So if we’re waiting for the law to change,” she warned, “we’re just going to keep waiting until we’re completely extinct.”
Referencing an effort by United Auto Worker’s president Shawn Fain to align as many contract fights as possible around May 1, 2028 in an effort to further create broader worker solidarity and increase pressure across various trade and service union sectors and industries, Nelson expressed hope for Leopold’s mass layoff idea and what Fain has proposed.
Both show, she said, “the working class that there is a way to be strategic” and can wake people up to “the power we have in standing together,” whether it be on wages, firings, union card campaigns, or contract fights.
And it may not take as long as May of 2028, Nelson added. “The moment may come to us before then, but talking about and really defining the problems—which we’re doing over and over again—is key, showing that these are not isolated issues,” she said. “The issue with housing, the issue with gun violence, the issue with healthcare, the issue with education and debt—these are not isolated issues. The issue is pure and simple corporate greed, and that’s what we have to organize against.”
“The issue with housing, the issue with gun violence, the issue with healthcare, the issue with education and debt—these are not isolated issues. The issue is pure and simple corporate greed, and that’s what we have to organize against.”
“Solidarity is our power,” Nelson explained during her interview with Common Dreams. “And so the strike is not itself the most powerful weapon here. It is the consciousness of worker power and the threat of the strike that is going to make change in our economy and in people’s lives.”
In a podcast interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders earlier this week, Fain of the UAW spoke along similar lines.
“We have to harness that power” of working class power led by organized labor, Fain said to Sanders.
“Union or not, we have to bring workers together all over, not just in America, but all over the globe,” Fain continued. “We want to see working class people all over this globe come together. The only way we’re going to beat the corporate global fight is by standing together globally and fighting for better standards for everyone and standard wages for everyone. So we lift everyone up everywhere. And to a lot of people, that seems like a pipe dream. I don’t believe it is.”
It was during the panel discussion in Burlington that Nelson looked out at the audience where Sen. Sanders—”our organizer-in-chief,” she called him—was seated and thanked him for the leadership he showed in both 2016 and 2020 while seeking the Democratic nomination for president.
“We want to see working class people all over this globe come together.” —UAW president Shawn Fain
“One of the reasons that unions are one of the most popular ideas in this country is because Bernie Sanders went around this country telling people that the trade union movement is the only way for us to lift up the standards for the working class,” Nelson said. “It is the only way to get back to the issues that we were talking about a hundred years ago and pushing forward on them. It is the only way to build the power that we need to change our politics. It is the only way to give working people agency to feel the democracy is something that they own, not what the capital class does.”
While speaking of Trump—who “lives the very antithesis of what it means to be union”—and his Republican Party with outright contempt as enemies of working people everywhere, Nelson was clear that nobody should think the Democratic Party is riding courageously to the rescue of the tens of millions of workers who toil and sweat to provide themselves and their families a decent life.
“The working class is going to save the working class,” she said. “It’s never going to be a party. We are going to bring politics to us if we do our jobs right. It doesn’t happen the other way around.”
Inspiration for decarbonising industry and creating green jobs is within the hands of those already facing precarity in today’s economically unstable times. A resilient history of workers’ initiatives overcoming redundancies, alongside recent activist, trade-union, and workforce collaborations, provides concrete examples for empowered transitioning.
In 2023, when Europe was blasted by a record-breaking heatwave named after Cerberus (the three-headed hound of Hades), workers organised to demand protection from the extreme heat. In Athens, employees at the Acropolis and other historical sites went on strike for four hours each day. In Rome, refuse collectors threatened to strike if they were forced to work during periods of peak heat. Elsewhere in Italy, public transport workers demanded air-conditioned vehicles, and workers at a battery plant in Abruzzo issued a strike threat in protest at the imposition of working in “asphyxiating heat”.
One could almost say that the Ancient Greeks foretold today’s climate crisis when they euphemistically referred to Hades, god of the dead, as “Plouton” (giver of wealth). The reference is to the materials – in their day, silver, in ours, fossil fuels and critical minerals – that, after extraction from the Underworld, line the pockets of plutocrats. Modern society’s plutocratic structure explains the astonishingly sluggish response to climate breakdown. The much-touted green transition is barely taking place, at least if the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases is taken as a yardstick. These continue to rise, even accelerate, and likewise the rate of global heating. The transition remains in the grip of powerful and wealthy institutions that – even if we leave aside motivations of avarice or greed for status – are systemically constrained to put the accumulation of capital above the habitability of the planet.
Against this backdrop, the politics of transition is class struggle beyond that of workers defending themselves and their communities against weather emergencies. That is part of the picture, of course. But class struggle is, above all, evident in the liberal establishment seeking to displace transition costs onto the masses, even as it presides over ever crasser wealth polarisation. From this, resistance inevitably flows. The question is, what form will it take?
Some takes the form of an anti-environmental backlash, instigated or colonised by conservative and far-right forces. While posing as allies of “working families”, they denigrate the most fundamental of workers’ needs: for a habitable planet. Some takes a progressive form, the classic case being the gilets jaunes in France. When Emmanuel Macron’s government hiked “green taxes” on fossil fuels as a signal for consumers to buy more fuel-efficient cars, the rural working poor and lower-middle classes, unable to afford the switch, donned yellow safety vests and rose in revolt. Although France’s labour-movement radicals joined the cause, they were unable to cohere into a political force capable of offering alternative solutions to the social and environmental crises.
Across the world, climate hazards become embedded within labour struggles, forming a new basis of mobilisation.
Surveying forms of climate-class struggle, movements, and events provides a glimpse into how the green transition might be redirected along social, worker-led lines. “Class struggle” is used in broad terms here to include questions of ecology alongside social reproduction, sexuality, identity, racism, and the like – all of which concern quality of life and are of as much interest to “labour” as are pay and conditions. Only from the vantage point of capital, or on a narrowly-drawn negotiating table, do workers’ needs appear reducible to ledgers of hours and pennies. Tony Mazzocchi, the US labour leader who coined the term “just transition”, provides a valuable counterpoint. As an activist, Mazzocchi was critical of the post-war social contract whereby union leaders surrendered input into decisions on the production process in exchange for improved wages. His red-green radicalism grew from the insistence that the health and wellbeing of workers requires transformation across the full spectrum of workplace and social life.
Workers’ resistance
Climate breakdown is increasingly making its mark on all forms of class struggle. Across the world, climate hazards become embedded within labour struggles, forming a new basis of mobilisation, and on union safety committee agendas, emergency preparedness has been climbing the priority ladder. Freya Newman and Elizabeth Humphrys’ research on construction workers in Sydney explores how workers understand heat stress as a class issue. “Our bosses never come out of their air-conditioned offices on stinking hot days,” grumbled one interviewee, even as they “make us work in horrible places with crazy high temperatures.” In regions where class consciousness is greater and unions had retained relative strength despite a general weakening trend during the neoliberal era, the researchers found that pressure from workers had secured the greatest improvements in climate-related health and safety conditions.
Protests demanding better protection against weather hazards, such as those in Athens, Rome, and Abruzzo, represent the close association of labour struggles with climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Another response is resistance against “indirect” effects. The scope here is vast and includes the 2010- 12 revolutionary risings across the Middle East and North Africa, where meteorological volatility caused soaring food prices, and, more recently, the farmers’ protests in India. It includes, too, industrial action in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic (if, as appears likely, SARS-CoV-2 entered human society as a result of environmental degradation).
Climate-related class struggle is not restricted to organising against the immediate effects of climate breakdown. As New York socialist Alyssa Battistoni states, it is present “in the rhythms of daily life”, in “nursing homes and schools, on the bus, and in the street”, affecting those in “pink-collar” jobs: teachers, care workers, and other service workers. For society to rapidly dial down emissions whilst adapting to the effects of climate chaos, social solidarity and egalitarianism will be indispensable, pivoting on the self-organisation of workers across the range of “collars”: not just pink but also blue and white, as well as black and green.
Decarbonising jobs
When we look for signs of a transition, the spotlight shines on sectors shifting work from blackto green-collar jobs: notably the automotive industry. For the transition to be experienced as even minimally just, jobs must be secure and satisfying. Yet corporations at the forefront of the decarbonisation programme – most notably Tesla – show scant regard for workers’ rights. In 2023, industrial action at the Tesla plant in Gränna, Sweden, accompanied by solidarity action across Scandinavia, pushed back against the Musk company’s anti-union stance and associated low pay and workplace injuries.
The transition, such as it is, is being driven by state policies. And, wherever green jobs are at stake, political demands will follow. Recall, for example, the protest at the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight in 2009. In response to its advertised closure, workers occupied the facility’s administrative buildings. Their action was primarily a challenge to planned redundancies, but this took on wider meaning within the context of wind power’s role in the energy transition. The occupiers pointed out that a closure of the plant would contravene the British government’s decarbonisation commitments. Saving jobs, they argued, was synonymous with saving the planet.
Many recent examples carry the same lesson. The alliance in Germany between ver.di, one of Europe’s largest trade unions in the public transport sector, and the climate protest movement Fridays for Future (FFF) is one such instance. Under the slogan #WirFahrenZusammen (we’re travelling together), ver.di took industrial action to demand better working conditions and FFF organised demonstrations in over 100 cities, collectively pressing the political case that any successful transition will need a colossal investment in public transport.
“Red” redundancies going “green”
Given that electric vehicles (EVs), renewables, and public transport are indeed critical to the green transition, where does that leave workers in the most polluting sectors? Some of the most inspirational transition stories come from the automobile and arms sectors. In the early 1970s, working-class militants and unions around the world were taking up environmental concerns: the “red” and the “green” were finding a common tongue. In the USA, for example, the United Automobile Workers union leader Walter Reuther, who was not a radical by any means, declared that “the environmental crisis has reached such catastrophic proportions that the labour movement is now obligated to raise this question at the bargaining table in any industry that is in a measurable way contributing to man’s deteriorating living environment.”
In Britain, the workers at Lucas Aerospace, a British arms manufacturer, did precisely that. Citing automation and falling government orders, the company’s management was laying off staff. In response, workers set up an unofficial union body, known as the Combine, representing employees from across the company’s 17 factories. Their central objective was to staunch job haemorrhaging by pushing the Labour government to invest in equipment for life rather than death. In 1974 they drew up a 1200-page document that detailed ideas for redeploying their skills and equipment towards socially-useful production, including kidney dialysis machines but also wind turbines, solar panels, hybrid vehicle engines, and lightweight trains – decarbonisation technologies that were virtually unknown at the time. The plan was beaten away by the Labour government of the day and the company’s management, who dismissed its authors as the “brown bread and sandals brigade”. However, the Combine story remains influential.
More recent threats of fossil-fuel-sector redundancies have also prompted action. A group of workers from Maflow made headlines in 2018, for example, when they occupied the premises of the company’s automotive components plant in Milan, Italy, and set up a cooperative, which they called RiMaflow, after owners began to relocate equipment to Poland. The workers developed a variety of “circular economy” projects, including the repair of electronic equipment and bicycles, as well as recycling wallpaper – all the while defending the occupied space against intrusion from police and courts.
In 2021-22, a flurry of such occupations occurred against the backdrop of a turn to state intervention in pandemic-afflicted economies. In Munich, at a Bosch engine components plant, workers were confronted with the threat of layoffs. Management blamed the decision on the shift to EVs, although in fact production was to be transferred to countries with lower wages. FFF activists teamed up with the union IG Metall (IGM) to resist the redundancies. Together, IGM and FFF pressed for a plant-level green transition, backed by state investment. The demand, published as a petition, was signed by a large majority of the workforce.
Following its purchase by Melrose Industries, a multinational asset-stripper, in 2021, GKN, another key player in the automotive industry, announced the closure of plants manufacturing components for automobile drivelines in Florence and Birmingham. Over 500 workers from the British factory responded with a vote for strike action. They demanded that the plant switch to producing components for EVs. In the words of the Unite union convenor Frank Duffy: “We realised that if we want to see a green future for the UK car industry and save our skilled jobs, we couldn’t leave it to our bosses and had to take matters into our own hands.” In conscious echo of the Lucas Plan, he added, “we put together a 90-page alternative plan detailing how we could reorganise production” to secure jobs and expedite the transition to electromotive transport.
At the sister plant at Campi Bisenzio in Italy, transition-from-below went further. Having previously organised themselves into a democratic factory council (collettivo di fabbrica), workers were already in a strong position. They occupied the factory, and security guards, who had been ordered in, were sent packing. Together with climate justice activists and academics, the workers drew up a conversion plan for sustainable public transport and pressed for its adoption.
In a sustained series of mobilisations, tens of thousands repeatedly went out onto the streets with the backing of trade unions and local communities, as well as environmental groups such as Extinction Rebellion (XR) and FFF. Now in its third year, the Campi Bisenzio occupation is Italy’s longest ever. Having failed to force Melrose to reverse the plant closure, the workers shifted tack to form a cooperative that now produces cargo bikes, maintaining a segment of the original workforce in secure employment, providing a glimpse of how worker-led decarbonisation programmes might begin.
Aeronautic transitioning
In these automotive industry examples, the path of transition appears straightforward, at least in material terms. A plant producing, say, components for cars with internal combustion engines (ICE) can be converted to one producing EVs, public transport, or bicycles. What, though, of such industries as aviation, for which no viable alternative technologies exist? As the scale of the environmental crisis grows more daunting, even moderate voices, such as the Cambridge “FIRES” group of engineers, recognise that aviation will have to be cut to virtually zero over the next two to three decades. How should workers in these industries respond?
The class struggles that unfold this century will define Earth’s habitability for millennia to come.
In Britain, at the height of the Covid-19 crisis, some small but brave proposals emerged. The Green New Deal for Leeds, for example, presented an alternative to the expansion plans for Leeds Bradford Airport. And workers at London Gatwick, Britain’s second-busiest airport, developed an important Green New Deal for Gatwick (GND). The initiative, convened by eco-socialists and union officials from the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), took shape early in the pandemic when aviation workers were threatened with redundancies. I asked Robert Magowan, one of the proposal’s instigators, what lay behind the deal: “We know that aviation must degrow,” he replied, “and it was degrowing during the pandemic, but this must not come at the cost of workers. The pandemic response showed what governments can do when pressure is on – especially when the Broughton manufacturing site of Airbus was retooled to produce ventilators. That gave us inspiration, much as Lucas Aerospace had done decades before.”
Magowan and the GND team mapped out the many ways in which the various categories of Gatwick workers’ skills sets could be adapted to jobs elsewhere in decarbonising industries. With PCS backing, they found support among the workforce, including a pilot whose words eloquently sum up what is at stake:
It has been my lifelong dream to fly. To face up to losing this massive part of our lives is incredibly scary; to lose our job is like losing a part of ourselves. But as pilots, we use our skills to identify this existential threat to the natural world and our lives. If this was an emergency in flight, we would have diverted to a safe destination long ago. We can’t just fly blindly to the planned destination as the flight deck fills with smoke. Our industry’s impact on global emissions is irrefutable. The so-called solutions to ‘green’ the industry at its current scale are decades away and are not globally or ecologically just. With environmental consciousness rising, the aviation sector will either shrink by design, through a ‘Just Transition’ for workers, or by disaster. We must find a way to put workers at the forefront of the green revolution, to ensure we have the option to be retrained into the green jobs of the future.
In its first incarnation, the green revolution at Gatwick failed to take off. Yet it provided a sense of possibility. During the “emergency” phase of the pandemic, when government intervention was the order of the day, the Gatwick GND connected to other workers’ initiatives such as the call by ver.di to replace short-haul aviation with ground-transport alternatives, opening up the horizons of a radical worker-led transition and reminding us of what is at stake.
Class-struggle environmentalism
The class struggles that unfold this century will define Earth’s habitability for millennia to come. We can find inspiration in struggles that unite climate activists and labour unions. We find it, too, in school strikes over climate change, which have introduced a new generation to the concept of strike action.
Yet we should also heed the fact that standout examples of red-green militancy happened half a century ago. This is no accident. The 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a worldwide revolutionary conjuncture, with surging labour militancy and social movements challenging oppression, injustice, and war. This was the soil in which the alliance of environmentalism and labour radicalism could grow, exemplified in the Lucas plan and Mazzocchi’s ecosocialist activism, as well as other pathbreaking initiatives such as green bans, where environmental goals were fought for through strike action.
In any renewed wave of class struggle, we can expect questions of climate breakdown and just transition to move centre stage in multiple forms. These will include reactionary backlashes but also progressive movements, as groups of workers move beyond seeing climate politics as the playground of distant elites to a field in which their collective action can be decisive.
Gareth Dale teaches politics at Brunel University. He has written books on Karl Polanyi, the German Democratic Republic, and Eastern Europe, and has edited volumes on migration, green growth, and revolutionary uprisings in the neoliberal era. His essays have appeared in The Conversation, The Ecologist, Truthout, Jacobin, Viewpoint, openDemocracy, and Spectre.
FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va.—Over 27,000 Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) workers won union elections for both of their bargaining units on Monday under the Fairfax Education Unions (FEU).
Around 14,000 teachers and 13,000 support staff will now be represented by an alliance of the Fairfax County locals of the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). This win increases union density in Virginia by at least 15%, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The election victories were for the two bargaining units within the FEU: the Licensed Instructional Unit, covering all workers requiring a license, such as teachers, counselors, social workers, psychologists, librarians, and speech language pathologists; and the Operational Unit for workers such as various kinds of assistants, cafeteria workers, custodians, transportation workers, and front office staff.
Anyone with hiring or firing power are not in these bargaining units and will seek their own representation.
String of recent wins
The wins are part of a flurry of union organizing activity in the Commonwealth lately, particularly in Northern Virginia with the Northern Virginia Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, headed by Ginny Diamond. Around 15,000 public and private workers have been organized in Virginia over the past five years, not including yesterday’s election.
In the public sector, the Teamsters organized county service workers; SEIU has done likewise in Fairfax and Loudon counties; at schools and college campuses, AFT, NEA, AAUP, and CWA have all had successes. Fire departments in a number of cities, including most recently in Richmond, have concluded collective bargaining agreements under the IAFF.
As for the private sector workforce, Unite Here organized 1,500 college food service workers; Workers United has organized 30 units (mostly Starbucks stores); the Operating Engineers have brought in 19 more units; SEIU organized airport workers at Dulles and Reagan; IBEW unionized 1,000 new workers; and the NewsGuild organized journalists at Politico. These are just a few of the several unions that have been growing and organizing.
Bring back the unions
Fairfax County Public Schools is the ninth-largest school district in the country, and Fairfax County is one of the richest counties in the country. While the Virginia General Assembly and governorship change hands between Democrats and Republicans regularly, the unique combination of a Democratic majority win in the statehouse in 2019 and a lame duck Democrat governor and pressure from local labor federations across the Commonwealth led a law which had banned collective bargaining by public sector employees to be repealed in 2021.
This also gave local governments the option of granting the right to collective bargaining to their employees. It took another two years of pressure from organized labor on the Democratic-supermajority FCPS School Board to finally extract collective bargaining rights for education workers in 2023.
These dual wins will mark the first time FCPS has had a union contract since 1977. Almost 50 years ago, organized labor in Virginia was attempting to repeal right-to-work, but workers and their allies fell just short of being able to do so.
In retaliation, segregationist Democrats (Dixiecrats) and Republicans chose to punish the unions for daring to challenge employer power. Since Virginia was already a right-to-work state, the only thing the right wing could do to make things more hostile to unions was to make it illegal for any government within the Commonwealth to recognize a union or have a contract.
In the interim, while collective bargaining was banned, some education workers did join the NEA or AFT, but the repressive legal atmosphere forced the unions to operate more along the lines of a solidarity union. Workers still had to rely on internal employer HR frameworks and court systems for any kind of labor disputes.
Over the rest of the 1970s and ’80s, most of the Dixiecrats completed their defections over to the Republicans, and the Democrats reconstituted themselves primarily in areas with larger numbers of people who were college-educated, Black, immigrants, in the military, from out-of-state, or some combination thereof.
These areas generally had the fastest economic expansion and the largest number of unionized workers, which also formed the Democratic voter base in places like Northern Virginia, Richmond, Tidewater, and Charlottesville.
Labor looking for allies
While the new Democrats who came in weren’t the Dixiecrats of old, they weren’t necessarily always the best on labor either. Despite having a solid Democratic majority and the governorship, it still took four years for FCPS workers to get their union: two years to repeal the collective bargaining ban and another two to ultimately to actually have the right to unionize be explicitly granted. This was all from Democrats who claimed to always support collective bargaining.
Many unions are on the hunt for stronger political support; extreme-right Republicans are openly hostile to organized labor, while many neoliberal Democrats at the state level say they back labor but don’t show much initiative without pressure from below. Given this political situation and the fact that three-quarters of recent union gains are in the public sector, labor could be one or two bad elections from having the right that made the Fairfax County victories possible stripped away once again.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
TN Long is a software developer and is active with the Communist Party in Northern Virginiav
There were many young workers at the CPUSA Convention and they discussed, among many other things, latest developments in the labor movement. | Taylor Dorrell/PW
CHICAGO—The “resurgence of militant, class struggle unionism,” led by movements which installed new leaders in both the Teamsters and the Auto Workers, “is catalyzing reform” within organized labor, the CPUSA says.
And that in turn “indicates a major shift in the balance of forces between the working class and monopoly capital,” says the labor resolution the party’s convention in Chicago adopted on June 8.
Nevertheless, with union density at only 6% in the private sector, 33% in the public sector, and just over 10% overall, many people are suffering under capitalist domination.
“The pressure you may be feeling is the boot of capitalism pressing down on your chest,” Kooper Caraway, formerly of South Dakota and now from Connecticut, said during a panel discussion on the measure. The party’s goal “is to take that boot off the neck of the working class and put our foot on the neck of the capitalist class.”
Panelists and speakers from the floor described various ongoing labor struggles—the Auto Workers against the Detroit 3 and at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tenn.—and at places such as Starbucks and Amazon. Struggles among nurses and among low-paid workers were also described.
Many of the coming struggles, participants at the convention noted, will be in professions like health care, fast food, warehousing, and other super-exploitative occupations. But not all: An African-American woman from Houston described how the Republican Party has used school takeovers there and elsewhere to both harm students of color and hamstring unions.
New, younger workers involved
And many struggles, participants noted, will involve new, younger workers, a majority of them women, who have known much about corporate exploitation and oppression and are fed up with it and are unwilling to take it anymore. So they’re voting against bosses in two ways: Organizing into unions, or taking a hike from low-paying and often dead-end jobs.
Another way to grow the labor movement requires navigating U.S. labor law. Organizing has been restricted ever since congressional Republicans emasculated the original 1935 National Labor Relations Act by turning it into an obstacle course for workers at the NLRB and through the courts via the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act.
The Protect The Right To Organize (PRO) Act, labor’s #1 legislative priority, would remove almost all obstacles Congress and courts have erected to benefit the corporate class. That class has also funded Republican opposition in the Senate which stopped the PRO Act in its tracks.
Those groups include farm workers, who were excluded on racial grounds—then as now most were Spanish-speaking—in 1935, and domestic workers, who were mostly Black women and excluded from the law for the same racist reason, to appease Southern segregationist senators.
“On farms, we’ve got young children breaking their backs working in the fields” starting at sunrise, Caraway said. “Then they go to school, then back to the fields” with only a few hours to spare to do their homework. “We have the moral obligation to go where people are hurting.
“Why should we follow laws that exploit our people and protect the capitalist state?”
Education and pressure can pay off. A participant from Atlanta said pressure—including strikes—by Waffle House workers in the Carolinas and Georgia, members of the Union of Southern Service Workers, an SEIU affiliate, forced company concessions.
“They told us we couldn’t beat a corporation like Waffle House,” an Atlanta Waffle House worker said on June 8. “They told us we couldn’t organize in the South, with its history of exploiting Black and brown workers. They were wrong: When we come together, united, taking collective action, we can shift the balance of power.”
They got $3 an-hour raises, increases in their base tipped wages and seniority raises. But they’ll keep fighting for the whole package, Erica promised the Chicago convention.
White-collar workers can be oppressed, too. A Houston teacher told delegates that 93 of the 107 school districts which the Lone Star State’s schools chief has taken over—including the Houston Independent School District—have majorities of “low-income students who are Black or brown.”
That’s no coincidence. The takeover law is a favorite of white right-wing Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and the white Republican majority in the heavily gerrymandered legislature of the nation’s second most populous state.
“Most of those districts fail because the community doesn’t have a voice” in running them, Mary said. Similar Republican takeovers occurred in Philadelphia—though a later Democratic governor revoked it–and New Orleans. There the entire city school system has been privatized via so-called charter schools.
While panelists didn’t mention it, the conversion to charters literally destroyed the Teachers’ (AFT) New Orleans local, the largest in the South. It sued to overturn the privatization and get teachers’ jobs back, but lost in federal courts, all during the Republican George W. Bush administration.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
Press Associates Inc. (PAI), is a union news service in Washington D.C. Mark Gruenberg is the editor.
A General Motors factory assembly line in Gliwice, Poland, 2015. (Marek Ślusarczyk / Wikimedia Commons)
Almost 50 years ago, metalworker and economist Harry Braverman published Labor and Monopoly Capitalism. It showed how bosses use technology to disempower workers — but that by taking control of the labor process, workers can free themselves from drudgery.
Only yesterday, artificial intelligence was still the stuff of science fiction; now, it casts a portentous shadow over the future of work. Depending upon which breathless commentator one believes, AI promises to relieve us of the tedious aspects of our work — or threatens to deprive us of our jobs entirely. Seeking historical perspective, I reached for the classic account of the evolution of the labor process under capitalism, Harry Braverman’s 1974 Labor and Monopoly Capital.
Braverman’s book ranges further, and sees more deeply, than its blunt subtitle, “The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century,” might suggest. Like his acknowledged model, Marx’s description of the transformation of the production process in Capital, Braverman provides a meticulous investigation of the restless making and remaking of the organization of labor under capitalism. But he never loses sight of the impact of these serial upheavals on the working class.
Braverman rejected simplistic interpretations of Marx as a technological determinist. Rather, he points out that a new invention always presents an array of possibilities. In the near term, the dominant social relations shape which of these possibilities are cultivated and which actively foreclosed. Capitalist relations of production exhibit an “incessant drive to enlarge and perfect machinery on the one hand, and to diminish the worker on the other.” This dynamic reflects capitalism’s larger tendency to separate conception from execution — the work of the brain and the work of the hand. The result is a small stratum of highly trained (and handsomely paid) professionals on the one side and a swelling mass of proletarianized laborers condemned to mindless tasks on the other.
Braverman brought a singular perspective to his investigation. He had apprenticed as a coppersmith and subsequently found employment in the steel industry, earning his living as a craftsman for fourteen years before cofounding a newspaper, the American Socialist. (He spent the remainder of his career in publishing, directing the storied independent socialist imprint the Monthly Review Press until his death in 1976.) Despite the rapid decline of the coppersmithing trade in which he was trained, Braverman bristled at the inference that his criticisms reflected nostalgia for an antiquated past: “Rather, my views about work are governed by nostalgia for an age that has not yet come into being.” Braverman’s background in the trades, as well as his decades-long involvement in socialist activism, made him uniquely equipped to take the baton from Marx and extend Capital’s analysis of the labor process into the twentieth century.
The pivotal figure in Labor and Monopoly Capitalism’s narrative is Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), the eccentric founder of the scientific management movement. From his childhood, Taylor showed signs of extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder, counting his steps and seeking ever-more efficient ways to perform the most mundane activities. “These traits fitted him perfectly for his role as the prophet of modern capitalist management,” Braverman deadpans, “since that which is neurotic in the individual is, in capitalism, normal and socially desirable for the functioning of society.”
So long as workers directed the labor process, Taylor maintained, they would never perform “a fair day’s work” — which he defined, naturally, as the maximum amount that they could perform without injury. Therefore, capitalists must not rest content with owning the means of production and the commodities labor produced: they needed to control the labor process itself. Taylor tends to be remembered for squeezing greater productivity out of workers by prescribing their every movement in accordance with the dictates of his “science.” But, Braverman suggests, his more important feat was to systematically compile the craft knowledge that had hitherto belonged to labor and transfer it to management.
Soon, workers were left performing simplified detail work that had been decontextualized from the production process as a whole; meanwhile, management enjoyed a monopoly on the technical know-how that, historically, had been the patrimony of the skilled trades. The ongoing separation of the conception and execution of labor that characterizes production under capitalism had reached a new threshold. This process subsequently repeated itself in management, creating a handful of corner-office executives and an army of deskilled administrative assistants and middle managers.
Labor and Monopoly Capital tells a sobering story, but by no means an unhopeful one. Braverman detected signs of capitalism’s historical limits in the fact that new technology frequently reunites and automizes the steps of the labor process that the division of labor had fragmented. In his final lecture, delivered in the spring 1975, Braverman urged that “Workers can now become masters of the technology of their process on an engineering level and can apportion among themselves in an equitable way the various tasks connected with this form of production that has become so effortless and automatic.” Liberated from the drudgery of repetitive tasks thanks to automation, a team of associated producers might reclaim the unity of the production process once enjoyed by craftworkers on a higher plane.
AI holds out a similar possibility of reuniting, in automated form, many of the skills and bodies of knowledge that the capitalist division of labor has pulverized in its relentless quest for control and efficiency. If predictions that AI will inaugurate an age of universal leisure are wildly optimistic, the prospect that socialized workers might direct the entirety of the production process with its assistance seems less so.
But we will have to fight for it. Capitalism customarily takes advantage of technological advances by firing workers and demanding greater productivity from the few it does not cull. Braverman informs us that the verb “to manage” “originally meant to train a horse in his paces, to cause him to do the exercises of the manège.” Management has always viewed the labor process as a site of struggle, and it is determined to keep hold of the reigns. If we want AI to improve rather than replace or further degrade our jobs, a reading of Braverman suggests that we must be prepared to carry the battle into the very labor process itself.
Mark Allison is a professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University and the author of Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-politics, and Literature in Britain, 1817–1918
My friend, neighbor, comrade, and mentor, George Meyers lived and breathed the credo of “Solidarity Forever.”
Son of a western Maryland UMW coal miner, he was an organizer of the 10,000-member Textile Workers Local 1874 in Cumberland, Md., and a leader in the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Many readers of People’s World will also remember him for his 30 years of service as the Communist Party USA’s Labor Secretary.
George fought racist job discrimination, a battle he waged with his best friend, fellow Communist, Joe Henderson, an African American steelworker at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point mill near Baltimore. Such work didn’t go unnoticed by the government.
He was thrown in a federal penitentiary for 38 months in the 1950s on charges that he “conspired to teach or advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence.” It was a brazen Cold War anti-communist lie put forward by people whose real agenda was to smash the CIO.
I’ve just completed a new book on his life, No Power Greater: The Life and Times of George A. Meyers. It’s out soon from International Publishers and is already available for pre-order. Reduce the theme of my book to a few choice words and they would be these:
“The secret of CIO success in organizing six million workers in the 1930s and ’40s was the unity of the left and center forces in the working class. The left does not have the strength to win on its own. It can only win if it is united with the center. It is a mutual need. The center too is incapable of winning on its own. It must have the left. But when the left and center are united, nothing can stop us.”
Of course, this was a strategy to organize workers into unions. But the concept of left-center unity applied to all struggles to organize the working class and its allies, not just unions.
United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis tapped George to be one of the key organizers of the CIO in the ’30s, along with Steelworker Gus Hall, Longshore leader Harry Bridges, and other convinced left-wingers. This was the unity of left and center in action.
Lewis, George said, is a “perfect example of a center force,” with many strengths and also weaknesses. But his main strength was that he was an anti-fascist who believed workers need unions to defend themselves from mad Wall Street wolves.
In those years, George A. Meyers was guided by an equally powerful idea—the United Front against fascism. He had read the pamphlet distributed by the Communist Party, Against War and Fascism, that contained the report delivered by Georgi Dimitrov to the 7th World Congress of the Communist International in 1935.
In it, Dimitrov defined fascism as the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”
Like left-center unity, the United Front—and later the Popular Front—was a strategy of building a broad coalition of millions of people who disagree on many issues. But they agree on the overriding issues: defense of democracy, racial and gender equality, and the rejection of corporate tyranny.
George returned to the Celanese mill after serving in the Army Air Corps in the war that defeated Hitler fascism at a cost of 50 million dead, a majority of them citizens of the Soviet Union and many millions of them Communists.
The giant banks and corporations and their government agents, like stool pigeon Ronald Reagan, understood perfectly the power of left-center unity and the United Front. They unleashed a full-scale war at home to smash the CIO. They targeted the left with nonstop witch-hunt hearings and the passage of Taft Hartley and other union-busting laws. They charged that Communist Party members were scheming to surrender the U.S. to Russia.
The center forces wavered, retreated, and then surrendered in the face of this offensive. The unity of left and center had been smashed by Wall Street’s targeting of the left, which had the intended aim of intimidating and forcing into retreat the center forces.
Corporate America then turned the AFL-CIO over to labor traitors like George Meany, whose ideology was racism, anti-communism, and servile “partnership” with Big Business.
The smashing of the CIO set the stage for the plague of plant closings that turned the industrial heartland of America into a rustbelt, with millions of jobs exported to lands of cheap labor. The density of union membership plummeted from nearly 30% when the CIO was at its height to about 6% today. All the gains won by the CIO, like Social Security, the minimum wage, and the 40-hour workweek, have been attacked, cut back, and undermined.
Think of the minimum wage, a pitiful $7.25 an hour, starvation pay. The Republican majority in the House blocks every effort to increase it. Medicare, a victory won in 1965, faces privatization by profit-greedy insurance companies who have tricked 51% of Medicare recipients into shifting to Medicare Advantage—a scheme that is neither Medicare nor an advantage.
When George got out of prison, he spent the rest of his life working to rebuild the left-center coalition in the labor movement.
He often visited Washington, where I was then serving as Bureau Chief of the Daily World. Together, we visited the D.C. offices of the United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers, Teamsters, American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association, the United Mine Workers, and the AFL-CIO.
He befriended many leaders, especially Machinists Union President William Winpisinger. Wimpy, a “seat of the pants socialist,” a Cleveland auto mechanic who led a near-million-member union, told me he deeply admired George and his lifelong dedication to building the labor movement.
George’s outreached hand of friendship for women and men he considered “center forces” was not a tactical gesture. He respected them, knew that he could learn from them and they could learn from him. George knew that the “center forces” disagreed with him on many issues. Yet he was always searching for “common ground,” for shared values of the left and center that served as the basis of unity.
What are those shared values? That workers need strong unions to win living wages, tolerable hours, workplace health and safety, and health care. That racial and gender unity is imperative. That the Constitution and the Bill of Rights must be defended. The same goes for the freedom to vote and to have those votes counted. And for women’s right to safe, legal abortions.
In those days, “common ground” was opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam. Today, it is opposing U.S. connivance with Israel in genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Some of these freedoms are subject to debate, but the left and center can be won to fight for these rights as the bedrock of saving democracy.
George made another point about left-center unity: When people are locked in sharp struggle, they awaken and begin to see clearly the nature of capitalism, a system driven by profit greed, racism, sexism, and imperialist war. They see from their own experience that the system is rigged against them. The “center” moves to the left. Some of them, like George A. Meyers himself, join the Communist Party and devote themselves to building the base for “Bill of Rights Socialism.” The left-center coalition is dynamic, not static.
Left-center unity is a winning strategy in the class struggle. It also expresses the deepest value of Communists: The unity of humanity in the quest for a world fit for human beings and all life.
George argued persuasively against ultra-left notions that reject left-center unity. It is a fatal sectarian error for the left to embrace “go-it-alone” illusions, George said. He argued that the politics of coalition, the science of building unity among masses of people with widely different views is the key to social change.
Set aside differences. Search for the points of agreement and organize majority support for those demands. Plunge into these struggles, whether it is the resurgent labor movement, the women’s equality movement, the “Black Lives Matter” movement, the “Blue-Green” alliance against global warming, or the movement to end the U.S.-Israeli war on the Palestinian people.
The Republicans and their corporate backers scheme to polarize the American people along lines of race, nationality, gender, urban-vs-rural, and region.
The Republicans and their Wall Street masters see the direction the U.S. and the world are heading: Growing diversity, millions demanding an end to the rule of the oil and gas billionaires, and young workers, members of “Gen Z” determined not to kneel and accept the starvation wages offered by the billionaires. At the end of this process of radicalization, the ideologues of capitalism see doom! The end of capitalist rule, the advent of socialism.
The Republicans today stand for racism, hate, ignorance, and division. We stand for unity, science, and hope! Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., called it the “Beloved Community.”
I attended a luncheon in Seattle a little while ago for Rep. Pramila Jayapal. The woman labor union leader who was introducing Jayapal mentioned that she is one of 70 lawmakers who have signed Rep. Cori Bush’s “Ceasefire in Gaza NOW” bill. The crowd of 500 people cheered Jayapal for her courage and foresight.
A wise leader of the labor movement said the other day, “Defense of Democracy flows through the ballot box.”
George A. Meyers would agree: The only way to break the grip of the fascist danger is to defeat them at the polls on November 5.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
Tim Wheeler has written over 10,000 news reports, exposés, op-eds, and commentaries in his half-century as a journalist for the Worker, Daily World, and People’s World. Tim also served as editor of the People’s Weekly World newspaper. His book News for the 99% is a selection of his writings over the last 50 years representing a history of the nation and the world from a working-class point of view. After residing in Baltimore for many years, Tim now lives in Sequim, Wash.
HOUSTON—“Staying neutral means staying silent. It means risking the rights of workers and the civil rights of all. It means the continuation of unemployment and poor wages while the powerful continue to get richer.” That’s the warning from Fred Redmond, Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO and the highest-ranking Black trade unionist in the country.
Redmond was speaking to over 1,200 Black, Latino/a, Asian, Arab, Indigenous, and white delegates and guests at the 53rd International Convention of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) that filled the Houston Marriott Marquis Hotel convention center on Thursday morning. Founded in 1972, the CBTU has been a driving force for trade union militancy and diversity and has been holding the labor movement accountable since its inception.
The theme of this year’s convention is “Never Back, Always Forward: Hate Cannot Erase Us.” With the 2024 elections looming, setting up a re-run between President Joe Biden and former twice-impeached president and fascist Donald Trump, the convention brought into stark relief the high stakes facing the working class and the trade union movement.
“Whether we like it or not, this election comes down to us: Black people and the labor movement,” Redmond continued. The upcoming election determines “the future of this country and the future of our labor movement.” What’s at stake in the 2024 election, according to Redmond, is the continued ability for the working class to fight for “worker’s rights, voting rights, civil rights, healthcare, water rights, the right to live and have a good-paying union job.”
“We have an opportunity to continue to build towards a Third Reconstruction…or usher in the second Confederacy,” a CBTU Region 7 delegate and member of the UAW told People’s World. “Yes, Joe Biden isn’t the best president we’ve ever had, but let’s not get amnesia about what Trump was about when he was president.”
That this year’s convention was held in Texas, a state that Republicans have turned into a bastion of right-wing and anti-immigrant, anti-labor, and anti-women fervor, is significant. Rick Levy, President of the Texas State AFL-CIO told delegates, “We need to proclaim our message loudly for all of Texas” to hear.
The message: Despite defunding of schools, the criminalization of abortion, the rollbacks of voting rights, and the fascistic assault on immigrants, Texas is also home to the “boldest union fighters who struggle every single day for justice and equality.”
“We gotta be honest about the reaction that is so severe,” said Levy. In Texas, the effort to outlaw diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies in public institutions is “absolute madness,” he said. “Since when does equality make you an enemy of the State?” Levy pointed out how this ultra-right assault is “installed and promoted by corporate America. They are scared of united workers fighting for economic justice. They are scared of democracy.”
Claude Cummings, Jr., who was recently elected to head the Communication Workers of America (CWA), making him the first Black president of that union, emphasized the importance of educating and mobilizing the labor movement in response to Project 2025—the fascist agenda proposed by the far-right Heritage Foundation.
The doomsday plan seeks to undermine and eliminate the hard-won democratic gains of working people throughout the course of the country’s history in favor of white supremacy, company unions, “Christian” nationalism, and a loss of basic democracy. Cummings called on CWA and CBTU to fight to “protect democracy and protect our unions.” He declared in no uncertain terms, “We will defend our unions!”
Fred Redmond, Secretary-Treasurer of AFL-CIO addressing the CBTU Convention in Houston. | Cameron Harrison / People’s World
The president of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA), Evelyn DeJesus, also the first Latina Executive Vice President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), spoke about the unity needed between all working-class people to defend our hard-won rights and fight towards a new, more just society. For DeJesus, the collective power of the working class is the driving force for all of our country’s social progress. “Racial unity is our strength,” she said, “and we need this unity to dismantle all systems of oppression!”
The main report delivered by Rev. Terrence L. Melvin, International President of CBTU, was met with lively cheers from the audience. “We are not here to pacify our oppressors,” he stated. “We are here to uplift our families and our communities!”
“The union movement is on fire!” shouted Melvin. “It is rooted in the new militancy in workers who are saying, ‘We ain’t taking this shit no more!’” Black workers are front and center in the current resurgence of organized labor, and they are increasingly being elected to positions of leadership in the trade union movement. “Black folks are kicking some ass!” Melvin remarked to a round of applause from the delegates.
Turning to the issue of peace, Melvin said, “Our hearts flinch for every child shot in Gaza” just like “our hearts flinch for every police killing in America.” said Melvin. The ceasefire sentiment among convention delegates was expressed in the form of peace and solidarity buttons, ceasefire stickers, keffiyehs, and bracelets in the colors of the Palestinian flag.
It was clear that CBTU, and the delegates of the convention more broadly, were not entirely pleased with the Biden administration’s first four years. They mentioned a dearth of movement on police accountability and reform, the support for the genocide against Palestinians, slow-motion on voting rights legislation, and a lack of political mobilization against the Jan. 6th coup-plotters.
However, “MAGA is democracy’s grave digger” and “Project 2025 is the billionaires’ plan to enshrine white supremacy and turn our country into an apartheid state,” asserted Melvin. “The MAGA cult has democracy on life support and we say, hell nah—we ain’t standing for that!”
“We need to bury MAGA and defend our hard-earned gains. This is a game of inches…not a game of perfection. The stakes are just too high.”
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
Cameron Harrison is a Labor Education Coordinator for the People Before Profits Education Fund. Based in Detroit, he was a grocery worker and a proud member of UFCW Local 876, where he was a shop steward. He writes about the labor and people’s movements and is a die-hard Detroit Lions fan.
Eric Brooks is Co-convener of the African-American Equality Commission, CPUSA, and Chair of the Communist Party of Indiana. He is organizing for an anti-racist society that puts the needs of working families over those of the rich.
MONTPELIER, Vt.—By veto-proof margins in the state that longtime worker champion Bernie Sanders represents in the U.S. Senate, Vermont’s legislators passed a state version of the Protect The Right To Organize (PRO) Act, labor’s top national legislative priority.
The measure, S102, cleared the Vermont Senate by a 23-6 tally on May 9. The state House approved it before that, 115-26 with nine members not voting. It now heads for the desk of Republican Gov. Phil Scott, who hasn’t said what he’ll do, yet.
Besides making Vermont labor law much more pro-worker, the Vermont PRO Act goes beyond current federal law, the National Labor Relations Act. Vermont’s bill extends the right to organize to historically barred Black and brown groups of workers, according to the Teamsters, one of a 26-group coalition of unions, civil rights groups, civic groups, and religious groups pushing it.
When Congress approved the original NLRA during the New Deal, FDR had to exclude household workers, who were mostly African-American women, and farm workers, who were mostly Spanish-speaking, to appease the then-dominant Southern segregationist wing of the Democratic Party.
“Federal labor law denies collective bargaining rights” to those two groups, the Pass the Vermont PRO Act coalition explains. “It is up to states like Vermont to end this historically racist exclusion.”
And the Vermont bill bans mandatory attendance at bosses’ “captive audience” meetings—a ban approved as a stand-alone law by other states. Under federal labor law, bosses can now discipline or even fire workers who refuse to go to those meetings and sit through anti-labor lies and harangues.
Vermont’s captive audience meetings ban, like the others, covers bosses’ demands of mandatory attendance at meetings on political or religious topics, including worker rights and union representation. Workers can still go, but only if they want to, and bosses can still harangue them.
“To protect their freedom of speech and of conscience, workers should have the right to refuse to attend without fear of discipline or termination,” the coalition adds.
The Vermont PRO Act also legalizes card-check recognition for public workers, the Teamsters said. The state AFL-CIO adds the Vermont PRO Act lets bosses fire workers only for good cause. It lists specific causes for termination—barring all others–and forces employers to follow those standards.
“Our goal is to make it easier for workers in both the private and public sectors to form a union by making it easier for workers in the public sector to form unions, expanding collective bargaining rights to agricultural and domestic workers and protecting workers’ freedom of speech by preventing employers from forcing employees to attend captive audience meetings,” the state AFL-CIO said.
“Vermont passed the Vermont State Labor Act in the 1960s with a goal of protecting the rights of the employees and the public. This is a work in progress, which will be strengthened by the Vermont PRO Act,” Curtis Clough, President of Teamsters Local 597 in Barre, told the national union. “This legislation is a game changer for workers and Gov. Scott must sign it into law immediately.”
Sanders, who chairs the U.S. Senate’s Labor Committee, hasn’t commented yet on his home state’s PRO Act, but he’s the lead Senate sponsor of the national version. A Republican filibuster threat, aided by renegade Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, has stopped the national measure from a floor vote.
Press Associates Inc. (PAI), is a union news service in Washington D.C. Mark Gruenberg is the editor.
The Supreme Court recently heard argument in Starbucks Corp. v. McKinney, a case where employers are trying to make it more difficult for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to obtain preliminary injunctions that undo an employer’s illegal acts while a case is pending. Without a preliminary injunction, an employer can interfere with organizing rights or refuse to bargain, knowing that it will take years before it is required to comply with a final judgment. Everyone agrees that to obtain a preliminary injunction, the NLRB must show that in the absence of an injunction there will likely be irreparable harm. The fight is over what constitutes irreparable harm. This is an instance where we should watch what employers do, and not what they say. Employers often make exceedingly weak arguments to the NLRB, and exhaust their appeals because they understand that the delay imposes harms on workers, and under current law workers are not compensated for those harms.
The Supreme Court has long held that irreparable harm is simply harm for which there is no adequate monetary remedy. Thus, an intangible harm, such as loss of First Amendment freedoms, is considered irreparable. During the oral argument, Starbucks’ lawyer, Lisa Blatt, argued for an extremely narrow definition of irreparable harm. Blatt contended that in the labor law context, irreparable harm only exists where there’s a specific pending event, for instance if workers are going to be prevented from voting in an upcoming election. The lawyer who argued for the government argued for a somewhat broader test, suggesting that the Court should consider whether the firing of a union activist “extinguishes the momentum of the union drive or impairs it in such a serious way that an order from the Board a year or two down the road won’t be able to restart the drive.” While workers are rarely able to restart a union organizing drive that’s been sidelined for two years, even if they were, they would still suffer irreparable harm. If an organizing drive that should have taken six months ends up taking three years, workers will not receive any compensation for the years in which they were effectively deprived of the right to organize, and thus, by definition, the harm is irreparable. The Board is currently considering the argument by NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo that it should overrule its 1970 decision in Ex-Cell-O Corporation, and compensate workers for the lost opportunity when employers illegally refuse to bargain, but so far even Abruzzo has not sought a compensatory remedy for illegal acts that slow down an organizing drive.
During the oral argument, Blatt insisted that the threat of a preliminary injunction is so “coercive” that it forces employers to settle unfair labor practice charges. There’s a different reason why cases often settle when the NLRB seeks a preliminary injunction, and it ties back directly to the irreparable harm argument. An NLRB Regional Director will generally only issue a complaint against an employer when they have a very strong case. So, once a complaint issues, management lawyers should be advising their clients that they are unlikely to prevail. But, in most cases, employers have little to lose and a lot to gain by delaying their inevitable defeat. If workers are fired illegally, there are no punitive or emotional distress damages. And any backpay owed is reduced by any interim earnings the worker earned at another job. For other violations, like a refusal to bargain, the only remedy is a prospective cease and desist order, so employers have a strong incentive to exhaust every appeal in an effort to delay as long as possible.
This incentive to delay explains why employers often raise frivolous arguments. Consider a pending case where Trader Joe’s is asking the NLRB to overturn a decisive union election victory. Trader Joe’s leading argument for overturning the election is that on the first day of the election, as the union’s lawyer walked through the store, he allegedly turned to one of the workers and raised his fist and shouted, “solidarity.” Trader Joe’s further alleges that the worker said, “I’m not part of the union group,” and then the lawyer responded, “Oh, you’re one of those.” While these facts are disputed, even if the allegations are credited, it’s absurd to suggest that the union lawyer’s conduct was intimidating, let alone that it changed the outcome of the election.
It’s been two years since workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York voted to unionize. Amazon predictably responded with a long list of objections, trying to set aside the election. The NLRB’s Regional Director rejected Amazon’s objections, but Amazon still refuses to bargain with the Amazon Labor Union. If a preliminary injunction forced Amazon to bargain while the litigation plays out, Amazon might well decide that its longshot objections aren’t worth the trouble. But, as I have previously explained, without a preliminary injunction, Amazon has nothing to lose by plowing forward with its flimsy claims – even if, as expected, it ultimately loses after exhausting all appeals, it will still have succeeded in postponing bargaining and demoralizing its workers.
Big business is playing a “heads I win, tails you lose” game enabled by right-wing courts. On the one hand, you have Starbucks telling the Court that there is no need to grant preliminary injunctions because workers will recover damages once litigation finally concludes. But, at the same time, SpaceX is arguing that the NLRB can’t award compensatory damages unless it figures out a way to empanel juries. And, the business lobby has opposed the NLRB’s pleas to increase its budget so that it could hire more staff and speed up case processing.
At the Supreme Court, the government’s lawyer was reduced to arguing that there is no need to rein in the NLRB when it comes to seeking preliminary injunctions because this is a tool that the Board hardly ever uses. The right-wing Justices weren’t buying that argument, but if they had it would provide little comfort to workers. The Board’s power to seek preliminary injunctions isn’t worth much if it can only be reserved for a handful of the most egregious cases each year. In 1969, a very different Supreme Court observed that because workers are economically dependent on their employer, they are more likely “to pick up intended implications of the latter that might be more readily dismissed by a more disinterested ear.” So, an employer’s illegal acts may not seem flagrant to a district court judge, but nevertheless they may be more than sufficient to intimidate workers.
Workers have long understood that justice delayed is often justice denied. The ability to seek a preliminary injunction is the only tool the NLRB has to prevent employers from using delay as an anti-union tactic. When Congress gave the NLRB the power to obtain preliminary injunctions, it did so to prevent employers from taking advantage of the Board’s slow-moving administrative processes to accomplish illegal objectives. The Supreme Court should honor that Congressional intent and not allow employers to violate the the law with impunity, secure in the knowledge that time is on their side.
Andrew Strom has been a union lawyer for more than 25 years. He is an Associate General Counsel of Service Employees International Union, Local 32BJ in New York, NY. He is the author of Caught in a Vicious Cycle: A Weak Labor Movement Emboldens the Ruling Class, 16 U.St. Thomas L.J. 19 (2019); Boeing and the NLRB: A Sixty-Four Year-old Time Bomb Explodes, 68 National Lawyers Guild Review 109 (2011); and Rethinking the NLRB’s Approach to Union Recognition Agreements, 15 Berkeley J. Emp. &; Lab. L. 50 (1994), and has written for Dissent and Dollars and Sense. He also taught advanced legal writing at Fordham Law School. He received his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. The views he expresses on this blog are his personal views, and should not be attributed to SEIU Local 32BJ.
COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE 