UAW Local 598
Sean Crawford (back row, fist raised) with members of UAW Local 598 showing solidarity on the picket line.
Trying to narrow down a progressive labor policy agenda to a couple of pages is impossible: Just about everything is labor policy.
The Green New Deal, as Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA says, is labor policy. Health care is labor policy. As Sean Crawford, an autoworker and member of United Auto Workers Local 598, tells The Progressive: “I’ll never forget having my insurance canceled during the GM strike while my wife was pregnant.” Single-payer health care, he says, would take this weapon away from the boss.
Anti-trust laws and progressive taxation—limiting the power and wealth of companies like Amazon and Walmart—are also labor policy. Trade policy is labor policy. Says labor historian Erik Loomis, “There is no legal reason why the United States cannot apply principles of labor rights in all its trade agreements. It simply chooses not to because the government has not much cared about the conditions of workers overseas.”
But in the interest of sketching out a plan, let’s agree to narrow the focus a little bit. Labor in the United States is governed by a patchwork of state and federal laws, Supreme Court cases, and National Labor Relations Board decisions. Some states allow collective bargaining for public sector employees but ban strikes; other states have so-called right-to-work laws that allow workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to opt out of paying representation fees.
Minimum wages are all over the place; certain types of workers remain exempt from the protections of New Deal-era labor laws like the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Some states and cities have enacted paid sick time provisions, family leave, and fair scheduling protections.
Expanding these existing protections so that they apply to all workers would be an important first step. Every worker should have minimum wage and overtime protections; we should raise the federal minimum wage and permanently index it to inflation, while allowing localities to raise it higher.
We should also give farmworkers and domestic workers the protections they were exempted from in the 1930s, as some states and cities have begun to do; ensure collective bargaining rights; give all workers access to paid sick time and paid family leave; and extend “just cause” protections—which currently exist only in Montana—to all, meaning that workers throughout the country would not be fired for no good reason. The right to strike, Nelson says, is critical: “Any worker who holds the unfettered right to withhold labor also has the ability to demand respect for that work. For this to truly work, the law must outlaw no-strike clauses that fundamentally undermine worker power and equal standing with the owner class.”
Another big step forward would be giving workers the ability to form a union through majority sign-up (known as “card check”), rather than a protracted union election process. Once workers have elected to unionize, companies should not be able to perpetually drag out the bargaining process to delay a contract. And, as Bhairavi Desai of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance says, we must push back against the spread of binding arbitration agreements that workers often sign unknowingly, stripping them of their right to sue their employer. (One response to this abusive practice is California’s Private Attorney General Act, which lets workers file suit with the backing of the state.)
U.S. labor law has lagged behind a changing economy for decades, but the rapid rise of the so-called gig economy has shown just how bad it is. “Things like insecurity at work, low wages, atomization, and isolation, these aren’t unique to gig workers and they’re symptoms of a continued erosion of labor standards where companies contract out [jobs] to lower their bottom line,” explains Brian Chen, a staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project. Bernie Sanders’s Workplace Democracy Act proposal would hold parent companies responsible for the labor practices of their subcontractors.
Anti-trust laws and progressive taxation—limiting the power and wealth of companies like Amazon and Walmart—are also labor policy.
“These gig companies pretend that the use of an app magically transformed their workers into their own bosses and it magically allows them to freely work however they please,” says Chen, who points to California’s flawed yet impressive AB5 as a potential model for pushing back on the misclassification of workers as independent contractors. The law requires companies to treat workers as employees unless, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “a) they are free from a company’s control, b) do work outside the company’s core business, and c) have independent enterprises performing the same type of work.”
Gig economy companies, Chen says, use the problems with existing labor laws to argue for “reform,” and then pour millions into making sure that the “reforms” favor companies and not workers. These companies, notes Desai, have been able to “normalize misclassification and gross economic inequality, all because people enjoy the actual product, which is just a fancy way of saying drivers’ labor.”
Yet one of the problems with AB5 has been its scope. For companies like Uber and Lyft, whose services are geographically specific, a state law might have an effect. But for other types of gig workers, who provide services that can be done from anywhere—freelance writers, for example—companies can simply ditch them and hire someone from out of state.
Federal level protections are part of the answer. The other part is to make sure all workers who are potentially affected by such legislation are involved in writing it.
A progressive agenda for labor must build on the base that minimum wage and hour protections and collective bargaining rights have set, and make possible more militant action in defense of those rights.
This begins with repealing the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, better known as Taft–Hartley. In the wake of World War II, Congress looked at the demands workers had begun to make under the National Labor Relations Act, and said, “Too much.” Taft–Hartley bans secondary strikes and boycotts, allows for right-to-work clauses and laws, restricts union political spending, and requires all union officers to swear they aren’t members of the Communist Party. (Readers may laugh now, but it drove many a radical organizer out of the labor movement.)
Sanders’s Workplace Democracy Act would repeal sections of Taft–Hartley, but even dumping the whole thing won’t mitigate all of its harms. As C.M. Lewis, a union staffer in Pennsylvania, wrote on Strikewave, “Employer ‘free speech’ has entered into Constitutional law, and in many states the concepts of Taft–Hartley have been codified into public sector labor relations.” Still, getting rid of this act would be symbolically powerful and restore tools that unions have long missed.
But repealing Taft–Hartley contains a catch-22, says Barbara Madeloni, former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association and now education coordinator at Labor Notes: “Capital knows how powerful we are. That’s why they passed Taft–Hartley to begin with.” Getting rid of it will take a powerful labor movement that, in Madeloni’s words, “shows the laws to be ineffective, unsustainable, and unenforceable.” Without an already-militant movement, labor is unlikely to write more militancy into law.
Sectoral bargaining is another common proposal these days but this strategy too contains a catch-22. Sectoral bargaining, writes labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, “encompasses an effort to win better wages and working conditions in an entire occupation or industry, usually in one state or city.” To autoworker Sean Crawford, that means greater numbers: “The larger your bargaining unit, the more power you have as a class.”
Others, though, see sectoral bargaining as a collaborative approach that might promote labor peace. European-style sectoral bargaining brings capital and labor to the table to hammer out policy; proposals to involve government wage boards envision a smoothed-out process, with fewer strikes and more conversations between “stakeholders.” Yet powerful unions once built effective sectoral bargaining regimes without the state, and they will need power to make sure sectoral bargaining doesn’t become “class snuggle” instead of struggle.
The aim of labor policy should be to allow working people more control over their lives. And workers like Crawford are beginning to think outside of the parameters that unions have long held to. During the recent UAW strike at General Motors, Crawford says, one sticking point was the closure of several plants. What would it mean if workers were given the right to take over the factories where they work, if the company no longer needs them?
In fact, GM built its Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant on ground that had been an immigrant neighborhood. The land was seized through eminent domain in 1980 and given to GM to build the plant that was saved—barely—after the strike. Suggests Crawford, “Companies would think twice before abandoning our communities if they knew their plants and all the machinery inside would be taken via eminent domain.”
Peter Gowan, a policy associate at the Democracy Collaborative, has written a proposal for such a policy, to give workers “a right of first refusal so they can convert their company into a worker trust or cooperative when it is being sold or closed.” The government would have to create institutions to help companies transition to worker ownership, but it could also be a way to transition to green industry. As Crawford puts it, “We could have built solar panels. We could have built a lot of things that would have been a benefit to this community and the workers and to our society as a whole.”
The real question for labor, then, is how to build democratic, powerful unions that can push for far-reaching changes to the economy and more power over workers’ own lives.
Gowan has also worked on a proposal for “democratic ownership funds,” an idea embraced by Sanders and Britain’s Labour party. A way to transition companies to worker or public ownership, this proposal would require companies to issue stock that would be placed in a fund collectively owned and directed by workers. It would democratize profits and decision-making; a collectively owned company might be less likely to bulldoze a neighborhood only to abandon a plant.
Another way to give workers more control over their lives is to give them more free time. For more than a century, the shorter working week with no loss in pay was a central demand of the U.S. labor movement. Crawford thinks it’s time to bring back that demand. As I wrote on Progressive.org in October, newly elected Missouri state Representative Rasheen Aldridge, a former Fight for $15 striker, plans to introduce a bill to implement a four-day working week. Sara Nelson of the AFA points to the proposal from Finland’s new prime minister, Sanna Marin, who also wants a six-hour working day.
“Even if automation were slowed, we cannot stop the change coming due to the climate crisis. This is Labor’s time to make demands,” Nelson writes in an email. “We need to redefine full time work and increase pay accordingly to adjust for our ever improved productivity.” The forty-hour week is the product of struggle, not a natural feature.
Madeloni worries that questions of law and policy change distract from thinking about how to organize. She points to the recent illegal teachers’ strike in Dedham, Massachusetts, where the union won its demands after only three days, as well as to the strike wave across so-called red states in 2018 that spread into 2019. What the law says was less important than labor’s power—something that was also shown in the GM strike, where the UAW failed to hold the company to tenets of their contract.
The real question for labor, then, is how to build democratic, powerful unions that can push for far-reaching changes to the economy and more power over workers’ own lives. A democratic labor movement, Desai says, one that is answerable to members and not elected officials, will be the thing that changes the law, and that is necessary to enforce it.
As Madeloni puts it, “The history of good legislation is the history of movements forcing the hand of whomever’s in power.”