When unions are outlawed, only outlaws will have unions. Unions don't owe their existence to labor laws that protect organizing activities. Rather, labor laws exist because once-illegal unions were formed in the teeth of violent suppression, and those unions demanded – and got – labor law.
Bosses have hated unions since the start, and they've really hated laws protecting workers. Dress this up in whatever self-serving rationale you want – "the freedom to contract," or "meritocracy" – it all cashes out to this: when workers bargain collectively, value that would otherwise go to investors and executives goes to the workers.
I'm not just talking about wages here, either. If an employer is forced – by a union, or by a labor law that only exists because of union militancy – to operate a safe workplace, they have to spend money on things like fire suppression, PPE, and paid breaks to avoid repetitive strain injuries. In the absence of some force that corrals bosses into providing these safety measures, they can use that money to pay themselves, and externalize the cost of on-the-job injuries to their workers.
The cost and price of a good or service is the tangible expression of power. It is a matter of politics, not economics. If consumer protection agencies demand that companies provide safe, well-manufactured goods, if there are prohibitions on price-fixing and profiteering, then value shifts from the corporation to its customers.
Now, if labor has few rights and consumers have many rights, then bosses can pass their consumer-side losses on to their workers. This is the Walmart story, the Amazon story: cheap goods paid for with low wages and dangerous working conditions. Likewise, if consumer rights are weak but labor rights are strong, then bosses can pass their costs onto their customers, continuing to take high profits by charging more. This is the story of local gig-work ordinances like NYC's, which guaranteed a minimum wage to delivery drivers – restaurateurs responded by demanding the right to add a surcharge to their bills:
But if labor and consumer groups act in solidarity, then they can operate as a bloc and bosses and investors have to eat shit. Back in 2017, the pilots' union for American Airlines forced their bosses into a raise. Wall Street freaked out and tanked AA's stock. Analysts for big banks were outraged. Citi's Kevin Crissey summed up the situation perfectly, in a fuming memo: "This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers":
Limiting the wealth of the investor class also limits their power, because money translates pretty directly into political power. This sets up a virtuous cycle: the less money the investor class has to spend on political projects, the more space there is for consumer- and labor-protection laws to be enacted and enforced. As labor and consumer law gets more stringent, the share of the national income going to people who make things, and people who use the things they make, goes up – and the share going to people who own things goes down.
Seen this way, it's obvious that prices and wages are a political matter, not an "economic" one. Orthodox economists maintain the pretense that they practice a kind of physics of money, discovering the "natural," "empirical" way that prices and wages move. They dress this up with mumbo-jumbo like the "efficient market hypothesis," "price discovery," "public choice," and that old favorite, "trickle-down theory." Strip away the doublespeak and it boils down to this: "Actually, your boss is right. He does deserve more of the value than you do":
Even if you've been suckered by the lie that bosses have a legal "fiduciary duty" to maximize shareholder returns (this is a myth, by the way – no such law exists), it doesn't follow that customers or workers share that fiduciary duty. As a customer, you are not legally obliged to arrange your affairs to maximize the dividends paid by to investors in your corporate landlord or by the merchants you patronize. As a worker, you are under no legal obligation to consider shareholders' interests when you bargain for wages, benefits and working conditions.
The "fiduciary duty" lie is another instance of politics masquerading as economics: even if bosses bargain for as big a slice of the pie as they can get, the size of that slice is determined by the relative power of bosses, customers and workers.
This is why bosses hate unions. It's why the scab presidency of Donald Trump has waged all-out war on unions. Trump just effectively shuttered the National Labor Relations Board, unilaterally halting its enforcement actions and investigations. He also illegally fired one of the Democratic NLRB board members, leaving the agency with too few board members to take any new actions, meaning that no unions can be recognized – indeed, the NLRB can't do anything – for the foreseeable future:
Trump also fired the NLRB's outstanding General Counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, who was one of the stars of the Biden administration, who promulgated rules that decisively tilted the balance in favor of labor:
Trump is playing Grinch here – he's descended upon Whoville to take all the Christmas decorations, in the belief that these are the source of Christmas. But the Grinch was wrong (and so is Trump): Christmas was in the heart of the Whos, and the tinsel and baubles were the expression of that Christmas spirit. Likewise, labor rights come from labor organizing, not the other way around.
Labor rights were enshrined in federal law in 1935, with the National Labor Relations Act. Bosses hated – and hate – the NLRA. 12 years later, they passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which substantially gutted the NLRA. Most notably, Taft-Hartley bans "sympathy strikes" – when unions walk out in support of one another. Sympathy strikes are a hugely powerful way for workers to claim value away from bosses and investors, which is why bosses got rid of them.
But even then, bosses who were honest with themselves would admit that they preferred life under the NLRA to life before it. Remember: labor militancy created the NLRA, not the other way around. When workers didn't have the legal means to organize, they organized by illegal means. When they didn't have legal ways of striking, they struck illegally. The result was pitched battles, even bloodbaths, as cops beat and even killed labor organizers. Bosses hired thugs who committed mass murder – literally. In 1913, strikebreakers working for the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company started a stampede during a union Christmas party that killed 73 people, including many copper miners' children:
Workers didn't take this lying down. Violence was met with violence. Bombs went off outside factories and stately mansions. There was gunfire and arson. Bosses had to hire armed guards to escort them as they scurried between their estates and their fancy parties and their executive offices. The country was in a state of near-perpetual chaos.
The NLRA created a set of rules for labor/boss negotiations – rules that helped workers claim a bigger slice of the pie without blood in the streets. But the NLRA also had benefits for bosses: unions were obliged to play by its rules, if they wanted to reap its benefits. The NLRA didn't just put a ceiling over boss power – it also put a ceiling over worker militancy. Von Clausewitz says that "war is politics by other means," which implies that politics are war by other means. The alternative to politics isn't capitulation, it's war.
Trump has torn up the rules to the labor game, but that doesn't mean the game ends. That just means there are no rules.
The labor movement has many great organizer/writers, but few can match the incredible Jane McAlevey, who died of cancer last summer (rest in power). In her classic A Collective Bargain, McAlevey describes her organizer training, from a tradition that went back to the days before the National Labor Relations Act:
McAlevey was very clear that labor law owes its existence to union power, not the other way around. She explains very clearly that union organizers invented labor law after they invented unions, and that unions can (and indeed, must) exist separately from government agencies that are charged with protecting labor law. But she goes farther: in Collective Bargain, McAlevey describes how the 2019 LA Teachers' Strike didn't just win all the wage and benefits demands of the teachers, but also got the school district to promise to put a park or playground near every school in the system, and got a ban on ICE agents harassing parents at the school gates.
This wildly successful strike forged bonds among teachers, and between teachers and their communities. These teachers went on to run a political get-out-the-vote campaign in the 2020 elections and elected two Democratic reps to Congress and secured the Dems' majority. McAlevey contrasted the active way good unions involve workers as participants with the thin, anemic way that the Democratic Party engages with supporters – solely by asking them for money in a stream of frothing, clickbait text messages. As McAlevey wrote, "Workplace democracy is a training ground for true national democracy."
Militant labor doesn't just protect labor rights – it protects human rights. Remember: MLK, Jr was assassinated while campaigning for union janitors in Memphis. LA teachers ended ICE sweeps at the school gates. Librarian unions are leading the fight against book bans.
The good news is that public opinion has swung wildly in favor of unions over the past decade. More people want to join unions than at any time in generations. More people support unions that at any time in generations.
The bad news is that union leadership fucking suuuuuuuucks. As Hamilton Nolan writes, union bosses are sitting on vast, heretofore unseen warchests of cash, and they just experienced a four-year period of governmental support for unions unheard of since the Carter administration, and they did fuck all with that opportunity:
Big unions have effectively stopped trying to organize new workers, even when workers beg them for help forming a union. Union organizing budgets are so small as to be indistinguishable from zero. Despite the record number of workers who want to be in a union, the number of workers who are in a union actually fell during the Biden years.
Indeed, some union bosses actually campaigned for Trump, a notorious scab. Teamsters boss Sean O'Brien spoke at the fucking RNC, a political favor that Trump repaid by killing the NLRB and every labor enforcement action and investigation in the country. Nice one, O'Brien. See you in hell:
Union bosses squandered a historical opportunity to build countervailing power. Now, Trump's stormtroopers are rounding up workers with the goal of illegally deporting them. Fascism is on the rise. Labor and fascism are archenemies. Organized labor has always been the biggest threat to fascism, every time it has reared its head. That's why fascists target unions first. Union bosses cost us an organized force that could effectively defend our friends and neighbors from Trump's deportation stormtroopers:
Not every union boss is a scab like O'Brien. Shawn Fain, head of the UAW, won an historic strike against all three of the Big Three automakers, and made sure that the new contracts all ran out in 2028, and called on other unions to do the same, so that the country could have a general strike in 2028 without violating the Taft-Hartley Act (Fain was operating on the now-dead assumption that unions had to play by the rules):
A general strike isn't just a strike for workers' rights. Under Trump, a general strike is a strike against Trumpism and all its horrors: kids in cages, forced birth, trans erasure, climate accelerationism – the whole fucking thing.
A general strike would build the worker power to occupy the Democratic Party and force it to stand up for the American people against oligarchy, rather than meekly capitulating to fascism (and fundraising), which is all they know how to do anymore:
But before we can occupy the Dems, we have to occupy the unions. We need union bosses who are committed to signing up every worker who wants workplace democracy, and unionizing every workplace in spite of the NLRB, not with its help. We need to go back to our roots, when there were no rules.
That's the world Trump made. We need to make him regret that decision.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Crazy to me that Trader Joe's has this reputation for being, idk, good and wholesome, when they're leading the charge to get rid of unions. They've done an insane amount of anti union shit already, and have been trying to get the laws around unions taken down.
Now, crucially, union members don't want you to stop shopping at Trader Joe's. But they do want you to be aware of this shit.
Here's a link to get you started, but just looking up 'trader joe's unions' brings up a lot of articles and other information.
The NLRB is under attack--learn more and take action to protect workers' rights.
You're a union shop steward. You're called in to a disciplinary meeting against a union member. The managers lay out a clear case: they have multiple witnesses, documentation of the offense, a clear prohibition against that behavior in the code of conduct the employee signed, and there isn't anything in the union agreement about it. They're smug, thinking they've got the employee dead to rights. And then, when you're given a chance to speak, you gently ask "for my first question, is it the policy of [company] to comply with state and federal law?" And the smug grins fall off their faces and come crashing down to the ground as you begin politely asking them whether they're familiar with the FLSA or the case law you've been carrying around in your steward bag.
The next day, you see one of the managers angrily berating an employee. You don't even have to walk all the way over; simply an arched eyebrow is enough to make them stop.
I hope that every one of you with a bad boss gets the chance to humble them this thoroughly between this labor day and the next.
When talking about (the lack of) construction productivity growth, or the fact that we used to build things much faster than we do today, co
"How much safer has construction really gotten? Let’s take a look.
Construction used to be incredibly dangerous
By the end of the 19th century, what’s sometimes called the second industrial revolution had made US industry incredibly productive. But it had also made working conditions more dangerous...
One source estimates 25,000 total US workplace fatalities in 1908 (Aldrich 1997). Another 1913 estimate gave 23,000 deaths against 38 million workers. Per capita, this is about 61 deaths per 100,000 workers, roughly 17 times the rate of workplace fatalities we have today...
In a world of dangerous work, construction was one of the most dangerous industries of all. By the 1930s and early 1940s the occupational death rate for all US workers had fallen to around 36-37 per 100,000 workers. At the same time [in the 1930s and early 1940s], the death rate in construction was around 150-200 deaths per 100,000 workers, roughly five times as high... By comparison, the death rate of US troops in Afghanistan in 2010 was about 500 per 100,000 troops. By the mid-20th century, the only industry sector more dangerous than construction was mining, which had a death rate roughly 50% higher than construction.
We see something similar if we look at injuries. In 1958 the rate of disabling injuries in construction was 3 times as high as the manufacturing rate, and almost 5 times as high as the overall worker rate.
Increasing safety
Over the course of the 20th century, construction steadily got safer.
Between 1940 and 2023, the occupational death rate in construction declined from 150-200 per 100,000 workers to 13-15 per 100,000 workers, or more than 90%. Source: US Statistical Abstract, FRED
For ironworkers, the death rate went from around 250-300 per 100,000 workers in the late 1940s to 27 per 100,000 today.
Tracking trends in construction injuries is harder, due to data consistency issues. A death is a death, but what sort of injury counts as “severe,” or “disabling,” or is even worth reporting is likely to change over time. [3] But we seem to see a similar trend there. Looking at BLS Occupational Injuries and Illnesses data, between the 1970s and 2020s the injury rate per 100 workers declined from 15 to 2.5.
Source of safety improvements
Improvements in US construction safety were due to a multitude of factors, and part of a much broader trend of improving workplace safety that took place over the 20th century.
The most significant early step was the passage of workers compensation laws, which compensated workers in the event of an injury, increasing the costs to employers if workers were injured (Aldrich 1997). Prior to workers comp laws, a worker or his family would have to sue his employer for damages and prove negligence in the event of an injury or death. Wisconsin passed the first state workers comp law in 1911, and by 1921 most states had workers compensation programs.
The subsequent rising costs of worker injuries and deaths caused employers to focus more on workplace safety. According to Mark Aldrich, historian and former OSHA economist, “Companies began to guard machines and power sources while machinery makers developed safer designs. Managers began to look for hidden dangers at work, and to require that workers wear hard hats and safety glasses.” Associations and trade journals for safety engineering, such as the American Society of Safety Professionals, began to appear...
In 1934, the Department of Labor established a Division of Labor Standards, which would later become the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), to “promote worker safety and health.” The 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which legalized collective bargaining, allowed trade unions to advocate for worker safety.
Following WWII, the scale of government intervention in addressing social problems, including worker safety, dramatically increased.
In addition to OSHA and environmental protection laws, this era also saw the creation of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).
OSHA in particular dramatically changed the landscape of workplace safety, and is sometimes viewed as “the culmination of 60 or more years of effort towards a safe and hazard-free workplace.”"
-via Construction Physics (Substack newsletter by Brian Potter), 3/9/23
Employers that violate federal labor law will face having to pay workers for the consequences of their unfair labor practices, thanks to a National Labor Relations Board precedential decision.
Section 7 rights are a specific part of the National Labor Relations Act, but which workers can benefit from them? Do workers anywhere have the right to organize? We dig into these questions in this section of our report on pre-majority unionism:
Section 7 rights refer to the rights that workers in the private sector have to organize collectively.
“McDonald's should not be held responsible for the labor practices of its franchisees, the National Labor Relations Board ruled on Thursday. ...The federal agency, in charge of enforcing U.S. labor law, delivered the latest ruling in a years-long union case that sought to hold the fast food chain liable for the treatment of all workers at both corporate and franchise locations. The agency, also known as NLRB, directed a federal administrative law judge to approve a settlement that had earlier been reached between McDonald's, its franchisees and the workers who had alleged labor-law violations.”
“The government's labor-law prosecutor at the time asked the judge, Lauren Esposito, to review the complaints and consider McDonald's a ‘joint employer’ of franchisees accused of violating labor laws. ...The SEIU and the Fight For $15 on Thursday called the board's ruling on the McDonald's case illegitimate, saying they would ‘forcefully’ appeal ... McDonald's welcomed the NLRB's ruling...”
“Worker advocacy groups have long argued that many companies use contracting and franchising as a shield from responsibility for workers who make their business possible. In multiple lawsuits, unions and groups have pushed for McDonald's to be designated as a ‘joint employer,’ which would also help the efforts to organize workers and bargain for higher wages. McDonald's has fought against the joint-employer designation because it would have ‘a major impact on their business... Separately, the NLRB is expected to undo an Obama-era policy that made companies jointly liable for labor violations by their contractors and franchisees. NLRB proposed the rollback in September 2018, and the agency's spokesman said the final rule is expected in 2020.”
NPR, December 12, 2019: “McDonald's Not Responsible For How Franchisees Treat Workers, U.S. Agency Rules,” by Alina Selyukh
Politico, December 13, 2019: “McDonald's notches NLRB victory,” by Rebecca Rainey
CNN, December 13, 2019: “Labor Board sides with McDonald's in landmark case,” by Danielle Wiener-Bronner
NLRB, “McDonald's USA, LLC, a joint employer, et al.” (Docket Activity)
NLRB, December 12, 2019: “Board Approves McDonald's Settlement”
Joint employer
The Labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board were each expected to release, in December, regulations that establish (under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act, respectively) when to classify a business a "joint employer," jointly liable for labor violations committed by its contractors and franchisees. But that deadline may slip into January. DOL's version is being reviewed by the White House budget office.”
Politico Morning Shift: Regulatory Corner, December 20, 2019: “REGULATORY CHECKLIST: Federal labor agencies have several significant employment-related regulations to get out the door in the next 11 days or early in the new year”
Reuters, WestLaw News, January 7, 2020: “Fight for $15 says ethics conflict warrants fresh look at NLRB McDonald's case”
