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:
Companies That Union-Bust Must Now Automatically Recognize Union, NLRB Rules
A new framework for unionizations means that a company must voluntarily recognize a union or demand an election—and can no longer interfere
The National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling on Friday that changes the framework for unionizations, making it easier for workers to organize and harder for companies to fight back against them.
The new process comes as part of a decision in the case between Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, where the Board found that the employer had committed over 20 “instances of objectionable or unlawful misconduct” between the filing of the union election petition and the election itself, intending to dissuade workers from organizing.
A decision last Friday makes union organizing possible again.
Version that doesn't require sign-in.
"Hot Labor Summer just became a scorcher.
[On August 25, 2023], the National Labor Relations Board released its most important ruling in many decades. In a party-line decision in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC, the Board ruled that when a majority of a company’s employees file union affiliation cards, the employer can either voluntarily recognize their union or, if not, ask the Board to run a union recognition election. If, in the run-up to or during that election, the employer commits an unfair labor practice, such as illegally firing pro-union workers (which has become routine in nearly every such election over the past 40 years, as the penalties have been negligible), the Board will order the employer to recognize the union and enter forthwith [a.k.a. immediately] into bargaining.
The Cemex decision was preceded by another, one day earlier, in which the Board, also along party lines, set out rules for representation elections which required them to be held promptly after the Board had been asked to conduct them, curtailing employers’ ability to delay them, often indefinitely.
Taken together, this one-two punch effectively makes union organizing possible again, after decades in which unpunished employer illegality was the most decisive factor in reducing the nation’s rate of private-sector unionization from roughly 35 percent to the bare 6 percent at which it stands today...
“This is a sea change, a home run for workers,” said Brian Petruska, an attorney for the Laborers Union who authored a 2017 law review article on how to effectively restore to workers their right to collective bargaining enshrined in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which was all but nullified by the act’s weakening over the past half-century. Taken together, Petruska added, last week’s decisions recreate “a system with no tolerance for employers’ coercion of their employees” when their employees seek their legal right to collective bargaining...
Since the days of Lyndon Johnson, every time that the Democrats have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, they’ve tried to put some teeth back into the steadily more toothless NLRA. But they’ve never managed to muster the 60 votes needed to get those measures through the Senate. The Cemex ruling actually goes beyond much of what was proposed in those never-enacted bills."
-via The American Prospect, August 28, 2023
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Note: I didn't include it because the paragraphs about it went super into the weeds, but the reason all of this is happening is because of the NRLB's general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, who was appointed by Biden. In fact, according to this article, this "secures Abruzzo’s place as the most important public official to secure American workers’ rights since New York Sen. Robert Wagner, who authored the NLRA in 1935." Voting matters
The company made the novel claim, echoing arguments by SpaceX and Trader Joe’s, in a legal filing while fighting a case.
In the latest sign of a growing backlash within corporate America to the 88-year-old federal agency that enforces labor rights, Amazon argued in a legal filing on Thursday that the National Labor Relations Board was unconstitutional.
The move followed a similar argument by SpaceX, the rocket company founded and run by Elon Musk, in a legal complaint in January, and by Trader Joe’s during a labor board hearing a few weeks later.
The labor board consists of a prosecutorial arm, which issues complaints against employers or unions deemed to have violated federally protected labor rights; administrative judges, who hear complaints; and a five-member board in Washington, to which decisions can be appealed.
Amazon’s filing was part of a case before an administrative judge in which labor board prosecutors have accused Amazon of illegally retaliating against workers at a Staten Island warehouse known as JFK8, which unionized two years ago.
On Tuesday, we learned that Elon Musk is not actually part of the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) that he is utilizing to wage a war on federal agencies. Rather he’s a “Senior Advisor to the President" and as such as a “special government employee.”
But there are a few things we have long known about Musk. For starters, he has made billions from the federal government. As the NY Times reported recently, “Musk’s companies secured $13 billion in contracts over the past five years.” While Musk is gutting agencies that help Americans from the FAA to the National Labor Relations Board, Musk’s companies saw nearly $4 billion in government contracts in 2024—with lots more on the way in 2025 given his close ties to Trump.
And second—while this has received less attention---Musk’s companies were being investigated by various federal agencies during the Biden administration. As the NY Times found, in January 2025, there were 32 continuing investigations into Musk’s six companies being led by at least 11 different federal agencies. These ranged from discrimination complaints filed by Black Tesla workers to potential stock fraud to consumer complaints about Tesla and more.
Some of the most visible investigations into Musk’s companies include the FAA seeking $633,000 in civil penalties against SpaceX for “allegedly failing to follow its license requirements during two launches in 2023.” The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) suing Musk for violating the Securities Exchange Act by failing to divulge to the public he had purchased more than five percent of Twitter stock as he was seeking to take over that company. If the public had known Musk had purchased the stock, the price would’ve jumped costing Musk more money to be future stock shares. The SEC is seeking disgorgement of ill-gotten gains and other penalties.
Then there is the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—a watchdog agency for workers—that is pursuing at least 24 investigations into Tesla, SpaceX and other Musk companies. And the list goes on.
But since Musk has come to power with his DOGE operatives, he has targeted the very agencies that were investigating him. In fact, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee--led by Rep. Jamie Raskin--recently released a fact sheet that details how Trump and DOGE are “punishing” agencies that were investigating Musk.
Examples cited by the House Democrats include the NLRB investigation on behalf eight Space X employees fired “in retaliation for speaking critically of Musk.” And a lawsuit by the E.E.O.C. that sued Musk’s Tesla for widespread and “ongoing racial harassment of its Black employees” and retaliation.
These investigations appeared to have ground to a halt because Trump recently fired the E.E.O.C. commissioners and the chair of the NLRB. Trump also fired the Inspector General for the Dept of Labor that oversees both. And when Trump replaces these people—if ever—it’s expected to be with people who will be pro-Musk.
[...]
To answer these questions, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the various agencies that were reportedly investigating Musk’s companies. My hope is to uncover information about the status of the investigations of Musk from the consumer complaints to the FAA fines.
Federal law requires these agencies disclose any information requested under the FOIA unless the information falls into one of nine exemptions. Of course, the law doesn’t matter to Trump nor Musk as we are seeing. It will be telling if Trump’s regime ignores my requests for info concerning Musk. But that doesn’t mean that you and I should not request it—which you can easily do online. I will of course update people on anything I receive.
We have never seen these types of brazen conflicts of interest, self-dealing and corruption playing out for all to see. The anger of the people is growing. And at some point, there will be a reckoning for Musk and the other oligarchs. The only question is what does that look like?!
Dean Obeidallah explores the reasons why Donald Trump ordered the federal investigations into his co-”President” Elon Musk ended.
