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AUGUST 22, 2023

On the Prospect website

* David Dayen on how Biden's antitrust enforcers are helping
Hollywood's striking actors and writers
<[link removed]'s fundamental pro-worker law has
become fundamentally anti-worker
<[link removed]'s labor department ordered 27 Boston Market outlets to stop
work after they violated minimum-wage laws.

In the history of American labor, I don't think we've ever seen a
period quite like today's. On one hand, public approval of unions is
the highest it's been since the mid-1960s-over 70 percent, which is
way higher than that for almost every other national institution.
Workers whom employers can't easily replace-chiefly, academics and
other professionals-are unionizing in droves, since firing those
workers, which is the normal employer strategy to deter unionization,
isn't an option. Union members look to be more militant than they have
in decades; the need to keep up with the rising costs of housing and
other necessities, compounded by their awareness of the immense wealth
of corporate CEOs and major investors, has prompted truckers, bakers,
actors, and hotel workers, among many others, to strike or to threaten
strikes against their employers.

On the other hand, the decades-long evisceration of labor laws still
permits-actually, encourages-employers to fire retail,
manufacturing, and other workers who can be replaced, a violation of
labor law that carries with it no significant penalty, and which thereby
dooms the vast majority of workers' efforts to unionize.

The gap between public support for unions and the inability of unions,
which now represent just 6 percent of the nation's private-sector
workforce, to organize has led Democrats in public office to try to
close that gap. Efforts to strengthen the National Labor Relations Act,
however, have been failing in the Senate for the past 60 years, and the
NLRA also preempts states' ability to do anything about private-sector
unionization within their borders. Nonetheless, in response to their
union and pro-union supporters, a number of Democratic governors, state
legislators, and state departments of labor have begun to do what they
can to empower workers. In Minnesota, Maine, and New York, they've
enacted laws that ban "captive audience" meetings, in which employers
compel their workers to attend meetings devised to discourage and/or
intimidate them from voting to go union. These laws break new ground;
they go up against NLRA preemption by arguing that such meetings are a
coercive affront to the First Amendment.

The latest Democratic state to chart a new course is New Jersey, where
the state's Department of Labor and Workforce Development responded
last week to a company's abuse of its workers with an uncommonly
forceful action. DOL investigations having revealed
<[link removed]'s 30 Boston Market outlets had violated the
state's minimum-wage and kindred laws, and that the company owed more
than $600,000 to 314 employees, and having received no response from the
company in response to these DOL-verified claims, the DOL issued a
stop-work order
<[link removed]'s private-sector economy, where 94
percent of workers are non-union, the abuse of employees can be a common
practice, and the remedy for such abuse, if remedy there is at all, is
characteristically slow and incomplete. Much like the outlawing of
captive-audience meetings, the stop-work order from New Jersey is a sign
that the frustration of a pro-worker public at the anti-worker status
quo has now reached Democratic legislators and administrations. Change
is seeping through the cracks. It'll take a lot more such seeping,
though, to create a long-overdue and desperately needed wave.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter <[link removed]'s top antitrust cops paid attention. BY DAVID DAYEN

This Economy Is Breaking All the Rules-and Thriving
<[link removed]