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**FEBRUARY 22, 2024**
On the Prospect website
Uncommitted Campaign in Michigan Uses the Power of the Vote
Anti-war activists want to channel the pain of Arab American and Muslim
communities to register a vote of no confidence in Biden's support for
Israel's devastation of Gaza. BY ELI DAY
Capital One-Discover Merger Tests Bank Regulators' Merger Approach
Regulators have dragged their feet on new bank merger guidelines. They
now have a $35 billion reason to get moving. BY DAVID DAYEN
Company Behind Joe Namath Medicare Advantage Ads Has Long Rap Sheet of
Misconduct
The firm formerly known as Benefytt pocketed millions selling sham
insurance to seniors and other consumers. BY MATTHEW CUNNINGHAM-COOK
Meyerson on TAP
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**** America's Richest Men Ask the Courts to
Make Unions Illegal
Lawyers for Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Amazon say the Court
erred in 1937 by letting workers have rights on the job.
Fourscore and seven years ago-1937, to be exact-our fathers on the
Supreme Court (well, five of them, which was just enough) brought forth
a new nation: New Deal America. In that year, the justices ruled that
the most fundamental legislative works of Franklin Roosevelt's
presidency-Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act
(NLRA)-were constitutional. So said the Court; so said, in the NLRA
case, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the decision's author, who
had been the Republican candidate for president in 1916. From these
decisions, which saved seniors from destitution and enabled workers to
form unions, a broadly shared prosperity emerged that gave the nation a
middle-class majority for the three decades after World War II.
Now we are engaged in a war with the rulers of the new economy, who,
having already downsized that middle class by appropriating an ever
larger share of the proceeds from its work for themselves, actually want
to strike down the NLRA. In the past few weeks, three pillars of that
economy-Elon Musk's SpaceX, Jeff Bezos's Amazon, and the Albrecht
family's Trader Joe's-have all asked federal courts to declare the
core functions of the NLRA unconstitutional, on the grounds that the
National Labor Relations Board's (NLRB) administrative courts, like
those of other regulatory agencies, mix judicial functions with
executive branch functions. In actual practice, what those bodies do is
hear and rule on cases such as those brought by workers on organizing
campaigns who've been illegally fired. What Elon and Jeff would prefer
is that federal courts hear such cases directly, which guarantees that
by the time they reach the bench, those organizing campaigns will have
become a dim memory. Or maybe, they want no one to hear such cases. Or
perhaps, given the deep hatred that Sam Alito holds toward unions, they
hope that Alito can persuade enough of his colleagues to toss the NLRA
altogether, as he did with
**Roe v. Wade**.
Their arguments are the same that came before the Court in 1937, when
the most reactionary corporate overlords of that era sought to destroy
the threat of some modestly countervailing worker power, which then had
been rising for several years. That same dynamic clearly threatens the
Musks and Bezoses today, with unions' approval rating at its highest
levels in 60 years, with young workers particularly bent on winning a
say in their work lives, and with Joe Biden's NLRB working to restore
some teeth to the NLRA, which had been largely defanged by decades of
decisions from pro-corporate courts.
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This isn't an academic exercise for the Elons and Jeffs; it's
personal. Musk's Tesla is the target of organizing efforts from the
UAW and a number of European unions, while Bezos's Amazon, having
suffered the indignity of having one of its warehouses vote to unionize,
is avidly surveilling all of its workers for any sign of undue
collective ambition. Like the CEOs of yesteryear, the current crop of
corporate autocrats knows they can't win the public to their cause:
The optics of the world's richest person (Musk) and the third-richest
(Bezos) destroying American workers' right to go union and win living
wages could be, well, problematic. If rebuffed in the court of public
opinion, though, they might just prevail in the courts of the United
States.
But really-in a time of stratospheric economic inequality and
overwhelming public support for unions, they want the courts to strike
down workers' right to collective bargaining? One of the fundamental
landmarks of the New Deal? Shall we negate all of America's
mid-20th-century social progress? All of Roosevelt's legacy? How about
we revisit World War II and surrender to the Nazis and Japan?
As with the company formerly known as Twitter, Musk is the sole owner of
SpaceX, as the Albrecht family is of Trader Joe's. But Amazon, at
least, is publicly traded, and its board of directors includes a few
members who may not wish to be so closely associated with the
evisceration of the New Deal's good works. Lawyer Jamie Gorelick has,
to be sure, lobbied for drug companies and done work for Jared Kushner,
but she's also on the board of the Urban Institute and once was Bill
Clinton's deputy attorney general. Patty Stonesifer, whom Bezos
installed as the interim CEO of
**The Washington Post**, has worked for a number of giant tech
companies, but has also played key roles establishing and running a
number of foundations and nonprofits, once even serving as CEO of
Martha's Table, an organization that makes fresh and healthy food more
available to the poor of Washington, D.C. While Martha's Table's
clientele would surely grow if unions were wiped off the map, we
shouldn't assume that Stonesifer would therefore support the Court's
revocation of the right to collective bargaining. For Jamie and Patty
and their fellow Amazon directors, dancing on FDR's grave, and the
mass grave of the American working class, may be viewed by future
historians as really unseemly.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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