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**APRIL 2, 2024**

On the Prospect website

Decider, M.D.

One man, Dr. Warren Roberts, determines whether prisoners in Oregon get
medical treatment for their illnesses and injuries. BY EMMA
RINDLISBACHER

How Republicans Screw Workers

Efforts by Obama and Biden to enforce labor laws have been
systematically undermined by right-wing courts and legislators. This
should be a prime election theme. BY ROBERT KUTTNER

The In-Flight Magazine for Corporate Jets

The Economist has channeled the concerns of elites for decades. It sees
the Biden administration as a threat. BY LUKE GOLDSTEIN

Lieberman's Legacy

Tom Tomorrow brings you This Modern World BY TOM TOMORROW

Meyerson on TAP

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**** A Valedictory Recommendation for What
Unions Need to Do

On stepping down, the president of the nation's hotel workers union
calls for a movement-wide organizing campaign at Amazon.

Last Friday, D. Taylor stepped down as president of UNITE HERE-the
union of hotel and casino employees. His nearly dozen years at the helm
of one of America's most member-involved unions saw it become an
improbable political powerhouse in a host of swing states and key
elections.

If anything, Taylor's tenure coincided with industry practices that
should have made already difficult union-building all the harder. These
days, the people working behind the hotels' registration desks and in
kitchen and waitstaffs may well be employed not by the hotel itself but
by contractors-a route hotel owners have taken precisely to thwart
their workers going union. Despite that, UNITE HERE has continued to
unionize hotel and casino workers not only in its Nevada stronghold and
in such legacy cities as New York, but also in the otherwise non-union
South. During Taylor's presidency, the union not only organized
140,500 new workers, but fully half of them were in right-to-work
states, which most unions shun for fear that workers benefiting from
union contracts there would exercise their right not to pay union dues.

Which gets us to what's really distinctive about UNITE HERE: It
generally wins a level of worker allegiance that leads workers to join,
and pay dues, even when they don't have to. Las Vegas, where the local
now claims roughly 60,000 members, has been ground zero for such
successes. There, Taylor and his presidential predecessor, John Wilhelm,
pioneered practices of involving workers in organizing, mobilizing, and
bargaining at levels that are uncommon in most unions. That involvement
has tended to pay off, literally, in the contracts the union has won.

During Taylor's tenure, that involvement has also spurred the
union's political programs. Most unions still do politics by writing
checks to the candidates they back, while some of the largest and
disproportionately public employee unions-the two teacher unions,
AFSCME and SEIU-can fund massive electoral operations that take to the
airwaves and also have members and other canvassers knocking on doors
and working the phones.

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UNITE HERE doesn't have that kind of treasury and can't afford to
hire non-member canvassers, as some unions do. But beginning in Nevada,
where it's long been much the biggest union, it has enlisted its hotel
housekeepers, waiters, and cooks to become the state's most potent
door-knocking and phone-banking force, often alongside the Democratic
machine built by the late Sen. Harry Reid. During Taylor's tenure, the
union began playing a similar role in other key swing states where its
locals had similarly motivated members. In 2020, it mobilized many
hundreds of its members in four swing states that gave Joe Biden the
presidency: Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and, of course, Nevada. Its
precinct walkers came from those states' unionized hotels, as well as
from those in such neighboring states as New York and California.
Moreover, as UNITE HERE secretary-treasurer Gwen Mills (who now succeeds
Taylor as president) told me in 2020, the union's electoral training
program for members also provides union organizing training as well.

In speaking with Taylor last month, he voiced both a cautious optimism
about his union's trajectory, and some frustration at the labor
movement's hesitation to exploit the unusually pro-union climate now
abroad in the land. "Right now," he said, "we have a high level of
worker militance, the highest level of public approval of unions in 60
years, the most pro-union administration in our history, and a labor
shortage that gives workers more power. If we fail to take advantage of
all that, historians will say we didn't do justice to the next
generation of workers."

Doing justice, in Taylor's view, would require waging a unified labor
campaign to organize the commanding heights of the economy-companies
like Amazon. "That will take not one union but a powerful coalition of
unions, a force like the CIO in the 1930s," he said. "We have to
increase union density if we're ever going to reduce the crazy levels
of economic inequality that we have. The whole movement needs to step
up."

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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