JULY

**23, 2020**

Meyerson on TAP

Who Should Say When a Workplace Is Safe? The Workers, That's Who.

Back in April, Nelson Lichtenstein, the dean of American labor
historians, wrote a piece for us

arguing that states should establish workers' councils that would
decide when it was safe to return to their worksites and would have the
authority to monitor those worksites for safety conditions when work
resumed.

While I know of no state that's enacted anything so sensible, Los
Angeles County-which, with ten million residents, is a lot bigger than
a host of states-became the first jurisdiction to do so on Tuesday,
when the County Board of Supervisors passed a partial version

of this idea. Noting that public-health officials were completely
overwhelmed by the number of possibly unsafe workplaces, the five-member
Board of Supes explicitly authorized the establishment of workers'
councils with the power to monitor workplace safety. "Employees must be
allowed to form public health councils without retaliation by their
employer," the motion read.

L.A.'s Board of Supes contains some of the most progressive elected
officials in the nation, and on this measure, they were lobbied by the
city's union movement, also among the nation's most innovative.
Indeed, the COVID crisis has brought together unusually broad alliances
of quite different unions around issues of worker safety and adequate
and nondiscriminatory funding. One such alliance is that of unions of
university employees-from tenured professors to graduate students to
office workers to maintenance employees-that penned a letter to
university administrators earlier this month calling on them not only to
ensure worker, student, and public safety before reopening but also to
avoid layoffs and pay cuts and provide the assistance that minority and
poor students need now more than ever. The signatories included faculty
unions from the public university systems of California and
Massachusetts, graduate student unions from across the nation, and
support staff unions from across the South. In both its geographic and
occupational diversity, the letter illustrates the growing militance,
sophistication, and scope of today's workers movement-something that
the Los Angeles ordinance also recognizes by establishing a new form of
worker power outside the strictures of the nation's long dysfunctional
labor law.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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Back to School

Universities that lived by the market model during the boom years face
an extinction event as the bubble bursts and their business model pushes
them to make perverse decisions about campus opening. BY FRANCOIS
FURSTENBERG

Can a Pipeline Company Invoke Eminent Domain? A Louisiana Court Ducks.

The company must pay property owners for its abuses, but its ability to
take property in the cause of the 'public good'-however
tenuous-remains intact. BY MARCIA BROWN

America: Still Going Wrong After All These Years

In an update of his best-seller on the decline and fall of the middle
classes, James Steele explores the roots of the current economic crisis
and possible pathways to the other side. A Prospect interview. BY
GABRIELLE GURLEY

Unsanitized: Mitt Romney Wants to Use the Crisis to Cut Your Social
Security

A Bowles-Simpson-style process to cut benefits could end up in the
Republican economic relief bill. This is The COVID-19 Daily Report for
July 23, 2020. BY DAVID DAYEN

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