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FEBRUARY 8, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

New Under the Sun: Government Pro-Worker Activism

The White House and Congress endeavor to empower groups of employees, as
Republicans try out a sham empowerment of their own.

'Tis the season of the worker, sort of. In a growing number of
Starbucks shops and university campuses, certainly. And also, just
yesterday, at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

Yesterday, the House voted by 335 to 97-which means not just all the
Democrats, but a majority of the Republicans, too-to ban forced
arbitration in cases of sexual assault and harassment. Tens of millions
of workers are compelled by their employment contracts to forgo the
right to sue their employer for abuses, discrimination, and the like,
and submit their claims to private arbitration, which in the
overwhelming majority of cases results in a pro-employer ruling. That
forced arbitration even exists is itself a form of worker abuse, but at
least it now appears doomed (the bill has overwhelming support in the
Senate and, of course, the Oval Office) in matters of sexual harassment.

Also yesterday, the White House released a long and detailed set of
rules and policies to bolster workers and unions, which was developed by
its Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment. The new rules will
help foster worker organizing among those federal employees who are not
now union members, and at companies that are recipients of federal
grants. The report comes in the wake of President Biden's
proclamations that employees of federal contractors must be paid an
hourly wage of at least $15, and that workers on every project funded to
the tune of at least $35 million by the recently passed infrastructure
bill must receive the prevailing construction wage on public projects in
that region-which invariably is a relatively high unionized
construction-worker wage.

Such legislation and administration policies are all to the good, but
they don't address what the White House task force identified as a
primary cause of the shrinkage of the American middle class-the
evisceration of the labor movement from a third of the workforce in the
mid-20th century to a bare 6 percent in the private sector today. That,
in turn, is largely due to the erosion of the National Labor Relations
Act, which once protected workers seeking to form a union from
management abuse and discharge. Returning that act to its original
purpose of helping workers would require enacting the considerable
rewrite of the NLRA contained in the PRO Act, which has majority support
in the House but can't pass the Senate so long as M&S (or is it S&M?)
refuse to dump the filibuster. In the face of congressional inaction,
the newly Bidenized National Labor Relations Board appears determined to
at least enforce what remains of the act in the pro-worker spirit that
its authors intended.

It's not that popular support for unions is lacking-on the contrary,
according to Gallup, it's at a 50-year high, with the labor movement
now claiming a 68 percent approval rating. Seeking to divert that
support, and to expand the Republicans' hold on many working-class
voters beyond the calumnies of cultural politics, Florida Sen. Marco
Rubio has recently proposed resurrecting the TEAM Act, a mid-1990s
brainstorm of Noted Workers' Friend Newt Gingrich. Rubio's bill
would allow employers to establish company "unions" of their own in
which employers and employees would jointly develop policies, so long as
the employer really liked them. If employers didn't like them, they
could, of course, just abolish the "union," as Jamelle Bouie notes

in his

**Times**column today. Bill Clinton rightly vetoed the 1990s bill as the
"worker empowerment" scam that it was, but now Rubio has sought to bring
it back. It's a useful reminder that the Republicans' Trumpification
doesn't mean that the party has abandoned all of its dubious heritage.
It's still the place where a lot of bad ideas live on.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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The Warehouse Space Race

With warehouse capacity at a premium, businesses try to get goods and
move them out as global economic chaos disrupts long-held ideas about
stocking stuff just in time. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY

Inflation-Fighting Legislative Agenda Takes Shape

An ocean shipping regulatory bill got attached to a broader reshoring
bill. There's now an emerging bipartisan agenda to dismantle
misguided, corporate-friendly policies. BY DAVID DAYEN

Not Even a Superhero Could Fix Global Supply Chains

The comic book industry halted production in 2020 and a supply chain
crisis bubbled in 2021, hitting retailers and fans alike. BY JAROD
FACUNDO

The Ukraine Crisis: Another Chapter in the Russian-American Carbon
Rivalry

The U.S. and Russia have vied to serve Europe with energy since the
1940s. The current tensions in Ukraine must be viewed in that context.
BY GUY LARON

Busy Being Born

The Odyssey of Todd Gitlin BY ROBERT KUTTNER

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