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DECEMBER 20, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

The Labor Board Gets a Raise

With organizing campaigns and strikes on the rise, Congress finally
proposes to increase funding for the NLRB-for the first time since
2014.

After nine lean years during which its budget had not increased by so
much as a penny, the National Labor Relations Board has finally secured
an increase in the 2023 funding bill that Congress will vote on this
week. That doesn't mean that nine fat years for the nation's labor
relations regulator are about to commence, but it does mean the NLRB
will not be compelled to furlough staff and can make some badly needed
hires in the coming year.

The funding, which Senate and House appropriators sent to their
respective floors today, includes an increase of $25 million for the
agency, roughly 9 percent higher than last year's (actually, the last
decade's) level. That's still $20 million less than the agency and
the administration had requested, but it's $25 million more than the
amount the Board has had to work with since President Obama's second
term.

And it comes not a moment too soon. Over the past several years, as the
public's approval rating for unions has risen to its highest level (71
percent) in nearly 60 years, the number of organizing drives and strikes
have both sizably increased. In 2022, according to
<[link removed]> Cornell University's School
of Industrial and Labor Relations, there have been 374 strikes-a 39
percent increase over 2021-running the spectrum from University of
California teaching assistants to the bakers at Kellogg and Nabisco.
Cornell tallies 78,000 workers who walked off the job in the first half
of this year-nearly three times the 26,500 who struck in the first six
months of 2021. With 48,000 academics walking the UC picket lines in
recent weeks, that number is likely considerably higher for this
year's second half.

Union organizing has increased as well. The number of requests to the
NLRB to conduct union recognition elections rose
<[link removed]>
by 57 percent from the first six months of fiscal 2021 (when there were
748 such requests) to the first six months of fiscal 2022 (when there
were 1,174). That latter number includes the landmark victory of Amazon
workers on Staten Island, and the first set of Starbucks baristas to win
recognition (as baristas at nearly 250 Starbucks outlets have now done).
An unprecedented share of those requests to the NLRB are coming from
college students and graduate employees at private universities,
museums, think tanks, nonprofits, and their like-workers whose skills
give them a degree of immunity from the common employer response to
workers seeking to unionize, which is to fire them.

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In the year's largest strike-that of the 48,000 TAs, RAs, postdocs,
and academic researchers at UC-a number of those workers are still on
the picket lines, as the proposed contracts for the TAs and RAs have yet
to be voted on. The proposed contracts would raise the annual wages for
those workers from the mid-20 thousands to the mid-30s, but provide a
couple thousand more for those working at UC Berkeley and UCLA, due to
the stratospheric costs of housing in the Bay Area and L.A. That
disparity has rankled a number of the grad students at UC's eight
other campuses, and the vote within the bargaining committee to send the
contracts to members for an up-or-down vote was split largely along
those lines. While more militant members on all campuses are urging
fellow workers to reject the contracts, this split seems at least as
much a function of geography as it is of ideology.

The split may also be a function of the union leaders' failure to
grasp the full importance of the historic bargaining strategy of their
parent union, the United Auto Workers. When the UAW bargained with what
we nostalgically call the "Big Three" automakers of yore, they demanded
and won a uniform wage increase for their members despite whatever
regional or local economic disparities may have existed. Only then could
the local unions separately attempt to craft supplemental deals, if they
wished, at individual factories, though these tended to concern
factory-specific working conditions rather than wage issues. The UAW
leaders at UC might have diminished the non-coastal discontent in their
ranks by following this pattern.

The University of California, of course, is a governmental institution,
and thus not under the jurisdiction of the NLRB, which oversees labor
relations in the private sector. But the activism of the young UC
workers, like the activism of growing numbers of young workers
everywhere, is the reason why the NLRB has needed to grow in order to
serve this expanding market. This week's funding bill is a good, if
long overdue, start, but it clearly needs to grow some more.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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The Committee Wraps It Up
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Charged with investigating the January 6th insurrection, the committee
made a devastating case against Trump, regardless of what the attorney
general elects to do. BY HAROLD MEYERSON

A Day of Constitutional Reckoning Approaches
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Section 2 of the 14th Amendment was designed to strip congressional
districts from states that disenfranchise voters. It's never been
implemented. BY MICHAEL MELTSNER

A Moral Video Game Industry Requires Regulation
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Epic Games allegedly exposed children to predators and ripped off its
customers. BY RYAN COOPER

What Now for China?
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A conversation with Joshua Kurlantzick of the Council on Foreign
Relations, a Prospect alum BY ROBERT KUTTNER

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