On August 22, 2019, Ryan Cooper writes on The Week:
David Portnoy, the founder of the fratty oaf website Barstool Sports, recently got national press attention for flagrantly violating labor law on Twitter. After sharing an article about how much he hates unions, he threatened that if any of his employees talked to a labor reporter, “I will fire you on the spot.”
According to the Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Act “forbids employers from interfering with employees in the exercise of rights to form, join or assist a labor organization for collective bargaining.” Portney is now under investigation by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). But, in a mark of the moribund status of American labor law, it is virtually certain that he will not be meaningfully punished — as other right-wing publishers have not in similar circumstances.
Luckily — for Barstool Sports employees but also for anybody who currently has a job, plans to get one in the future, or whose friends and family work — Bernie Sanders is riding to the rescue with a proposal for what would be the most sweeping pro-union program in the history of the United States. It’s not just high time employers were forced to obey the dang law, it’s also a long overdue way to help the American worker.
Unions used to be the foundation of the American middle class, and their deliberate destruction is one major reason why the American economy is so hideously unequal (and prone to crisis). As Vox‘s German Lopez writes:
“[U]nions were crucial to some of the biggest gains in this area in the past century, from the New Deal to the Affordable Care Act. In doing this, unions also help address income and wealth inequality, which have fueled social and political discord in the US in recent decades. Based on reviews of the research, the decline in unions— of about 66 percent since the 1940s and ’50s — can explain about 10 to 30 percent of the rise in inequality we’ve seen in the past several decades.” [Vox]
Probably the core of the Sanders plan is a total overhaul of the basic structure of union organizing. Currently, American unions are organized separately at each individual workplace: First you identify your bargaining unit and a union to join, then you send the NLRB cards proving at least 30 percent of the workforce wants a union, then you hold an election, and if you get a majority, hey presto, you’re unionized! It’s not that tough in theory, but in practice there are multiple legal opportunities for employers to trip up or stall the process — and a great many illegal ones that they usually get away with.
Sanders would replace that with sectoral bargaining, as seen in much of Europe. Under this model all the unions and all the employers in a particular industry negotiate a bargain for wages and benefits, and then the government extends the contract to cover every employee in the industry — whether they are members of a union or not. As Dylan Matthews argues, this would drastically reduce the incentive for individual bosses to stop their workers from organizing, and stop investors from strategically directing capital to non-union firms.
He would also streamline and upgrade the union formation process in several ways. Instead of the two-step process above, unions could be certified with a simple majority petition. He would establish a legal right to unionize, remove the ability of employers to reject a first contract, and make it easier to force them into binding arbitration. He would stop employers from being able to escape unionization by labeling their employees as supervisors or independent contractors, and ban them from forcing their workers to attend anti-union harangues. He would classify franchises like McDonald’s as “joint employers,” allowing such employees to unionize under the corporate parent instead of store-by-store. He would ban contract-infringing state laws which forbid employers from signing closed shop agreements with unions, and mandate that businesses that merge must honor their existing union contracts.
Then Sanders would clean up a number of smaller labor items. He would end at-will employment, requiring employers to show “just cause” before they terminated someone. He would re-legalize solidarity boycotts (where a union in one firm takes collective action to support workers outside their own workplace), and ban permanent replacement of striking workers. And he would reverse the 2014 law signed by President Obama which made it easier to cut benefits for multi-employer pensions.
Finally, Sanders would ensure that existing union members do well under Medicare-for-All. He would require that employers with union-negotiated health benefits give any savings they obtain from universal Medicare back to employees in wages or benefits. (The objective here is clearly to get the big unions on board the Medicare-for-All train.)
Of course, writing a new bill would not guarantee the law wouldn’t be ignored as the NLRA currently is. But writing a new, more aggressive law is a time-tested way to shake off the legal dust — as the 1965 Civil Rights Act did for the 1875 law of the same name. However, Sanders would still definitely need to find some hardened pro-union legal experts to appoint to the NLRB — something that should be done even if reforms can’t be passed. A law is only as strong as its enforcement mechanism.
At any rate, if actually implemented, this would upend American political economy. Union organizing would explode overnight, working-class wages would soar, and the income of executives and investors would fall sharply. It would be a glorious victory for nearly all of the American people — which is why big business will fight it to their dying breath. But it’s just possible that under President Sanders, we could enjoy the spectacle of scofflaw bosses like David Portney being hauled out of their offices by federal marshals.
Gary Reber Comments:
The core of the Sanders plan is a total overhaul of the basic structure of union organizing.
Sanders would replace the old structure with sectoral bargaining, as seen in much of Europe. Under this model all the unions and all the employers in a particular industry negotiate a bargain for wages and benefits, and then the government extends the contract to cover every employee in the industry — whether they are members of a union or not. As Dylan Matthews argues, this would drastically reduce the incentive for individual bosses to stop their workers from organizing, and stop investors from strategically directing capital to non-union firms.
But significantly, what is missing?
Historically and in its present form, the labor movement is destructive in that it agrees with the idea that propertyless people should exist to serve those who own property. The labor movement doesn’t seek to end wage slavery; it merely seeks to improve the condition of the wage slave. If it actually cared about human rights and freedom, it wouldn’t call itself the “labor movement.”
Sanders should be advocating for a union movement transformation to a producers’ ownership union movement and embrace and fight for economic democracy. They should play the part that they have always aspired to — that is, a better and easier life through participation in the nation’s economic growth and progress. As a result, labor unions will be able to broaden their functions, revitalize their constituency, and reverse their decline.
Unfortunately, at the present time the movement is built on one-factor economics — the labor worker. The insufficiency of labor worker earnings to purchase increasingly capital-produced products and services gave rise to labor laws and labor unions designed to coerce higher and higher prices for the same or reduced labor input. With government assistance, unions have gradually converted productive enterprises in the private and public sectors into welfare institutions. Binary economist and author, Louis O. Kelso stated: “The myth of the ‘rising productivity’ of labor is used to conceal the increasing productiveness of capital and the decreasing productiveness of labor, and to disguise income redistribution by making it seem morally acceptable.”
Kelso argued that unions “must adopt a sound strategy that conforms to the economic facts of life. If under free-market conditions, 90 percent of the goods and services are produced by capital input, then 90 percent of the earnings of working people must flow to them as wages of their capital and the remainder as wages of their labor work… If there are in reality two ways for people to participate in production and earn income, then tomorrow’s producers’ union must take cognizance of both… The question is only whether the labor union will help lead this movement or, refusing to learn, to change, and to innovate, become irrelevant.”
Unions are the only group of people in the whole world who can demand a real, justice managed, equal allocation Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), who can demand the right to participate in the expansion of their employer by asserting their constitutional preferential rights to become capital owners, be productive, and succeed. The ESOP can give employees access to capital credit so that they can purchase the employer’s stock, pay for it in pre-tax dollars out of the earnings generated by the new assets that underlie that stock, and after the stock is paid for earn and collect the capital earnings income from it, and accumulate it in a tax haven until they retire, whereby they continue to be productive capital earners receiving income from their capital asset ownership stakes. This is a viable route to individual self-sufficiency needing significantly less or no government redistributive assistance.
The unions should reassess their role of bargaining for more and more income for the same work or less and less work, and embrace a cooperative approach to survival, whereby they redefine “more” income for their workers in terms of the combined wages of labor and capital on the part of the workforce. They should continue to represent the workers as labor workers in all the aspects that are represented today — wages, hours, and working conditions — and, in addition, represent workers as full voting stockowners as capital ownership is built into the workforce. What is needed is leadership to define “more” as two ways to earn income.
If we continue with the past’s unworkable trickle-down economic policies, governments will have to continue to use the coercive power of taxation to redistribute income that is made by people who earn it through owning “tools” as inputs to production or their labor and give it to those who need it. This results in ever deepening massive debt on local, state, and national government levels, which leads to the citizenry becoming parasites instead of enabling people to become productive in the way that goods, products, and services are actually produced.
When labor unions transform to producers’ ownership unions, opportunity will be created for the unions to reach out to all shareholders (stock owners) who are not adequately represented on corporate boards, and eventually all labor workers will want to join an ownership union in order to be effectively represented as an aspiring capital owner. The overall strategy should assure that the labor compensation of the union’s members does not exceed the labor costs of the employer’s competitors, and that capital earnings of its members are built up to a level that optimizes their combined labor-capital worker earnings. A producers’ ownership union would work collaboratively with management to secure financing of advanced technologies and other new capital investments and broaden ownership. This will enable American companies to become more cost-competitive in global markets and to reduce the outsourcing of jobs to workers willing or forced to take lower wages.
Kelso stated, “Working conditions for the labor force have, of course, improved over the years. But the economic quality of life for the majority of Americans has trailed far behind the technical capabilities of the economy to produce creature comforts, and even further behind the desires of consumers to live economically better lives. The missing link is that most of those un-produced goods and services can be produced only through capital, and the people who need them have no opportunity to earn income from capital ownership.”
Sanders also should advocate that the union movement expand beyond representing corporate employees and represent capital ownership empowerment for all propertyless citizens.
