Larry, Curly and Moe
There’s a pro-labor agenda stirring in the country, but Republicans at every level are working to destroy it.
Monday is Labor Day and, on Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will begin hearings into the nomination and inevitable confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court of the United States. It shouldn’t be overlooked that his record on labor issues is every bit as retrograde as any other part of his Federalist Society bona fides.
Labor Day is a good time to think about the courts because it was in the courts that organized labor was most effectively crushed in this country, and it was in the courts that the way was cleared for it to flourish, and, it appears that the courts are being set up to crush it again.
Right now, the president* is a guy who stiffed contractors, and fought unionization in every one of his properties until his opponents ran out of money for legal fees. The congressional majorities are resolutely anti-union and many state legislatures are no better.
But there is stirring out in the country. Pro-union candidates are winning primaries, the latest being Andrew Gillum in Florida. In Wisconsin, both Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers and his running mate, Mandela Barnes, are running specifically against rolling back the anti-union measures enacted by incumbent Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage this particular midwest subsidiary. In Seattle, as the Seattle Times reports, unions are preparing to celebrate the centennial of the great 1919 general strike in that city with a renewed sense of purpose.
Sooner or later, though, all of this energy is going to run up against a federal court system, and a Supreme Court, that is going to be marbled all the way through with judges who’ve come up on the same assembly-line as Brett Kavanaugh. In the history of this country, there has not been an expansion of the middle-class without a strong, vibrant union presence. That doesn’t change just because factories move to Mexico, or because of robots. There simply is no other way for wages to rise generally other than having the people receiving those wages bargain collectively for them. That Labor Day is still a holiday at all, I guess, is something for which we can give thanks. The attack on labor itself begins again on Tuesday.