By Gerry Scoppettuolo
The 2025 Project (issued by the Heritage Foundation) is a Hitler-like plan to crush civil and labor rights enacted in the U.S. A close reading of recent Supreme Court decisions more than suggests that 2025 is effectively already here as far as workers’ rights are concerned.
The writing was on the wall several months ago when the Court issued its Loper decision which sharply curtailed the power of Executive agencies of Government like the National Labor Relations Board and the Economic Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to issue certain remedies to protect workers.
Previously unions could go to the Labor Board and obtain court ordered injunctions to make workers “whole” (pay back wages, be restored to employment – McKinney v. Starbucks). This remedy no longer exists legally.
For example, in 2022 the Board simply went to a local court and got an immediate injunction issued to restore the Memphis Seven to their jobs after they had been unlawfully terminated by Starbucks. This was normal procedure, and the workers got their jobs back quickly to avoid what can be years of litigation. Now, however, Board injunctions must be written with new four- part standards to pass muster (see below).
Local courts will have to scrutinize Board requests for injunctive relief and decide whether to issue or not, whereas such issuance was automatic in the past. On June 13 the day of the Supreme Court decision (McKinney v. Starbucks), Nabretta Hardin, a Starbucks barista, who previously was able to get back, was defiant. “We are still going to do that no matter what, whether we’re with Starbucks or not. I think we all still took that away from this experience, that we’re all going to be that megaphone for people who can’t speak up for themselves,” said Hardin. (FOX 13, Memphis Interview 6/13/24).
The Supreme Court has become a bare-bones cudgel against workers in the U.S. It has always been stultifying and anti-worker in the past, but now the pretense is gone, and the wheels of justice are not just turning slowly, they are coming off.
In 1990, this writer, then an organizer for District 1199/SEIU in Ohio, filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge with the Labor Board on behalf of a nursing assistant who was fired after she helped to organize her union. After enduring constant harassment from management, she resorted to slitting her wrists in a suicide attempt. Fortunately, she was unsuccessful and was restored to her job in a matter of weeks by the Board. The employer in that case was not interested in appealing the ruling of the local Board administrative law judge since then Supreme Court precedent would have been protective.
Today’s Lords of Capital like, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Howard Schulz have untold billions of dollars wrung out of the unpaid wages of workers and can hire scores of law firms to write legal appeals to a receptive Supreme Court. It should be remembered that in 1937 the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act by a slim 5-4 vote in the Jones and Laughlin case.
Today, unsatisfied with chipping away at workers’ rights with lengthy legal wrangling with the Labor Board, Elon Must and Jeff Bezos want to eliminate the Board altogether. In January 2024, Musk filed a lawsuit challenging the NLRB’s constitutionality and after several rounds of hearings and appeals, the lawsuit is now before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Right to Work (for less) Texas (Space Exploration Technologies Corp. v. National Labor Relations Board, et. al., Case No. 24- cv-0001 (S.D. Tex., filed Jan. 4, 2024). This same court is also deciding whether to allow Musk to fire eight workers at SPACEX for wearing union T Shirts.
These legal developments will proceed whatever the outcome of the November elections. Despite heartening union organizing victories in the past two years, labor currently represents barely 10% of the workforce. At some point in the near future, workers and our unions will have to decide whatever terms of resistance and struggle are appropriate to the new material conditions of work in a “post-liberal” United States.
The four-part test for NLRB injunctions requires the party seeking the injunction to show “[1] he is likely to succeed on the merits, [2] that he is likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary relief, [3] that the balance of equities tips in his favor, and [4] that an injunction is in the public interest.” Winter, 555 U. S., at …Jun 14, 2024.
Be the first to comment