Last Tuesday, I argued in Jacobin that, for all the ways in which Justice Alito’s Janus decision was wrong, it made one important point. Justice Alito correctly noted the false distinction drawn by the Abood court between union’s “ideological” work in the electoral sphere and its “non-ideological” work in collective bargaining and contract enforcement. Abood‘s insistence that there was nothing ideological…
In a week chockful of major news about the American labor movement, no story has captured the imagination of workers and labor activists across the country like the West Virginia teachers’ strike. Despite having no legally protected right to strike or collectively bargain, and despite facing Republican control of both houses of the legislature and…
Advocates and scholars agree that the labor movement is in dire straits: shrinking union density, fewer successful elections, Trump appointees to the NLRB, and proliferating state free-rider laws all threaten labor’s power. Everyone knows that there’s a problem. The disagreement, however, is in the nature of the problem—and consequently, how to solve it. I submit…