Since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Harris v. Quinn last month, some have questioned the future of home care worker organizing. The ruling stated that unions cannot require home care workers who choose not to be represented by the union to pay fees. According to a recent article in Portside by Dave Jamieson, however, the SEIU is showing no signs of slowing down in its efforts to organize:
Jamieson writes:
After being dealt a major setback by the Supreme Court just two weeks ago, the Service Employees International Union is plowing ahead in its efforts to organize home care workers, filing a petition Tuesday for what could be one of the largest union elections in Minnesota history.
According to SEIU, the election would cover an estimated 26,000 Medicaid-funded home care workers in the state who assist the elderly and people with disabilities. Under a hotly debated law passed last year, unions in Minnesota are allowed to organize day care and home care workers who work in clients’ homes and are paid in part through the federal health care program.
Check out our very own Ed Ott, a distinguished lecturer here at the Murphy Institute, on MSNBCS’s The Cycle discussing his recent book New Labor in New York
In March, I traveled to Cuba with my family. We were able to go legally on a People to People license issued by the US government. Limited, legal travel is one of the ways the Obama administration has been easing restrictions between the two nations. As a requirement of our visa, we were mandated to adhere to a strict schedule of tours and programs that served as a cultural exchange, rather than a traditional vacation.
I want to give context to our trip and acknowledge my role as an outsider who was traveling within the bounds of a US-granted license and a tour run by the Cuban government. Despite these details, I learned an incredible amount that I feel has been mostly absent throughout my educational career in the United States. It was an incredible opportunity to view this experience through the lens of the Urban Studies program. Continue reading Observations on Cuba→
Jane McAlevey is working on her PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center. This article was written by originally posted in The Nation.
Unions are in trouble. Short of a giant meteor crashing on top of the nation’s union headquarters emblazoned with the words, “warning, you will soon be crushed by right-to-work laws,” few things could be clearer from the Supreme Court’s Harris v. Quinn ruling.
Harris v. Quinn unites some of the most toxic trends in American labor tradition. It resurrects the worst of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, the racially motivated, sexist concept of “excluded workers,” and then joins it with one of the worst provisions of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, the so-called “right-to-work” legal framework which attempts to gut unions from the inside-out. (Although “right to work” has historically been a state’s rights concept, Harris v. Quinn effectively nationalizes it.)
The five-to-four Supreme Court decision in Harris v. Quinn is a blow to organized labor, a movement that in recent decades has suffered one blow after another, with victories few and far between. But it is not as devastating as many unionists feared. The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation hoped to use this case involving Illinois homecare aides to overturn the 1977 ruling in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision which found it constitutional to require public employees who choose not to join a union to pay an “agency fee” to cover the costs of representing them. The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, took lots of potshots at Abood, but did not overturn it. Nonetheless, it ruled the agency fee illegal in this case, deeming the home aides involved not “full-fledged public employees” because under Illinois law they are jointly employed by the state and the individual clients they care for.
Why would one expect American unions to foster a broad insurgent culture? The legal framework, political and organizational for today’s unions goes back almost 80 years. It has always encouraged a culture of accommodation with the needs of production, output and efficiency and discouraged a broad insurgent culture of conflict, turmoil and disruption.
The Wagner Act strictures were not imposed on labor but rather demanded by it. The AFL in the 1930’s was not looking for social conflict and industrial strife but for stabilization. The CIO was looking for the same thing, institutional standing for unions, though they were willing to use disruption as a tactic to get it. The New Deal gave labor what it asked for, institutional protection. Labor gave the New Deal leaders what they needed in return; relatively stable production.
Unions viewed the Wagner Act as a fundamental pillar of American society, almost on the level of the Bill of Rights, like Social Security. Unions were here to stay this time. Public sector unionism’s growth comes from the post-World War 2 expansion of America’s version of a welfare state. Unions treated both the welfare state and the unions of workers who administer it as permanent features of American society more than as contested terrain. Union structures made responding to the growing contest over the terrain more difficult.Continue reading Another go-round on Unions as Consciousness Builders – Part 2: Hello & Goodbye with Far too little In Between→
A conversation about workers, communities and social justice
Need help with the Commons?
Email us at commonshelpsite@gmail.com so we can respond to your questions and requests. Please email from your CUNY email address if possible. Or visit our help site for more information:
