The Wagner Act Is Dead
In LA, organizing is beautiful
News and Views
On the 90-year anniversary of the Wagner Act, which established the NLRB, “unions should conclude that the act is already dead and begin to behave accordingly,” labor historian Joseph McCartin writes. Trump’s NLRB is operating without a quorum, and could soon be taken over by Republicans in the pocket of big business. Lawsuits are threatening to further gut the law. McCartin: Workers “should engage in the kinds of struggles, including mass civil disobedience, that made the act’s passage possible in the first place. By doing so, they will at least have some hope of opening a way where none currently exists for the passage of 21st-century legislation that protects workers’ capacity to organize and bargain collectively.”
Trump’s order to shut down Job Corps vocational training programs is undermining his efforts to reshore manufacturing jobs, CNN reports.
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker cut taxes on businesses earlier this summer – and is now arguing that the city can’t afford to pay its workers a living wage. “Sanitation workers in Philadelphia earn an average salary of about $40,655, according to findings by the Economic Research Institute, a firm that compiles salary and cost-of-living data,” Bloomberg reports. “The living wage in the Philadelphia-Camden region is more than triple that for residents with two children.” The city is resuming negotiations with DC 33 today.
AFGE celebrates a spate of victories in the OBBBA, with provisions removed that would have gutted collective bargaining in the federal sector.
Labor Notes looks at the ways unions are taking on ICE.
Today’s Win
Beauty shop workers are organizing with CWA in Los Angeles.