My Granddaughter, 2023

 

 

Looking for something positive to celebrate on New Year’s Eve? Consider lifting a glass to the hardworking people behind these inspiring victories of 2023

 

1. The ‘Year of the Strike’

More than half a million American workers walked off the job this year. In October, companies lost more workdays to strikes than in any month during the past 40 years. 

Big 3 auto workers, Hollywood writers and actors, Las Vegas and Los Angeles hotel staff, and Kaiser Permanente health care employees were among those who used strikes to score big bargaining table wins. For UPS drivers, the mere threat of a Teamsters strike was enough to secure historic wage hikes and safety protections. 

After  renewing contracts with Ford, GM, Stellantis, and UPS, the UAW and the Teamsters doubled down on efforts to organize the unorganized. The Teamsters picketed outside 25 Amazon warehouses, demanding a fair contract for unionized drivers at a California-based delivery service for the notoriously anti-union retailer. The UAW set their sights on non-unionized car companies, causing so much indigestion among Nissan, Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai executives that they immediately hiked wages for their U.S. employees.  

2. Black worker organizing in the south 

To move the needle on the country’s dismally low 6 percent unionization rate, the labor movement will need to make inroads in tough territory, particularly in historically anti-union southern states that have been magnets for investment. 

Two union victories in 2023 are the latest proof that this goal is not impossible. The United Steelworkers won an election at a Blue Bird bus factory in Georgia with nearly 1,500 predominantly Black workers. In three Alabama cities, AT&T Mobility workers at In Home Expert hubs joined the Communications Workers of America.

3. A crack in the anti-union tech sector

The past year also saw union progress in another historically union-averse territory: the tech sector. Earlier this month, Microsoft forged an agreement with the AFL-CIO to remain neutral in organizing drives among their U.S.-based workers. This will make it easier for about 100,000 Microsoft employees to unionize, with potential ripple effects across the industry. 

4. New trifecta states

In Michigan and Minnesota, pro-worker state legislators hit the ground running after Democrats won state trifectas in 2022. 

Minnesota passed a blizzard of pro-labor reforms, including paid sick leave for most workers, minimum pay and benefits for nursing home staff, and wage theft protections for construction workers. Teachers will be able to negotiate over class sizes and nurses will have a greater say in staffing levels. The new laws also ban non-compete agreements and “captive audience” meetings designed to undercut union support.

This year Michigan became the first state in six decades to roll back anti-union “right-to-work” laws. They also restored a “prevailing wage” law requiring construction contractors to pay union wages and benefits on state-funded projects.

5. Cities lead the way on low-wage worker protections

The federal minimum wage for tipped workers has been stuck at $2.13 since 1991. In that vacuum, states and cities are taking action. This year, restaurant servers and other advocates in the nation’s capital successfully beat back last-ditch industry attempts to undercut a victorious 2022 ballot initiative to phase out the local subminimum tipped wage. After a multi-year, hard-fought campaign, DC’s tipped workers got their first raise this past summer, putting them on track to earn the full local minimum wage by 2027. The Chicago City Council also passed a five-year tipped wage phaseout plan, set to begin in 2024. 

App-based delivery drivers in New York City had to fight back in 2023 against Uber, DoorDash, and other corporations’ efforts to block introduction of the nation’s first minimum wage for their occupation. Gig companies finally lost their legal challenges to the pay rule in late November. Delivery driver pay rose to $17.96 an hour on December 4 and will increase to $19.96 when the legislation takes full effect in 2025. 

6. College campuses as labor hotbeds

Organizing among graduate and medical students continued to explode in 2023, with the highest number of union elections among these groups than in any year since the 1990s. In the first four months of 2023 alone, over 14,000 graduate students on five campuses voted to join the United Electrical union — all by margins of over 80 percent. Campuses across the country coordinated organizing efforts through a series of teach-ins and other events under the banner of Labor Spring, an initiative that will continue in 2024.  

7. Stock buyback blowback

Many of the labor battles of 2023 skewered corporate executives for underpaying workers while blowing money on stock buybacks, a financial maneuver that artificially inflates CEO stock-based pay. Two precedent-setting federal policies to rein in buybacks also took effect in 2023. For the first time, corporations faced a one percent excise tax on buybacks. The Biden administration also began giving companies a leg up in the competition for new semiconductor subsidies if they agree to forgo all stock buybacks for five years. This important precedent should be expanded to all companies receiving any form of public funds.  

8. Collective bargaining requirements on federally funded construction projects

With megabillions in new public investment flowing into infrastructure projects, it’s critical that the administration ensure these taxpayer dollars support good jobs. This week, Biden officials took an important step forward by finalizing regulations requiring the use of “project labor agreements” between employers and workers for large federal construction projects. The terms of these pre-hire collective bargaining agreements must cover all parties — contractors, subcontractors, and unions. This important rule should be expanded beyond construction to contractors that provide goods and other services.

9. Trashing “junk” fees

Working class Americans fork out tens of billions of dollars every year on deceptive, hidden charges that raise the cost of banking and internet services, concerts and movies, rental cars and apartments, and more. In October, President Joe Biden announced a plan to put these “junk fees” where they belong — in the trash.

Under the plan, the Federal Trade Commission aims to force companies to disclose the total price of goods and services up front and slap violators with big fines. This will mean no hidden fees — and more money in working families’ pockets.

10. NLRB rulings on Amazon and Starbucks

Anyone wondering whether our labor laws need fixing need look no further than the fact that Starbucks and Amazon have been able to get away with refusing to negotiate with workers who voted to unionize for well more than a year. (Two years for the path-breaking Buffalo, New York Starbucks workers). On the positive side, Biden appointees at the National Labor Relations Board seem to be making the most of their current authority and capacity. 

In August, the labor board issued a ruling that will make union-busting harder in cases where a majority of workers have signed union cards but the employer still demands an election. Under the ruling, bosses who engage in unfair labor practices in these situations will now be forced to recognize and bargain with the union without an election.

In the meantime, the NLRB is continuing to try to hold Starbucks and Amazon accountable for rampant labor rights violations. The board has 240 open or settled charges against Amazon in 26 states and they’ve issued more than 100 complaints against Starbucks, covering hundreds of accusations of threats or retaliation against union supporters and failure to bargain in good faith. Most recently, the NLRB ordered the reopening of 23 Starbucks cafes, alleging the company had closed them to suppress union activity, in violation of federal law. 

Reflecting on 2023, Starbucks barista and union organizer Shep Searl marveled at how diverse workers, “from Teamsters to actors,” demonstrated that there are many ways to win through collective action. 

“Every day, we’ve been absorbing that information and utilizing it in our mobilization and escalation plan,” Searl told Inequality.org. “We aren’t going anywhere and so much of that is inspired by the other campaigns. If we stand together, there’s no mountain we cannot climb.”

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project and co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies.

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Source URL: https://portside.org/2023-12-25/10-victories-working-class-2023

Readers of Today’s World View may agree that it’s been a grim year

 

In Ukraine, a grinding counteroffensive against Russia’s invasion lurched into a bleak stalemate. In the Middle East, a decades-old conflict exploded into an unprecedented, high-intensity war in the Gaza Strip. The bulk of the territory’s inhabitants have been driven from their homes, some 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in a matter of weeks, and a quarter of Gaza’s population is “starving,” according to the United Nations, which warned Thursday that the risk of famine in the territory is “increasing each day.”

“It doesn’t get any worse,” Arif Husain, chief economist for the United Nations World Food Program, told reporters. “I have never seen something at the scale that is happening in Gaza. And at this speed.”

While these two wars consumed the attention of major global news outlets (and this daily newsletter) for much of 2023, other crises smoldered on. In Sudan and Myanmar, ruinous civil wars, marked by myriad atrocities and reports of war crimes, are collapsing already dysfunctional states and provoking spiraling humanitarian crises. Over a wide swath of sub-Saharan Africa, coups and power grabs roiled the region. Social instability and post-pandemic economic pressures fueled surges in migration across the world.

2023 will probably be the hottest year on record, with heat waves scourging every continent, accompanied by other extreme climactic events. Droughts and floods were both more acute — the most viscerally shocking moment came arguably in September, when heavy rains led to the failure of dams and flash floods that killed more than 11,000 in northeastern Libya. “This disaster is of mythic proportions,” a Libyan health official told my colleagues at the time.

In the face of such calamity, one would hope that the new year would bring better news. But, as your humble harbinger of bad tidings, I have to apologize: There’s a lot that can go wrong in 2024, and many crises that will get worse.

The war in Gaza is reaching a dangerous tipping point. While Israeli officials vow a long campaign, the current fighting is pushing Gaza’s 2.2 million people to the brink. The territory is the deadliest place in the world to be a civilian. Before Oct. 7, when the militant group Hamas launched its strike on southern Israel, 80 percent of Gaza’s population required humanitarian assistance. Now, everyone does, and barely a trickle of what’s needed is getting into the besieged territory. Aid organizations and myriad world leaders are calling for a cease-fire and a surge of relief aid into Gaza. But absent a cessation of hostilities, the war could convulse the region, bringing in anti-Israel factions based in Lebanon and Syria, and spawning an unprecedented flow of Palestinian refugees into Egypt.

In its annual “emergency watch list” published this month, the International Rescue Committee ranked the conflict in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories as the second most glaring crisis to watch in 2024. The first was the far-less-discussed civil war in Sudan, where eight months of fighting between the country’s military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have left more than half the country in need of humanitarian aid and forced some 6 million people from their homes. Some 19 million children are without education as the conflict has shuttered thousands of schools.

“Sudan has become the world’s largest displacement crisis,” the IRC’s Elshafie Mohamed Ahmed said in the report. “The ability to deliver aid is hindered by the lack of humanitarian access and funds. The ethnic, tribal and regional polarization of the current war is further threatening the limited access currently available.”

Africa is home to the bulk of the other potential hot spots, as listed by the IRC. Three “coup belt” nations in West Africa — the junta-led states of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — are all in the rankings. The Burkinabe military is floundering in the face of a surge in Islamist militancy, with renegade factions controlling more than half the country. In Mali and Niger, where similar dynamics are on show, growing food insecurity and the drying up of foreign aid are plunging millions toward greater peril.

The IRC’s 10 “watch list” nations account for 86 percent of all people in humanitarian need globally. Lurking behind the political instability consuming these societies is the specter of a warming planet, as droughts and other climate shocks affect some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. “What were once separate circles of crisis are now a Venn diagram with an expanding intersection,” wrote IRC President David Miliband. “Three decades ago, 44% of conflicts happened in climate-vulnerable states. Now that figure is 67%.”

The Biden administration has most successfully held the line in shoring up Western support for Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression. But its scope for action will be constrained in a divisive election year, and even Washington’s capacity to fund Kyiv is in doubt — let alone its ability to get its arms around myriad crises elsewhere, from Somalia to Afghanistan to gang-dominated Haiti, teetering on the verge of state collapse.

In Asia, an election in Taiwan may be marked by new provocations from China at a time when the Biden administration is trying to bring some stability to its relationship with Beijing. But the biggest conflagration could take place in Myanmar, where the ruling junta is reeling from an offensive launched by a coalition of rebel militias and seeing mounting desertion in its ranks.

The current trajectory, however, “does not point towards a near-term regime collapse on the battlefield, absent unforeseen developments,” noted Morgan Michaels, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “Myanmar is instead headed towards a new phase of the conflict, marked by a weakened but still dangerous regime, more intense violence and greater uncertainty.”   

-Ishaan Tharoor and Sammy Westfall for the Washington Post

 

Why 14th Amendment bars Trump from office: A constitutional law scholar explains principle behind Colorado Supreme Court ruling

In 2024, former President Donald Trump will face some of his greatest challenges: criminal court cases, primary opponents and constitutional challenges to his eligibility to hold the office of president again. The Colorado Supreme Court has pushed that latter piece to the forefront, ruling on Dec. 19, 2023, that Trump cannot appear on Colorado’s 2024 presidential ballot because of his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

The reason is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended. Section 3 of that amendment wrote into the Constitution the principle President Abraham Lincoln set out just three months after the first shots were fired in the Civil War. On July 4, 1861, he spoke to Congress, declaring that “when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.”

The text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states, in full:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

 

To me as a scholar of constitutional law, each sentence and sentence fragment captures the commitment made by the nation in the wake of the Civil War to govern by constitutional politics. People seeking political and constitutional changes must play by the rules set out in the Constitution. In a democracy, people cannot substitute force, violence or intimidation for persuasion, coalition building and voting.

The power of the ballot

The first words of Section 3 describe various offices that people can only hold if they satisfy the constitutional rules for election or appointment. The Republicans who wrote the amendment repeatedly declared that Section 3 covered all offices established by the Constitution. That included the presidency, a point many participants in framing, ratifying and implementation debates over constitutional disqualification made explicitly, as documented in the records of debate in the 39th Congress, which wrote and passed the amendment.

Senators, representatives and presidential electors are spelled out because some doubt existed when the amendment was debated in 1866 as to whether they were officers of the United States, although they were frequently referred to as such in the course of congressional debates.

No one can hold any of the offices enumerated in Section 3 without the power of the ballot. They can only hold office if they are voted into it – or nominated and confirmed by people who have been voted into office. No office mentioned in the first clause of Section 3 may be achieved by force, violence or intimidation.

A required oath

The next words in Section 3 describe the oath “to support [the] Constitution” that Article 6 of the Constitution requires all office holders in the United States to take.

The people who wrote Section 3 insisted during congressional debates that anyone who took an oath of office, including the president, were subject to Section 3’s rules. The presidential oath’s wording is slightly different from that of other federal officers, but everyone in the federal government swears to uphold the Constitution before being allowed to take office.

These oaths bind officeholders to follow all the rules in the Constitution. The only legitimate government officers are those who hold their offices under the constitutional rules. Lawmakers must follow the Constitution’s rules for making laws. Officeholders can only recognize laws that were made by following the rules – and they must recognize all such laws as legitimate.

This provision of the amendment ensures that their oaths of office obligate officials to govern by voting rather than violence.

Defining disqualification

Section 3 then says people can be disqualified from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Legal authorities from the American Revolution to the post-Civil War Reconstruction understood an insurrection to have occurred when two or more people resisted a federal law by force or violence for a public, or civic, purpose.

Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Insurrection, Burr’s Rebellion, John Brown’s Raid and other events were insurrections, even when the goal was not overturning the government.

What these events had in common was that people were trying to prevent the enforcement of laws that were consequences of persuasion, coalition building and voting. Or they were trying to create new laws by force, violence and intimidation.

These words in the amendment declare that those who turn to bullets when ballots fail to provide their desired result cannot be trusted as democratic officials. When applied specifically to the events on Jan. 6, 2021, the amendment declares that those who turn to violence when voting goes against them cannot hold office in a democratic nation.

A chance at clemency

The last sentence of Section 3 announces that forgiveness is possible. It says “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” – the ineligibility of individuals or categories of people to hold office because of having participated in an insurrection or rebellion.

For instance, Congress might remove the restriction on office-holding based on evidence that the insurrectionist was genuinely contrite. It did so for repentant former Confederate General James Longstreet.

Or Congress might conclude in retrospect that violence was appropriate, such as against particularly unjust laws. Given their powerful anti-slavery commitments and abolitionist roots, I believe that Republicans in the House and Senate in the late 1850s would almost certainly have allowed people who violently resisted the fugitive slave laws to hold office again. This provision of the amendment says that bullets may substitute for ballots and violence for voting only in very unusual circumstances.

A clear conclusion

Taken as a whole, the structure of Section 3 leads to the conclusion that Donald Trump is one of those past or present government officials who by violating his oath of allegiance to the constitutional rules has forfeited his right to present and future office.

Trump’s supporters say the president is neither an “officer under the United States” nor an “officer of the United States” as specified in Section 3. Therefore, they say, he is exempt from its provisions.

But in fact, both common sense and history demonstrate that Trump was an officer, an officer of the United States and an officer under the United States for constitutional purposes. Most people, even lawyers and constitutional scholars like me, do not distinguish between those specific phrases in ordinary discourse. The people who framed and ratified Section 3 saw no distinction. Exhaustive research by Trump supporters has yet to produce a single assertion to the contrary that was made in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Yet scholars John Vlahoplus and Gerard Magliocca are daily producing newspaper and other reports asserting that presidents are covered by Section 3.

Significant numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate agreed that Donald Trump violated his oath of office immediately before, during and immediately after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Most Republican senators who voted against his conviction did so on the grounds that they did not have the power to convict a president who was no longer in office. Most of them did not dispute that Trump participated in an insurrection. A judge in Colorado also found that Trump “engaged in insurrection,” which was the basis for the state’s Supreme Court ruling barring him from the ballot.

Constitutional democracy is rule by law. Those who have demonstrated their rejection of rule by law may not apply, no matter their popularity. Jefferson Davis participated in an insurrection against the United States in 1861. He was not eligible to become president of the U.S. four years later, or to hold any other state or federal office ever again. If Davis was barred from office, then the conclusion must be that Trump is too – as a man who participated in an insurrection against the United States in 2021.

-Mark A. Graber, University System of Maryland Regents Professor of Law, University of Maryland

-The Conversation