Happy Labor Day. There's no better time to talk about why workers’ rights would suffer if Brett Kavanaugh, whose hearings for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court start tomorrow, is confirmed.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 3, 2018
The Court's ruling in Janus v. AFSCME earlier this summer overturned a 40-year-old precedent to hold that public-sector workers with union contracts don't have to pay fees for collective bargaining expenses if they're not members.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 3, 2018
The Court has also recently granted corporations the right to deny workers reproductive health care and made it harder for workers to sue businesses by allowing companies to force employees to sign mandatory arbitration clauses with their contracts.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 3, 2018
In other words, the Court has already been widening the disparity in power between corporations and workers. Kavanaugh's record from his time as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia shows he'd help further that trend for a generation.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 3, 2018
In 2014, he dissented in a case where the Occupational Safety and Health Administration held SeaWorld accountable for the death of a trainer.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 3, 2018
Unions and labor movements are why we have workplace safety precautions, collective bargaining, weekends, minimum wages, and, yes, Labor Day.
We can't afford more damage to workers' rights. Make sure your senators hear from you: Let's #StopKavanaugh.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 3, 2018
Supplementary, from the ever-excellent Mr. Charles P. Pierce:
… Labor Day is a good time to think about the courts because it was in the courts that organized labor was most effectively crushed in this country, and it was in the courts that the way was cleared for it to flourish, and, it appears that the courts are being set up to crush it again.
From 1897 until approximately 1937—the end date is a matter of some dispute—the court’s relation to labor was defined by the horrendous decision in Lochner v. New York. Citing “freedom of contract” as a constitutional right, the decision was used through the decade to strike down all manner of regulations touching on business large and small. (Lochner itself was about working conditions in bakeries.) Unions, of course, came along with the deal. In Adair v. United States, the Court struck down a law that would have made it illegal for a company to fire employees for trying to organize.
Make no mistake. There is a strong strain of modern conservatism that is openly nostalgic for the Lochner Era; Rand Paul made the case a part of his campaign for president in 2016…
In the history of this country, there has not been an expansion of the middle-class without a strong, vibrant union presence. That doesn’t change just because factories move to Mexico, or because of robots. There simply is no other way for wages to rise generally other than having the people receiving those wages bargain collectively for them. That Labor Day is still a holiday at all, I guess, is something for which we can give thanks. The attack on labor itself begins again on Tuesday.
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