Washington, D.C. – In two official letters last week, a diverse, prominent chorus of voices called for senators to swiftly confirm the full package of nominees submitted by President Obama for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a step necessary to free the agency from its current limbo status and allow it to function in its role protecting workers’ rights in the United States.

The first letter, signed by nearly 400 notable professors from colleges and universities across the country, states:

The scholars underscoring the need for a functional NLRB include: Catherine Fisk, Professor of Law, University of California at Irvine; Thomas Kochan, Professor of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; John Logan, Associate Professor of Labor & Employment, San Francisco State University; Nancy MacLean, Professor of History, Duke University; Ruth Milkman, Professor of Sociology, City University of New York; and Dorian Warren, Associate Professor of International & Public Affairs, Columbia University.

To view the academic letter and full list of signatures, click here.

The National Workers’ Rights Board – a group of diverse national and local leaders representing faith, civil rights, social justice, human rights, and academic communities – also released a letter calling for Senate action on the NLRB to protect the vital rights of employees to collectively improve their job standards. The letter, signed by noted authors Barbara Ehrenreich, Dave Zirin, and Bill Fletcher Jr., National Organization for Women President Terry O’Neill, Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance Ai-jen Poo, President of the Alliance for Justice Nan Aron, former U.S. Congressman and House Minority Whip David Bonior, and Center for Community Change (CCC) Director Deepak Bhargava, states:

“The strength of our democracy is tied to our nation’s ability to uphold and uplift workers’ rights. America’s workers deserve much more than the status quo to fully protect their rights on the job. Yet they do not deserve to have their basic workplace rights invalidated due to Congressional inaction.”

To view the National Workers’ Rights Board letter and full list of signatures, click here .

On May 16, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions will hold the first hearing on the pending NLRB nominations. At present, two of the five seats on the Board are vacant and the term of one of the three current Board members, Chairman Pearce, will expire this August. Without action by the Senate, the Board will soon be left without the quorum of at least three members that is required for it to function, leaving approximately 350 cases and all of the appeals generated by the Noel Canning decision in flux.

The package of five nominees includes three current members of the Board – Chairman Mark Pearce and Members Sharon Block and Richard Griffin – and two nominees who have not served previously, attorneys Philip Miscimarra and Harry Johnson, who have represented management in disputes with employees.

For further background on why workers need a functioning NLRB and how employers are taking advantage of the vacancies and judicial overreach to violate workers’ rights, click here.

Acting Secretary of Labor Seth Harris listens May 14 as fast food worker Laura Bailey describes the financial stresses of raising a daughter while earning $7.80 an hour. Between them is Jonathan Martin, another Baltimore worker who would benefit from a minimum wage increase. (U.S. Department of Labor)

BALTIMORE—With one minimum wage hike proposal after another languishing in Congress, some advocates may have given up hope of an increase anytime soon. But Acting Labor Secretary Seth Harris is not discouraged.Harris, who has been the interim head of the Department of Labor since Hilda Solis’s resignation in January, has taken the agency on

road in favor of a wage raise. He traveled to Baltimore this week to meet with low-wage workers and promote President Barack Obama’s State of the Union proposal to lift the federal minimum from $7.25 to $9.00 an hour. The president’s plan would also automatically link future increases to inflation, as a way of preventing the gradual erosion of purchasing power that has plagued low-wage workers since the 1980s, Harris says.

The labor department’s promotional tour has hit some 23 cities since the February 12 State of the Union address, with more to come. The effort has been largely overshadowed, however, by the March 18 nomination of Thomas Perez as the new secretary of labor and a confirmation fight that is still underway in the U.S. Senate. Nevertheless, Harris says he is pressing forward because “there is a lot of hunger out there” to see the wage increased.

The reasons for that hunger were all too clear this week at Our Daily Bread, a Catholic Charities of Baltimore center that offers free meals to the needy and employment services to the city’s poor. Some 35 low-income workers met there with Harris to tell their stories of scratching out a living on paltry wages and insufficient public services. They are among an estimated 15 million workers in 49 states who would see an immediate raise under the Obama proposal. (Though 19 states have minimum wages higher than the federal rate, only Washington’s is above $9.00.)

For example, 23-year-old Maurice Brown relies on his job at a 7-Eleven convenience store to support both himself and his 2-year-old daughter. But the $8.00 an hour he’s paid is not enough, he says, and he is currently behind on his rent. Brown adds it is near impossible for a convicted felon like himself to get a better job, so the minimum wage law is especially important. Another $1.00 an hour, he says, would make a difference in keeping up with his monthly bills.

Likewise, Erin Breen, a food server, says her job sometimes brings in as little as $100 a week. That’s because her wage at the Sunshine Grille is actually $3.63 an hour, a so-called “tipped wage” that assumes she will receive tips from customers that will bring her income up to minimum wage levels. The tips flow freely at times, she says, but not consistently. In the past she has relied on food stamps to help feed her 2-year-old son, she says, but she no longer qualifies because she has a full-time job.

Employers who offer a server wage are supposed to ensure that workers receive enough tip income so that wait staff are assured the equivalent of the minimum wage, Harris explains, but that doesn’t always happen in practice. The labor department’s enforcement division is constantly on the lookout to deter or punish employers who skirt the server rules, he says.

Obama’s proposal would raise the federal tipped minimum wage, currently $2.13 an hour, by 85 cents each year until it reaches 70 percent of the regular minimum.

Harris notes that in personally conducting about a dozen similar meetings with low-wage workers in recent weeks that the names of very prominent, very successful corporations keep popping up. That happened again this week when Baltimore resident Laura Bailey discussed her job at a Wendy’s, a fast food restaurant, where she earns $7.80 an hour. A single mother like Breen, Bailey says the hardships of low pay often fall hardest on her 15-year-old daughter. There is no money for most of the simple pleasures that mean a lot to a teenage girl, her mother says.

These stories illustrate that some of the widely used arguments against raising the minimum wage are no more than contemporary myths, Harris says. One of the most popular arguments is that most minimum wage workers are teenagers engaged in casual work—that they work only to earn money for spending on luxury spending at the local mall. This is demonstrably untrue, he says, with less than 20 percent of minimum wage workers still in their teen years. Further, more than 25 percent of all minimum wage workers are helping to support their own children, according to Harris.

Harris says his immediate goal is to build public support for Obama’s proposal, an implicit admission that it faces some very serious obstacles in the political arena. With a majority of members in the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans could easily kill the effort. Harris insists he is not engaged in vote counting, but the labor department road show seems to be a recognition that to gain any momentum, the proposal will need a grassroots push.

“The surveys show that 3 out of 4 people are in favor of raising the minimum wage, so we have a solid base,” he says. But this public support–like the strong public support for recently failed gun safety legislation—has not yet translated into the votes necessary for legislative success.

Eager to avoid enmeshing himslef in partisan congressional battles, Harris mildly offers up the suggestion that since Republican President George W. Bush signed the most recent increase into law in 2008, there is no need to consider Republican opposition monolithic. From a broader historical perspective, he says, the federal minimum wage marks its 75th anniversary this year, so it has a long history of bipartisan support that deserves to be continued.

Bruce Vail is a Baltimore-based freelance writer with decades of experience covering labor and business stories for newspapers, magazines and new media. He was a reporter for Bloomberg BNA’s Daily Labor Report, covering collective bargaining issues in a wide range of industries, and a maritime industry reporter and editor for the Journal of Commerce, serving both in the newspaper’s New York City headquarters and in the Washington, D.C. bureau.

This post originally appeared on the  Working In These  Times blog.

Tomorrow I will speak at a rally in Chicago to commemorate the Republic Steel Memorial Day Massacre of 1937 when 10 striking members of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) were shot down by the Chicago Police Department, because they were on strike for the 8 hour day and the right to organize a union. They were murdered for striking for an 8 hour day and the right to organize a union.

Workers were organizing and striking all over industrial America. The National Labor Relations Act had been passed, but it had yet to be upheld by the Supreme Court. The CIO and the autoworkers had begun sit-down strikes in plant after plant. Unprovoked beatings and killings were common. Workers and unions were still suffering the bloodiest labor history in the western world. Police forces and the National Guard had been routinely used to bust heads, break organizing efforts, and break strikes. The United Steelworkers were not yet a fully formed union. SWOC had begun the Little Steel strike to win contracts at the second tier of steel companies. The modern American labor movement was being birthed and it was a very tough delivery.

It was in that context that workers went on strike at Republic Steel and the massacre occurred.

It wasn’t the first massacre of workers and it wasn’t the last. We have not yet seen the last massacre of workers in struggle in America.

Most of the strikes and brutal repression of workers from the 1870s to 1940 were over two main issues – the freedom to organize unions and the right to an 8 hour day. As workers and union leaders said, we are not animals. We are human beings and we need enough time off to be parents, to read, to be human beings.

Last week Republicans in Congress introduced legislation to destroy the 8 hour day. Let that sink in.

Stewart Acuff served as director of organizing for the AFL-CIO. He has been a community organizer and union organizer for 25 years and is a member of  the National Steering Committee of Jobs with Justice.

Image Source: Photo by Judy Seidman of League for Industrial Democracy, Poster by Anita Willcox (1932) via Wikimedia Commons

Harold Meyerson

One aspect that defines our current economy is that things are happening that shouldn’t be happening. I don’t mean that things are happening that are illegal or immoral. (Well, some of them are immoral, but that’s not what I mean.) Rather, things are happening that defy economic logic—a slippery term that really means, the economic patterns of roughly the past half-century.

The first such logic-defying thing is that corporate profits are soaring even as corporate revenues limp along. The quarterly reports of S&P 500 corporations for the first three months of 2013 are almost entirely in now, and they show profits rising by more than 5 percent even while revenues have risen by less than 1 percent. Seventy percent of these companies—the largest publicly traded U.S. firms—exceeded the analysts’ profit projections. On the other hand, 60 percent came in under the projections for their sales. 

Were this disjuncture just a one-time epiphenomenon, we could pass it off as a statistical oddity, but it’s not. Profits of American corporations have become decoupled from the other indices of American economic well-being with which they’ve historically been linked. They currently comprise the largest share of the nation’s economy that they have since World War II. Yet the increase in consumer spending in the 15 quarters since the recession’s official end is lower than its increase 15 quarters after the recessions of 1982, 1991, and 2001 ended. Similarly, 15 quarters after the recession ended, the increase in GDP is lower than it was in those three preceding recessions. So spending and growth are lagging while profits soar. What gives?

Part of the answer is that the S&P 500 now sell roughly half their wares abroad, so they’re less dependent on the health of the U.S. economy to hit or exceed their profit targets. But how to account for the increase in profits when revenues—which, like profits, are measured globally—also decline?

The answer is that profits are increasing because corporations are getting by with fewer workers than they employed before the crash of 2008, and they’re paying those workers less. Wages and compensation (that is, wages plus benefits) now make up the smallest shares of GDP that they have in 50 years, and their decline has proceeded without interruption since 2001. According to a report from JP Morgan Chase’s Chief Investment Office, two-thirds of the increase in corporate profits between the end of the dot-com bust and the collapse of 2008 is directly attributable to the decline in the wages they paid their employees. As the share going to profits has continued to increase since that report appeared, and the share going to wages has kept on decreasing, the centrality of wage suppression to profit maximization has continued to grow.

Certainly, companies have been replacing workers with machines wherever possible. But they are also replacing their own employees with temps—workers hired from employment agencies to whom they pay no benefits and whose wages can be lower than those of regular employees. Which brings us to the second anomaly in recent economic statistics: For the first time in modern economic history, temps are working longer hours than regular employees. Historically, an employer’s own workers have worked longer hours than those brought in on a temporary basis from employment agencies. But in 2009, the average workweek of temps began to exceed the average workweek of all employees. The average number of hours that Americans work still hovered at 34.4 in March, the latest month for which we have figures. Temps, however, worked an average of 35.2 hours – more than they did not only during the Recession, as The New York Times’ Catherine Rampell points out, but during the years preceding the recession as well. We can reasonably infer that employers are opting to substitute temps for workers they once would have hired outright.

The metrics of the American economy may have gone topsy-turvy on us, but that doesn’t mean they’re inexplicable. If profits are rising while revenues flatline, and if employees from temp agencies are putting in longer hours than anybody else, it’s chiefly because American workers have lost the capacity to defend their interests, and their employers are exploiting their weakness to extract profits they could not otherwise attain. American capitalism has become a zero-sum game, and it’s American workers who’ve been zeroed out.ne aspect that defines our current economy is that things are happening that shouldn’t be happening. I don’t mean that things are happening that are illegal or immoral. (Well, some of them are immoral, but that’s not what I mean.) Rather, things are happening that defy economic logic—a slippery term that really means, the economic patterns of roughly the past half-century.

The first such logic-defying thing is that corporate profits are soaring even as corporate revenues limp along. The quarterly reports of S&P 500 corporations for the first three months of 2013 are almost entirely in now, and they show profits rising by more than 5 percent even while revenues have risen by less than 1 percent. Seventy percent of these companies—the largest publicly traded U.S. firms—exceeded the analysts’ profit projections. On the other hand, 60 percent came in under the projections for their sales.

Were this disjuncture just a one-time epiphenomenon, we could pass it off as a statistical oddity, but it’s not. Profits of American corporations have become decoupled from the other indices of American economic well-being with which they’ve historically been linked. They currently comprise the largest share of the nation’s economy that they have since World War II. Yet the increase in consumer spending in the 15 quarters since the recession’s official end is lower than its increase 15 quarters after the recessions of 1982, 1991, and 2001 ended. Similarly, 15 quarters after the recession ended, the increase in GDP is lower than it was in those three preceding recessions. So spending and growth are lagging while profits soar. What gives?

Part of the answer is that the S&P 500 now sell roughly half their wares abroad, so they’re less dependent on the health of the U.S. economy to hit or exceed their profit targets. But how to account for the increase in profits when revenues—which, like profits, are measured globally—also decline?

The answer is that profits are increasing because corporations are getting by with fewer workers than they employed before the crash of 2008, and they’re paying those workers less. Wages and compensation (that is, wages plus benefits) now make up the smallest shares of GDP that they have in 50 years, and their decline has proceeded without interruption since 2001. According to a report from JP Morgan Chase’s Chief Investment Office, two-thirds of the increase in corporate profits between the end of the dot-com bust and the collapse of 2008 is directly attributable to the decline in the wages they paid their employees. As the share going to profits has continued to increase since that report appeared, and the share going to wages has kept on decreasing, the centrality of wage suppression to profit maximization has continued to grow.

Certainly, companies have been replacing workers with machines wherever possible. But they are also replacing their own employees with temps—workers hired from employment agencies to whom they pay no benefits and whose wages can be lower than those of regular employees. Which brings us to the second anomaly in recent economic statistics: For the first time in modern economic history, temps are working longer hours than regular employees. Historically, an employer’s own workers have worked longer hours than those brought in on a temporary basis from employment agencies. But in 2009, the average workweek of temps began to exceed the average workweek of all employees. The average number of hours that Americans work still hovered at 34.4 in March, the latest month for which we have figures. Temps, however, worked an average of 35.2 hours – more than they did not only during the Recession, as The New York Times’ Catherine Rampell points out, but during the years preceding the recession as well. We can reasonably infer that employers are opting to substitute temps for workers they once would have hired outright.

The metrics of the American economy may have gone topsy-turvy on us, but that doesn’t mean they’re inexplicable. If profits are rising while revenues flatline, and if employees from temp agencies are putting in longer hours than anybody else, it’s chiefly because American workers have lost the capacity to defend their interests, and their employers are exploiting their weakness to extract profits they could not otherwise attain. American capitalism has become a zero-sum game, and it’s American workers who’ve been zeroed out.

Harold Meyerson is the editor-at-large at The American Prospect and a columnist for The Washington Post.  He is an vice-chair ofDemocratic Socialists of  America.

Register at labornotes.org/newyork

The port of Savannah, Georgia generates some $14.9 million in income each year and brings in goods that are dispensed throughout the South—including to a massive Wal-Mart distribution center in the nearby city of Statesboro. Savannah is now the country’s fourth largest container port, and the fastest growing. Traffic at the port went up 11 percent between 2008 and 2012 even as the rest of the country suffered through recession.

The wealth generated at the port, though, hasn’t trickled down. While Wal-Mart and other retailers are doing just fine, the products they sell are transported by port truck drivers who still make low wages—a nationwide average of about $12 an hour. Since the industry was deregulated in the late 1970s, port truck drivers have been classified by their employers as “independent contractors,” meaning that they’re paid by the load, not by the hour, and the bosses don’t shell out for taxes or benefits.

“We need benefits, we need retirement just like everybody in the office does,” says port truck driver John Jackson, part of the Savannah Port Drivers Organizing Committee. “We’re doing all the work and they’re getting the gravy, in a sense. They’re getting a salary, they don’t have to pay out of their salary to try to keep equipment up.”

The workers have to pay for and maintain their own trucks, effectively forcing them to pay to work. Because of that, and because the workers are mostly black, a 2010 report [PDF] from the National Employment Law Project and the labor federation Change to Win calls the situation of the truckers “sharecropping on wheels.” Some of them are forced to lease trucks from the companies they work for, meaning that they’re literally paying their bosses to be able to do their jobs. The report estimates that these costs can run up to 60 percent of the drivers’ income.

“By the time we’ve taken out for fuel, insurances, our cell phones that we have to have at the companies that we’re with, by the time we get all those deductions, then it’s time to pay bills, we’re down to nothing,” says port truck driver Carol Cauley, another member of the organizing committee. “We kind of have to choose bills or family.”

Lewis Grant, also a driver and committee member, adds, “With funds being low there’s some tough decisions that I have to make on a weekly basis. Do I buy new tires for my truck or do I put food in the refrigerator? Do I send my kids to day care this week?”

Across industries, classifying workers as independent contractors is a common way for employers to evade the costs and responsibilities of employment. Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, in the foreword to the report, writes, “Millions of employees are misclassified by their employers as independent contractors, often as an excuse to cut costs and avoid paying taxes. Thus disguised, these employees become workers who fall outside the protection of most labor and employment laws that our civil rights and labor law communities have fought so hard to secure.”

The report looks at three different legal frameworks for classifying workers as employees and concludes that the majority of port truck drivers are employees, not independent entrepreneurs. It found that the companies that employ the drivers exert significant controls over their behavior, including drug testing, setting schedules, and dispatching workers to do jobs. Drivers in the Savannah organizing committee tell stories of having fees deducted from their checks for tire replacement and being required to pay for company cell phones. They’re restricted to one company at a time, without the ability to make extra money on the side.

Independent contractors also don’t have the right to form a union, leaving the port truckers without an official voice. Meanwhile, the companies for which they work face continuing pressure from big-box retailers like Wal-Mart to lower their costs—pressure which results, inevitably, in the workers being squeezed, with no real power to resist.

The drivers in Savannah are coming together to challenge their misclassification, but also to try to find a way to organize now, whether or not they are classified as employees. The question is, “How can workers excluded, not just organize as a lobbying force, but begin to engage in forms of collective action?” asks Ben Speight, an organizer with Teamsters Local 728 in Georgia. The work done by Seattle-area taxicab drivers, for instance, who associated with Teamsters Local 117, is a possible example for these port drivers.

The South presents unique challenges to organizing, certainly—Georgia has long been a so-called “right-to-work” state, and unions have almost no foothold there. But the ports serve as an integral part of the global supply chain and thus present an opportunity for the workers to exercise some power. Federal money has been authorized for the dredging of the Savannah River to deepen the port (and to mitigate environmental consequences from the dredging), meaning that there will be a lot of focus on Savannah in the coming years.

On June 1, the Savannah drivers will hold a community/driver forum with Larry Benjamin of the U.S. Department of Labor’s wage and hour division, as well as faith and community leaders, and elected officials from the state legislature and Savannah City Council. The coalition hosting the event calls itself “Stand Up for Savannah,” and it’s looking beyond just the issue of driver misclassification to discuss ways in which the newfound wealth at the port could benefit everyone.

Included in the discussion, along with the wages and conditions of the drivers, will be the question of the condition of the trucks. Because the drivers have to pay to maintain their own vehicles, the ports are full of old, crumbling diesel trucks, literally held together in some cases with duct tape and bungee cords. “You’re forced to drive these containers with these split tires down the highway,” says driver Jim Myrick.  “When a tire has a failure, the driver’s responsible for the tire. You have to call road service, you may be on the side of the road for three to four hours waiting on the tire guy to come. The tire may cost more than you may even make off the run; in most cases it does.”

Those trucks are a source of pollution that leaves the surrounding community struggling with asthma, to say nothing of the effects on the drivers who breathe fumes all day. Driver Jimmy Romero explains, “You idle a lot because it takes so long for you to get in and out of the port. You don’t have AC, so [with the windows down] all the smoke is coming into your truck, and you’re throwing that in the environment so everyone who lives near the port is getting all that smoke.” Bringing community members together with the truckers to discuss the impact of the pollution on them all will be part of the conversation.

“This actually is a campaign for organizing industry-wide.  These workers don’t identify themselves as being part of a contractor, they identify themselves as a class, they see themselves as an industry,” Speight says. Like workers across the country these days, suffering from various versions of what my colleague Josh Eidelson calls the “Who’s the Boss” problem, the port truck drivers can either wait for the question of who really employs them to be answered, or they can reach out to community allies and to one another and figure out how to organize outside of traditional union frameworks.

The Savannah drivers, at least, are going for the latter.

Sarah Jaffe is an independent journalist, a rabblerouser and contributor to Truthout, AlterNet, The Nation, Jacobin and others. Follow her exploits on Twitter @sarahljaffe.  Along with Josh Eidelsohn, she cohosts Dissent’s Belabored podcast.

This post originally appeared on the Working In These Times blog.

English: Picture of Sheila C. Bair, Chairman, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

See this video.  It includes good explanations of cooperative work sites and ownership, such as Sacramento Municipal Utility District ( electric power).

http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-what-has-capitalism-done-for-us-lately/

It includes Sheila Bair, formerly of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.  A Republican. Critic of the bail outs. Author of, Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street.   She discusses the issues of banking crisis and why we have not reformed our reformed our banks.

This is a good opportunity to learn some of the basics of corporations and how they exploit working people.  See the interview with economist Richard Wolff  section on the Cyprus Crisis and Student Loans.

by Kari Lydersen
Reprinted with permission
from In These Times

Kari Lydersen, an In These Times contributing editor, is a Chicago-based journalist whose works has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Reader and The Progressive, among other publications. Her most recent book is Revolt on Goose Island. In 2011, she was awarded a Studs Terkel Community Media Award for her work. She can be reached at kari.lydersen@gmail.com.

Jack Metzgar

Last month a few hundred retail and fast-food workers, from places like Sears, Dunkin’ Donuts, and McDonald’s, walked off their jobs for a rally in downtown Chicago.   Carrying signs saying “Fight for 15” (or “Lucha Por 15”) and “We Are Worth More,” these workers make $9 or $10 an hour, at best, and they figure they’re worth at least $15.

A one-shift walk-out and protest by a few hundred out of the thousands of such workers in the Chicago Loop and along Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile cannot have the economic impact of a traditional strike – one that shuts down an entire workplace or industry for an extended period of time and, therefore, can bend an employer’s will.   And these workers’ chances of getting $15 an hour any time soon are worse than slim.   This “job action,” bolstered by community supporters organized by Action Now and with help from Service Employees International Union organizers, is more in the nature of a public protest than a “real strike.”   You could even call it “a public relations stunt,” but you’d be wrong to dismiss it as inconsequential.

“Public relations,” ironically, has a bad image.  But think of it as workers witnessing their own plight, calling for others in similar situations to join them and appealing to those of us with decent incomes to support them.  Witnessing, with its religious overtones, is not intended as an immediately practical action.  It’s first about individuals summoning the courage to put themselves forward to make a public claim that they are one of thousands (millions nationally) who are being treated unjustly.  In this case, it means taking the risk that they may be fired or otherwise disciplined for leaving work and going into the streets to proclaim “We are worth more.”

Witnessing is meant to make us think about justice as the witnesses simultaneously inspire and shame us with the courage of their individual actions.  I was at one of the first draft-card burnings that protested the Vietnam War in 1965, and I remember saying something like, “I’d do that if I thought it would do any good,” while knowing in my heart of hearts that I didn’t have the guts to take that kind of risk then.  But it inspired and shamed me – and thousands and then hundreds of thousands of others — to do many other things to fight against that war as we inspired and bolstered (and exerted peer pressure on) each other.

For the broader public, these initial job actions – in New York and Chicago among retail and fast-food workers; in California and Illinois among workers at Walmart warehouses; and all over the place among Walmart retail workers – are “public relations” that raise awareness and pluck consciences.   But for workers who watched workmates walk off the job to witness for them, there may be some of that inspiration and/or shame that is a particularly powerful call to action. That’s what organizers are counting on, in the hope that the numbers of such workers will grow helter-skelter across the retail industry, eventually initiating a contagion of worker direct action that can put these workers in a position to negotiate for “labor peace,” with or without the blessing of the National Labor Relations Board.

There’s another determined witness who couldn’t be more unlike these striking workers.  He’s a retired law professor from the University of Texas, Charles Morris, who is a leading expert on the legislative and early administrative history of the National Labor Relations Act and the Board that enforces it.  In a 2005 book, The Blue Eagle at Work, Morris makes the legal case that the Act defined a labor union as any group of two or more workers who act together (“in concert”) to seek redress of grievances from their employer.   According to Morris, the “concerted activity protection” articulated in the Act means that employers cannot legally fire workers for forming a non-majority  or “members-only” union (as few as two workers acting together), and what’s more, an employer is legally bound to “bargain in good faith” with that union.

Through meticulous legal research, Morris has shown that these worker rights were in the Act from the beginning but have been forgotten by the subsequent customary practice of defining a union as only that group of workers who have formally voted to be represented by a petitioning union. What’s more, other legal scholars have now signed on to Morris’s legal interpretation and are ready to bolster it before an NLRB that is willing to hear their case.  There would be such an NLRB, what Morris calls “a friendly Board,” if Republican Senators would allow a vote on President Obama’s nominees for the Board.

A favorable NLRB ruling would be important for a variety of legally technical reasons that workers and organizers could use to their tactical and strategic advantage – none of which includes the expectation that employers will voluntarily obey the law just because it is the law. But equally important is that Morris’s reading of the Act’s history restores the original meaning of a labor union that is based on workers’ decisions to act together “in concert” with one another.  That is, a labor union is not just an institution with a bureaucracy and a marble palace in Washington, D.C., though it may be that as well.  It is any group of workers in any workplace, no matter how big or small, who decide to and then do act in concert to advance their own interests in their workplace.

In March Chicago Working-Class Studies helped organize a public forum that brought Charles Morris together with workers and organizers from Fight for 15, the Walmart retail and warehouse strikers, and two other groups who are already acting as unions under this definition.  Though there were some disagreements between the elderly legal scholar and the mostly young workers and organizers — one emphasizing the importance of politics and administrative case law in the long run, the others focused on the potential of direct action in the here and now – they agreed that if and when the two come together, the possibilities for a worker-led upsurge of union organizing are great.

Nonetheless, through their actions these workers have already changed what a labor union is and is thought to be.   It is now, and really always has been — even a century before the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935, even when it was an illegal “conspiracy” — simply a group of two or more workers acting in concert with one another.   To be really effective there will need, of course, to be many, many more than the hundreds and thousands who have begun this process.  But it starts with a few brave witnesses who take a risk and ask others to join them.  The peer pressure is now on the rest of us.

Jack Metzgar is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University in Chicago  and the author of a book about the 1959 steel strike called Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered.  his piece was first published on the Working-Class Perspectives Blog of the Center for Working Class Studies at Youngstown Universities.