Reactions to Kate Andrias, The New Labor Law
This collection is a response to Kate Andrias’s Article in Issue 1 entitled The New Labor Law.
The ‘New’ Labor Regime
In The New Labor Law, Professor Kate Andrias describes a labor regime founded upon politicized social bargaining emerging from the wreckage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). This regime rejects (for the most part) the NLRA’s employer-employee dyad model of private ordering through worksite-based representation and collective bargaining, in favor of a model involving mobilizing workers across entire sectors and harnessing state power through legislation or other vehicles to strengthen workers’ economic and political clout. Pointing to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)-backed Fight for $15, Andrias identifies what she calls a “coherent vision of unionism” that is transforming unions from representatives of particular workers to advocates for workers generally.
Nothing New Under the Sun: “The New Labor Law” Must Still Grapple With the Traditional Challenges of Firm-Based Organizing and Building Self-Sustainable Worker Organizations
There’s no avoiding Walmart, Toyota, Amazon, T-Mobile, and Federal Express. The greatest concentration of unorganized workers in the United States is still employed at these and similar large multinational corporations. Helping these workers form unions is essential for the labor movement not only to recover from its current state representing less than eleven percent—and, in the private sector, less than seven percent—of the workforce, but also to maintain existing bargaining relationships and improve standards for workers at organized employers like General Motors, AT&T, and United Parcel Service. The labor movement’s economic and political power rests on the existing infrastructure of collective bargaining; there is no realistic path towards rebuilding labor’s voice in society that does not begin with organizing key firms in industries with significant existing union density.
Fighting for the Common Good: How Low-Wage Workers’ Identities Are Shaping Labor Law
Social movements led by workers in low-wage industries, from fast food to car washes to nursing homes, have upended the public narrative of who poor workers are and what they deserve both at work and at home. By doing so, these movements have won victories that were once considered “unrealistic” and “doomed.” As a result of the Fight for $15’s campaign, for example, nearly seventeen million U.S. workers have earned wage increases, and 59% of those—ten million workers—will receive gradual raises to $15 an hour. In fact, between 2012 and 2016, workers earning less than $15 gained $61.5 billion in wage increases. However, the workers who lead and drive these movements are not simply agitating for a higher wage. As Jorel Ware, a McDonald’s worker from Chicago and member of the Fight for $15, states it: What’s motivating me is there’s a lot of different issues going on in the United States with living wages, with Black Lives Matter issues, immigration reform, childcare. These issues are basically the same because everybody’s going through them, black and brown people are going through this. This is how it comes together and it gives me the drive and I’m finally willing to make a change.