Seth Wenig/AP Photo
A man reads a stop-work order posted on the door of a Boston Market restaurant in Hackensack, New Jersey, August 17, 2023.
In the history of American labor, I don’t think we’ve ever seen a period quite like today’s. On one hand, public approval of unions is the highest it’s been since the mid-1960s—over 70 percent, which is way higher than that for almost every other national institution. Workers whom employers can’t easily replace—chiefly, academics and other professionals—are unionizing in droves, since firing those workers, which is the normal employer strategy to deter unionization, isn’t an option. Union members look to be more militant than they have in decades; the need to keep up with the rising costs of housing and other necessities, compounded by their awareness of the immense wealth of corporate CEOs and major investors, has prompted truckers, bakers, actors, and hotel workers, among many others, to strike or to threaten strikes against their employers.
On the other hand, the decades-long evisceration of labor laws still permits—actually, encourages—employers to fire retail, manufacturing, and other workers who can be replaced, a violation of labor law that carries with it no significant penalty, and which thereby dooms the vast majority of workers’ efforts to unionize.
The gap between public support for unions and the inability of unions, which now represent just 6 percent of the nation’s private-sector workforce, to organize has led Democrats in public office to try to close that gap. Efforts to strengthen the National Labor Relations Act, however, have been failing in the Senate for the past 60 years, and the NLRA also preempts states’ ability to do anything about private-sector unionization within their borders. Nonetheless, in response to their union and pro-union supporters, a number of Democratic governors, state legislators, and state departments of labor have begun to do what they can to empower workers. In Minnesota, Maine, and New York, they’ve enacted laws that ban “captive audience” meetings, in which employers compel their workers to attend meetings devised to discourage and/or intimidate them from voting to go union. These laws break new ground; they go up against NLRA preemption by arguing that such meetings are a coercive affront to the First Amendment.
The latest Democratic state to chart a new course is New Jersey, where the state’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development responded last week to a company’s abuse of its workers with an uncommonly forceful action. DOL investigations having revealed that 27 of the state’s 30 Boston Market outlets had violated the state’s minimum-wage and kindred laws, and that the company owed more than $600,000 to 314 employees, and having received no response from the company in response to these DOL-verified claims, the DOL issued a stop-work order for those 27 outlets. If an outlet refused to close, the company could be fined $5,000 per day.
Throughout much of our nation’s private-sector economy, where 94 percent of workers are non-union, the abuse of employees can be a common practice, and the remedy for such abuse, if remedy there is at all, is characteristically slow and incomplete. Much like the outlawing of captive-audience meetings, the stop-work order from New Jersey is a sign that the frustration of a pro-worker public at the anti-worker status quo has now reached Democratic legislators and administrations. Change is seeping through the cracks. It’ll take a lot more such seeping, though, to create a long-overdue and desperately needed wave.
