Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo
Disney employee Manuel Ortiz decorates his car with signs before a drive-by protest to demand a safe reopening amid the coronavirus pandemic, June 27, 2020, in Anaheim, California.
Back in April, Nelson Lichtenstein, the dean of American labor historians, wrote a piece for us arguing that states should establish workers’ councils that would decide when it was safe to return to their worksites and would have the authority to monitor those worksites for safety conditions when work resumed.
While I know of no state that’s enacted anything so sensible, Los Angeles County—which, with ten million residents, is a lot bigger than a host of states—became the first jurisdiction to do so on Tuesday, when the County Board of Supervisors passed a partial version of this idea. Noting that public-health officials were completely overwhelmed by the number of possibly unsafe workplaces, the five-member Board of Supes explicitly authorized the establishment of workers’ councils with the power to monitor workplace safety. “Employees must be allowed to form public health councils without retaliation by their employer,” the motion read.
L.A.’s Board of Supes contains some of the most progressive elected officials in the nation, and on this measure, they were lobbied by the city’s union movement, also among the nation’s most innovative. Indeed, the COVID crisis has brought together unusually broad alliances of quite different unions around issues of worker safety and adequate and nondiscriminatory funding. One such alliance is that of unions of university employees—from tenured professors to graduate students to office workers to maintenance employees—that penned a letter to university administrators earlier this month calling on them not only to ensure worker, student, and public safety before reopening but also to avoid layoffs and pay cuts and provide the assistance that minority and poor students need now more than ever. The signatories included faculty unions from the public university systems of California and Massachusetts, graduate student unions from across the nation, and support staff unions from across the South. In both its geographic and occupational diversity, the letter illustrates the growing militance, sophistication, and scope of today’s workers movement—something that the Los Angeles ordinance also recognizes by establishing a new form of worker power outside the strictures of the nation’s long dysfunctional labor law.
