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Welcome to The Labor Prospect, our weekly round-up highlighting the best reporting and latest developments in the labor movement.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, seeking to bolster his bona fides as the leading anti-labor crusader in the Republican presidential field, announced yesterday an ambitious plan to gut workers' rights nationwide. In a speech in Las Vegas, he unveiled a policy platform that calls for eliminating federal public sector unions, instituting a national right-to-work law, and eliminating the National Labor Relations Board. He appears to be doubling down on his image as someone who'll stand up against organized labor, but as Brian Mahoney notes for Politico, it doesn't appear to be working. Walker's national polling numbers have dropped to about 2 percent.
While his plan would kill the NLRB, Republicans are already busying themselves with how to curtail the impact of recent rulings from the labor board. GOP lawmakers quickly announced a legislative proposal that would reverse the "joint employer" standard recently set by the NLRB, arguing that it "threatens hundreds of thousands of franchise businesses and millions of contractors."
A new report from the Center for American Progress links union density with increased economic mobility for children. As Noam Scheiber writes for the New York Times, "Their most interesting explanation is that unions are effective at pushing the political system to deliver policies-like a higher minimum wage and greater spending on schools and other government programs-that broadly benefit workers."
Surging Sanders
The Bernie Sanders campaign said that last week it had conducted a conference call with 17,000 labor union members-a number, it says, is indicative of the growing support from rank-and-file union members in the country.
Still, that hasn't kept union leaders from doling out early endorsements to Hillary Clinton. Yesterday, the United Association (the plumbers' union) became the latest to announce its support for a Hillary presidency. In some unions, rank-and-filers are calling on their leaders to hold off on endorsements. SEIU leadership-which is widely speculated to favor endorsing Hillary-is facing a concerted effort from Sanders supporters to delay an endorsement.
How High Can You Go?
The Berkeley City Council will reportedly consider a proposal to raise its minimum wage to $19 an hour by 2020. The proposal came from the city's labor commission, and calls for an annual cost of living adjustment and mandatory paid sick leave. If passed, the move would mark the highest mandated minimum wage increase scale in the country.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced at a rally last week with Vice President Joe Biden that his administration has approved the wage board's decision to raise the fast-food industry's minimum wage to $15 an hour, and promised that he will push for legislation in Albany that would create a $15 state minimum. Given that Republican state legislators oppose such a push, Cuomo's credibility would be enhanced if he broke with past practice and actually worked to give Democrats control of the state Senate in the next (2016) election.
The City Council of Portland, Maine, voted to raise the city's minimum wage to $10.10 an hour this January, with future increases pegged to inflation. The council also increased the minimum wage for tipped workers.
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After the Birmingham City Council voted to increase its minimum wage to $10.10 a couple weeks ago, the Alabama state legislature is already considering a law that would prohibit localities from setting their own minimum wages. The irony, of course, being that Southern Republicans would prefer that local governments adhere to federal law (since the state has no wage law of its own) rather than allow cities to have more control.
At the Prospect…
Ride-sharing companies like Uber have taken a lot of flak for their arms-length approach with its "independent" drivers. But as Caroline Fredrickson points out, the taxi industry is no saint either when it comes to workers' rights. "The fact is that while Uber has faced criticism for pushing out traditional taxi companies with its reliance on contracted labor, the lines between these two worlds are surprisingly blurry. Here's a little known fact: traditional taxi companies have long been able to classify their drivers as independent contractors because of exemptions from federal labor protections."
Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute explains why the Fed shouldn't rely on jobless numbers to gauge recovery as it considers whether to raise interest rates. All you need to do is look at wages and you'll see that the recovery is far from complete.
