Karla Ann Cote/NurPhoto
Demonstrators attend a protest in favor of Amazon workers in New York City on February 20, 2021.
Cancel culture is a red-hot issue, in fields ranging from academia and the arts to journalism and politics. We hear countless stories of dorm room snubs, articles rejected, and social media firestorms. But many who claim to care deeply about freedom of expression have said virtually nothing about the most prevalent form of cancellation in our society: the routine silencing of workers who seek to form a union or enforce their workplace rights.
Workers’ struggles are not just economic battles. They’re also expressions of solidarity and statements about justice and the value of human lives. And amid a historic wave of union organizing, this Labor Day is the perfect moment to recognize that cancellation doesn’t just happen to professional intellectuals, and that speech and expression are also crucial for America’s working people.
Employers commonly take drastic measures to cancel workers who speak out virtually every day. Two household names—Amazon and Starbucks—have been among the most visible companies quashing worker expression in recent months. Amazon fired former warehouse worker and now Amazon Labor Union president Christian Smalls for organizing a protest about workplace safety during the height of New York’s first COVID-19 wave. The company later called the police on Smalls when he delivered pizza to former co-workers in a break room. More recently, Amazon called the police to deal with union organizers at its Albany, New York, warehouse.
For its part, facing a high-velocity nationwide campaign in which baristas have unionized over 200 stores, Starbucks has reduced hours and terminated numerous union supporters. The company has even closed store locations, allegedly because of safety concerns raised by workers, an explanation that clearly tells workers to stop speaking out. Among the stores allegedly closed for safety: an actively unionizing store located in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station. Police data showed precisely one store incident (a shoplifter) in the past 18 months. Previously closed: a newly unionized Ithaca, New York, location shuttered with one week of notice, supposedly because of a long-standing grease-trap problem.
This kind of cancellation has been ongoing for years. In my prior job enforcing state labor laws in New York, I saw that employer retaliation was a regular occurrence. For example, just one day after a citywide fast-food worker protest, an upper Manhattan Domino’s Pizza location locked out workers for complaining about their wages. And in a display of considerable chutzpah, a JFK airport contractor fired a longtime skycap days after he stood next to New York’s attorney general at a press conference about a wage-related settlement. (We quickly and quietly got him reinstated.)
Reviewing one case file early in my career, I came across a labor lawyer’s version of a smoking gun: a transcribed interview with an employer explaining a worker’s recent demotion: I demoted him because I lost trust in him after he testified at the labor department hearing.
Workers are fired for organizing unions, and for complaining about dangerous working conditions or sexual harassment, or discrimination, or being underpaid. Still, despite the risk, many workers stand up, often motivated largely by empathy for their colleagues. As a lawyer for workers, I heard, over and over, It’s not about me. I just don’t want them to do this to anyone else.
People concerned about free expression could show their true commitment by joining the fight for workers’ rights.
For their part, employers have many ways to retaliate; along with firing or demoting someone, they can reduce hours or pay; bad-mouth a worker to future employers; assign someone to an inconvenient work shift or location; or close an entire facility. All of this is illegal if retaliatory, but employers who violate the law often come up with disingenuous pretexts for their actions.
Free-expression advocates may somehow feel that worker organizing and action aren’t really expression. But why is it not expression when workers seek to form a union? Why is it not speech when workers object to or report glaring legal violations by their employer?
At its core, worker organizing is an expression of collective power. It reflects a desire to have better conditions, but also to have a voice and input and agency on the job. Henry Ford reputedly once asked, “How come when I want a pair of hands, I get a human being as well?” When workers organize or stand up for their rights, the crux of the message is simple, and at the same time revolutionary: I’m not a machine. I’m a person.
Workers seeking a union are also expressing a vision based on a shared struggle, captured perfectly by the longtime labor slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all.” This collectivism and empathy are at odds with the individualism and divisiveness too common in our country today. Workers who report violations or file lawsuits are also engaging in expressive activity: My employer isn’t all-powerful or above the law, and I deserve better than this.
Public intellectuals concerned about expression generally focus on academia, journalism, or similar fields, where cancellation may result from cerebral ideas seen as unpopular or dangerous. Saying, “I’m human,” “I want input,” or “I deserve better treatment at work”—maybe it all seems a little basic. You don’t have to be ingeniously counterintuitive to come up with these ideas. And of course, to many intellectuals, sophomores in seminars are more commonly imagined conveyers of challenging ideas than workers in warehouses.
But worker expression is in fact profoundly dangerous. That’s why the companies react so strongly. Ideas about justice and solidarity are highly threatening to the current economic order in the United States. These ideas are also potentially far more transformative than most of what gets attention these days from anti-cancellation activists, who tend to focus on seemingly edgy positions that frequently involve punching down: anti-transgender comments by famous writers, tenured professors who think #MeToo has gone too far.
But the impact on workers of being canceled is far more devastating than whispering or censure in the campus dining hall. People lose their livelihoods. They can’t pay rent or feed their children.
People concerned about free expression could show their true commitment by joining the fight for workers’ rights. This would mean, for example, pushing hard for passage of the PRO Act, a bill overhauling outdated federal labor laws to make it easier for workers to join unions. Critical for freedom of expression, union contracts typically require “just cause termination,” preventing employers from firing people for arbitrary reasons unrelated to job performance.
Cancel culture opponents should also push for laws requiring just cause termination, as many other countries do; it’s also a legal requirement in Montana and for fast-food workers in New York City. In addition, supporters of free expression should seek more measures like a recently enacted Connecticut bill that bans employers from forcing workers to attend work meetings sharing the employer’s views on political or religious matters. We also need more funding to enforce all workplace laws.
Of course, an active marketplace of ideas is one hallmark of a healthy culture; people—especially teenagers and young people—should be able to make mistakes as they test out new ideas and ways of thinking. And when they do make mistakes, most people deserve a pathway back to our collective good graces, including through genuine remorse and restorative measures.
But for those expressing deep concern about silencing of people’s voices, for those who genuinely hold a core belief in free expression, Labor Day should be their holiday, too. It’s high time for everyone who cares about free speech to fight for the people most frequently and all too easily canceled for speaking up: our country’s workers.
