The Freedom of the Constitution, the Right-Wing Sector, and the Power of the Supreme Court: The Case Against the Proposition of the Second Amendment

Franklin Roosevelt argued that the people and their leaders needed to be confident that they had the power to interpret the constitution, if they wanted to confront a hostile Supreme Court. Facing a court hellbent on striking down New Deal reforms, Roosevelt declared that the Constitution is “a layman’s document, not a lawyer’s contract.” Citing and building on the arguments of Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt called on the “lay rank and file,” “the American people,” to interpret the Constitution for themselves and set their own constitutional vision against the doctrines of the judiciary.

To be sure, unions themselves are hardly blind to this insidious effort to take this country back to the Gilded Age – and have been doing their level best to combat it on behalf of all who do or will have a job in this country. A battle against two formidable enemies is what the American labor movement and the working people they represent face.

But the right-wing court has decided that these amendments prohibit race-conscious efforts to redistribute some political and economic power and opportunity to Black Americans. Progressives today should do more than argue that such efforts are something the Constitution permits. They should explain instead — as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did on her first day on the bench — that the Constitution here means just the opposite of what the Supreme Court majority says. Measures like the Voting Rights Act, which the court has been gutting, are what the Constitution demands.

It has very little chance in court today. That’s why it is up to the political branches to press the constitutional argument and check and balance the Supreme Court.

University of California Teachers’ Salaries: Tradeoffs Between Faculty And Graduate Employees Involved in Collective Bargaining and the Professions

The UC system reached a similar deal with 12,000 postdoctoral employees and academic researchers who are part of the 48,000 union members who walked off the job and onto picket lines. That agreement will hike pay up to 29% and provide increased family leave, childcare subsidies and lengthened appointments to ensure job security, according to a statement from United Auto Workers Local 5810.

At a time when unions have been growing at universities, the strike occurred at a time of increased labor action across the country, which was also reflected in the Starbucks strike.

“In addition to incredible wage increases, the tentative agreements also include expanded benefits for parent workers, greater rights for international workers, protections against bullying and harassment, improvements to accessibility, workplace protections, and sustainable transit benefits,” Tarini Hardikar, a member of the union bargaining team at UC Berkeley, said in a news release Friday.

The pay hikes and boost in benefits could have an impact beyond California. For several decades, colleges and universities have increasingly relied on faculty and graduate student employees to do teaching and research that had previously been handled by tenured track faculty — but without the same pay and benefits.

The president of the University of California said that graduate student employees will be the best supported in public higher education under the agreements. “If approved, these contracts will honor their critical work and allow us to continue attracting the top academic talent from across California and around the world.”

The National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College in New York said that the strike by academic workers in the University of California was the largest strike in higher education.

The academic workers did not want to live in cities like Los Angeles, San Diego and Berkeley where housing costs are high because they were not able to afford it.

No university has yet decided to go for the jugular of its employee union in the way that Temple University has done, even though graduate student unionization is new.

“There’s a fundamental shift in who’s doing the academic work in higher education,” Cain said. Wages for graduate students haven’t kept up over time, and they face a lot of competition for full-time faculty jobs.

Labor Unions Are Getting Better Pays and Benefits: How Walmart, the University of New England, and Other Companies Have Founded Their Unions

Today, all of this is at risk. Ordinary people who go to work every day at Amazon, Starbucks, and others have been subjected to illegal and successful attempts by the companies to prevent them from becoming part of a union and securing better wages and benefits. Thanks to the Supreme Court ruling, everyone who works suffered a huge blow to their right to decent pay and safe workplace.

Some factors help explain the rise. Public support for unions is at a 60-year high (more on that below). And Starbucks played an outsized role in driving up that number. The union won in four out of everyfive elections this year, and accounted for 25% of all union elections.

Other notable union campaigns this year involved graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, health care workers at Kaiser Permanente and elsewhere, and auto workers at Ultium Cells, a GM-owned electric vehicle battery cell plant in Warren, Ohio.

Companies say unions are bad for their relationship with workers. To dissuade employees from unionizing, they have preemptively raised wages, added benefits and made workplace changes. Some pro-union workers were fired for other violations and stores were flooded with managers.

It can take a while to get a collective-bargaining contract to negotiate pay raises or other changes that unionized workers want.

The process hasn’t even begun, despite the win by the Amazon Labor Union at the Staten Island warehouse.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/27/1145090566/labor-unions-organizing-elections-worker-rights-wages

Wage Increases in the First Three Years: The Effects of Inflation on Labor Relations, Salatrix, and Benefits for Food Service Workers

Overall, wages this year increased 5.1% over last year. With far more openings than available workers, wages grew even faster at some of the lowest-paying jobs. But adjusting for 7% inflation, overall wages actually declined, and many workers felt like they were losing ground.

Rail workers didn’t get everything they wanted out of the protracted talks with the freight railroads, but they did get a 7% raise in 2022, with promises of another 8.5% over the next two years, plus cash bonuses every year.

Food service workers at San Francisco International Airport won a 30% wage increase two years after striking for three days. They’ll see wages rise from about $17 an hour to $22 an hour by 2024. There was a one-time bonus, health insurance, and retirement included in the deal.

More than 75% of Americans approve of unions, but only 10% of U.S. workers belong to one. It’s not seen since 1965, at a level of support.

The Temple University Labor Rights Unions History Thompson vs. 1913-1914: Remembering the Children Who Worked Hardly

Heather Ann is a historian at the University of Michigan. She was a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her book ” Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy”. The views expressed here are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.

When John D. Rockefeller worked to ensure that all of the employees who wanted better wages and working conditions in the coal mines of Ludlow, Colorado were evicted, it was not 1913 and 1914.

The harms of the past are echoing loudly in Temple University’s recent decision to undercut the efforts of its graduate students to secure better wages and health care by suddenly demanding full payment for their tuition and then threatening that not paying would result in them being barred from taking classes to complete their degrees.

It serves as a stark reminder that without remembering the dire costs of our nation’s labor history, ordinary people who go to work each day in this country are going to pay a terrible price.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, not if all of us resolve to reckon not just with this nation’s long history of letting businesses work their employees for the least pay and the longest hours, but also to take inspiration from the equally long and determined history of ordinary people’s efforts to achieve and then to defend the labor movement’s most basic gains over the last two centuries.

In fact, many companies across the nation have been slowly, quietly and most determinedly chipping away at the very organizations and laws that have allowed people to pay their rents and feed their families. To increase their own profit margins, a number of businesses today even seek to take us back to the days when child labor was perfectly legal.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/16/opinions/temple-university-labor-rights-unions-history-thompson-ctrp/index.html

Temple and the Philadelphia City School: The Educated and the Preferred Students in the United Way are entitled to Higher Wage and Social Security

Why sinister? Consider the implications of this move just for Temple and in the city of Philadelphia, where it is located. Temple’s striking graduate students are demanding higher wages because they say their current wages don’t allow them to make ends meet. Now, those same students, many of whom currently cannot even put their own children on their health care plan as dependents, must pay many thousands of dollars in tuition because they dared to take this collective stand. The students who are still on strike now have to decide whether or not to give up their degree, seek another type of low wage job, or be placed on public assistance.

According to Temple, state law stops the public school from paying those who refuse to work. The school said that striking workers had been told of their obligation to make arrangements to pay their tuition, which was consistent with how the university treated other students with unpaid tuition obligations.

Many graduate students are negotiating with the University of Michigan and support staff in the Los Angeles Unified School District are voting on whether or not to go on strike. Maybe.

The rich and poor are the same in America. And it is a most familiar story, it is a story as old as the nation itself, and it is a story that we can’t afford not to know.

The fundamental truth of historic labor says that an injury to one, is an injury to all.