Labor, Civil, and Social Rights

Erik Loomis is doing wonderful things at Lawyers, Guns, and Money. This time, he is doing a wonderful thing by bringing to my attention what Jake Blumgart is doing.

It is for these reasons that Kahlenberg and Marvit argue that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act should be extended to cover labor organizing. In Why Labor Organizing Should be a Civil Right (available April 1), the authors claim it is time to change both the broken legal system that ineffectually “protects” American workers like Ballard, and the tactics of reformers who want to change it.

Kahlenberg and Marvit first argue the legal case. Title VII provides a powerful defense against discrimination based on race, sex, age, and religion (among others). Under the Civil Rights Act the employee can opt out of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission process (close to the civil rights equivalent of the NLRB) and take the case to a federal court, before a jury, where they are provided with the means to retain a lawyer if they do not have the necessary funds.

Such suits are not an easy win. The opponent is almost always a business with substantial legal and monetary resources. But the incentives are not one-sided: Employees stand to win much more than $5,000. As Kahlenberg and Marvit note, “a plaintiff may be awarded a variety of remedies, including back pay (with interest), reinstatement or front pay, equitable relief, compensatory damages, and punitive damages.” Lost overtime, health and pension benefits are included, as are “money damages to cover emotional pain, suffering, inconvenience, mental anguish.” These cases also make the right of “discovery” available, opening up internal documents and data to the court and the public—a prospect many companies dread. In short, firing workers would no longer be a painless way to stamp out a union organizing drive.

This goes back to my post earlier today on labor and contraception, and why I don't categorize issues along an economic/social divide, or an economic/civil rights divide. I see the fight instead as being to what extent do we want to embed the principle of autonomous control by individuals and self-organized communities over their decisions and actions into our institutions. It is not my position that maximizing this is always preferential, nor that there are not in fact tradeoffs and conflict between which individuals and communities are accorded preferential treatment in their capacity to have authority over their decisions: racist store-owners, most people would agree, should be denied a capacity to exclude people based on color (or class, but fewer people agree) from their establishments, and racist unions should be denied the capacity to organize their associations as they see fit if that involves the exclusion of persons from other social categories.

But labor rights are civil rights are association (labor organizing) rights are social (privacy) rights . Abortion restrictions, yellow-dog contracts, and the exclusion of workers from a say in the operation of their workplace are all instances of the same basic conflict: who should be accorded authority in a given place and a given area, and how far does this authority over persons extend.