Will Labor Come Back?

Labor Day has never been a very inspiring holiday, established as it was by late-nineteenth-century union bosses as a homegrown alternative to May Day, which was viewed as having uncomfortably leftist, European associations. American workers today, of course, would love to have the healthcare, organizing rights and vacations enjoyed by their counterparts in most of Europe, thanks to the "radical" labor organizing traditions on that side of the Atlantic. The Bush Administration is moving in the opposite direction, although there are some hopeful signs that labor's fighting back.

Celebrating the holiday early, in August the Bush White House and its rich friends no doubt toasted new regulations that will deprive up to 6 million additional American workers of overtime, defined as time-and-a-half pay for working more than forty hours a week. Even more disturbing, in June the Administration's National Labor Relations Board quietly moved to "review" the legitimacy of the card-check procedure, by which an employer recognizes a union when presented with cards signed by more than half of the shop's employees. The labor board has upheld card check many times since the 1930s, when the procedure was first established. Repealing it would effectively deprive countless Americans of the right to organize and put an immediate halt to many of labor's most promising campaigns.

The Bush Administration might have enjoyed a champagne toast to another recent victory over workers, also engineered by its NLRB. In July the agency declared that graduate students do not have the right to organize and that under federal law they are not employees, thus abruptly reversing a legal precedent set by several earlier decisions. The decision fell sharply along party lines: The three judges voting for it were Republicans; the two dissenters were Democrats. Presidential hopeful John Kerry, meanwhile, has firmly opposed the Bush Administration on overtime as well as card check, even co-sponsoring the Employee Free Choice Act, which would require an employer to recognize a union when 50 percent of its workers sign cards. At present, recognition is up to the employer, so if enacted this bill would hugely improve workers' chances of organizing.

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