Jonathan R. Harkavy has taught labor and employment law at Wake Forest School of Law and corporate finance at Duke Law School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law. During the summers of 2018 and 2019, he has been a visiting research fellow in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.
Charlotte Garden’s insightful essay at Take Care about how antitrust laws are being used as a bludgeon against union collective action immediately brings to my mind Andrew Strom’s OnLabor post about the so-called “Powell Memo.” My hope is that considering these two posts together will fortify what both OnLabor contributors have to say.
To refresh, when Lewis Powell was at the height of his influence as a private practitioner in 1971, he wrote a memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that is now widely regarded as the blueprint for building a collective voice for the American business community. Witness Powell’s words about collective or unified action:
“But independent and uncoordinated activity by individual corporations, as important as this is, will not be sufficient. Strength lies in organization. . . and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”
Fast forward nearly fifty years from the Powell memorandum: We can now better appreciate (recalling Lewis Powell’s own words) what Charlotte Garden wrote about—the collective might of the business community wielding, of all things, the antitrust laws to sap the “strength [that] lies in organization” and hamstring the “united action” of working people.
And so, it is ironic in the extreme, if not downright hypocritical, for the premier exponent and beneficiary of collective action—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—to attempt (whether by the antitrust laws or otherwise) to deny to individuals who work for its members the benefits of a collective voice and unified action.
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November 25
In today’s news and commentary, OSHA fines Taylor Foods, Santa Fe raises their living wage, and a date is set for a Senate committee to consider Trump’s NLRB nominee. OSHA has issued an approximately $1.1 million dollar fine to Taylor Farms New Jersey, a subsidiary of Taylor Fresh Foods, after identifying repeated and serious safety […]
November 24
Labor leaders criticize tariffs; White House cancels jobs report; and student organizers launch chaperone program for noncitizens.
November 23
Workers at the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority vote to authorize a strike; Washington State legislators consider a bill empowering public employees to bargain over workplace AI implementation; and University of California workers engage in a two-day strike.
November 21
The “Big Three” record labels make a deal with an AI music streaming startup; 30 stores join the now week-old Starbucks Workers United strike; and the Mine Safety and Health Administration draws scrutiny over a recent worker death.
November 20
Law professors file brief in Slaughter; New York appeals court hears arguments about blog post firing; Senate committee delays consideration of NLRB nominee.
November 19
A federal judge blocks the Trump administration’s efforts to cancel the collective bargaining rights of workers at the U.S. Agency for Global Media; Representative Jared Golden secures 218 signatures for a bill that would repeal a Trump administration executive order stripping federal workers of their collective bargaining rights; and Dallas residents sue the City of Dallas in hopes of declaring hundreds of ordinances that ban bias against LGBTQ+ individuals void.