
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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April 28
WA strike bill goes to governor; MLBPA discloses legal expenses; Ex-Twitter employees seek class certification against Musk.
April 27
Judge thwarts Trump's attempt to strip federal workers' labor rights; AFGE to cut over half of its staff; Harvard unions rally amid attacks.
April 24
NLRB seeks to compel Amazon to collectively bargain with San Francisco warehouse workers, DoorDash delivery workers and members of Los Deliveristas Unidos rally for pay transparency, and NLRB takes step to drop lawsuit against SpaceX over the firing of employees who criticized Elon Musk.
April 22
DOGE staffers eye NLRB for potential reorganization; attacks on federal workforce impact Trump-supporting areas; Utah governor acknowledges backlash to public-sector union ban
April 21
Bryan Johnson’s ULP saga before the NLRB continues; top law firms opt to appease the EEOC in its anti-DEI demands.
April 20
In today’s news and commentary, the Supreme Court rules for Cornell employees in an ERISA suit, the Sixth Circuit addresses whether the EFAA applies to a sexual harassment claim, and DOGE gains access to sensitive labor data on immigrants. On Thursday, the Supreme Court made it easier for employees to bring ERISA suits when their […]