Benjamin Sachs is the Kestnbaum Professor of Labor and Industry at Harvard Law School and a leading expert in the field of labor law and labor relations. He is also faculty director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy. Professor Sachs teaches courses in labor law, employment law, and law and social change, and his writing focuses on union organizing and unions in American politics. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty in 2008, Professor Sachs was the Joseph Goldstein Fellow at Yale Law School. From 2002-2006, he served as Assistant General Counsel of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in Washington, D.C. Professor Sachs graduated from Yale Law School in 1998, and served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. His writing has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the New York Times and elsewhere. Professor Sachs received the Yale Law School teaching award in 2007 and in 2013 received the Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence at Harvard Law School. He can be reached at [email protected].
Douglas Williams has a great post up on Talking Union that critiques my Unbundled Union essay. William’s post is definitely worth a read.
A few very quick points. One, it’s worth saying, as Williams does, that my proposal for “political unions” is meant as a means to mitigate the representational inequality – that is, the political inequality – that lower- and middle-income Americans currently suffer. Whether or not workers who join political unions would embrace the traditional goals of the labor movement, increasing their political voice would be a victory for political equality. Two, the argument in the Essay is not that management wouldn’t oppose political unions; sometimes it would. Williams notes that management is more likely to oppose political unions if those unions push for economic goals, but, even so, such opposition would be less intense than is opposition to collective bargaining unions (for reasons the Essay explains). More importantly, the existence of opposition to progressive economic policy does not imply that political unions could never secure economic policy goals. The examples the Essay gives of contemporary union efforts that resemble political unionism – SEIU Local 880’s homecare campaigns, to take one – involved explicitly economic goals. Three, and related, Williams reads me as arguing that things like paid sick leave are “anti-competitive.” The argument in the Essay, though, is that this is true to the extent that paid sick leave is required of some firms in a market but not others. Because a paid sick leave law would sweep in far more firms than a collective bargaining agreement, the sick leave law will be less likely than the CBA to disadvantage some firms vis-a-vis others, and thus less likely to inspire opposition. Finally, as Williams also notes, my argument “does not imply that workers should not also have a collective voice in the workplace” and “the proposal . . . is meant as a complement to, rather than a substitute for, efforts to rethink collective economic representation at work.”
You can find my Yale Law Journal Essay here, and the NYT op-ed version (“A New Kind of Union”) here.
Daily News & Commentary
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May 22
U.S. employers spend $1.7B on union avoidance each year and the ICJ declares the right to strike a protected activity.
May 21
UAW backs legal challenge to Trump “gold card” visa; DOL requests unemployment fraud technology funding; Samsung reaches eleventh-hour union agreement.
May 20
LIRR strike ends after three-day shutdown; key senators reject Trump's proposed 26% cut to Labor Department budget; EEOC moves to eliminate employer demographic reporting requirement.
May 19
Amazon urges 11th Circuit to overturn captive-audience meeting ban; DOL scraps Biden overtime rule; SCOTUS to decide on Title IX private right of action for school employees
May 18
California Department of Justice finds conditions at ICE facilities inhumane; Second Circuit rejects race bias claim from Black and Hispanic social workers; FAA cuts air traffic controller staffing target.
May 17
UC workers avoid striking with an 11th-hour agreement; Governor Spanberger vetoes public employee collective bargaining protections; Samsung workers prepare for an 18-day strike.