As the corporate funded drive to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom enters its final phase, the governor’s campaign has increasingly relied on labor unions to galvanize supporters. Indeed, unions in the Golden State have spent millions to combat what they have framed as an “anti-worker” and “anti-union” recall effort. Although a wave of support from organized labor propelled Newsom into the governor’s mansion in 2018, he found himself facing criticism from the labor movement early in his tenure for several conservative positions — including abandoning single-payer healthcare and opposing prolabor legislation — he had adopted. Nonetheless, unions have largely embraced the governor’s leadership during the pandemic, and his sensitivity to class injustice far exceeds that of his foremost opponent, a reactionary radio host who insists that the minimum wage is unlawful and has characterized the notion that “unions are for workers” as a “myth.”

In the months ahead, the new Democratic majority on the NLRB is reportedly “poised to carry out sweeping policy changes” which, collectively, could “dramatically shift the balance of power toward workers and away from employers.” Such initiatives include expanding the statute’s definition of “employee,” enlarging the scope of protected concerted activity, and increasing the penalties imposed on firms that illegally interfere with organizing efforts. Such policies, POLITICO posits, could “serve as a backdoor for enacting provisions included in [the PRO Act].” To be sure, however, since the NLRB’s policy changes are subject to abrogation or reversal by the agency’s next Republican majority, not to mention invalidation by the courts, their transformative capacity is fundamentally limited. They can supply no substitute for the sweeping statutory amendments many prolabor voices in the academy view as imperative to resuscitate the labor movement.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is scheduled to join workers and union members at a rally in Massachusetts today to demand that rideshare firms abandon their $100 million ballot initiative designed to solidify their drivers’ status as independent contractors, as distinguished from employees, under state law. The initiative, bankrolled by such leading platform-based employers as Uber and Lyft, is analogous to California’s Prop. 22, which a judge recently ruled was contrary to that state’s constitution. Senator Warren is expected to urge the firms supporting the initiative to withdraw it before the Commonwealth’s voters consider it next fall.

Axios reported on Monday that unions presently represent a larger percentage of U.S.-based workers than at any time in the past five years. This figure is, to be sure, slightly misleading, for it largely reflects the many pandemic-induced furloughs and discharges that, in a display of unions’ power to protect their members, displaced unorganized workers at a much higher incidence than their organized counterparts. Indeed, despite the slight uptick in national union density, the raw number of unionized employees declined in 2020 by nearly half a million. However, the amount of nonunion jobs eliminated in that year was much higher. To underscore the contrast, new research by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative uncovered that nonunion Latino employees were seven times more likely to lose their jobs in the early months of the pandemic than unionized Latinos. In short, in spite of the dislocation and precarity the pandemic occasioned, the organized labor movement, as Kevin observed over the weekend, may have emerged from it in its strongest position in decades.