by nelpaction | Feb 28, 2025 | Op-Ed
By Paul Sonn, Director, NELP Action
After an election where Republicans made substantial gains with working-class voters, Democratic leaders are debating what went wrong and how to win back their support. But in a puzzling turn of events, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Colorado’s Jared Polis, both rising stars in the party, are siding with corporations in high-profile fights and blocking long-overdue protections for workers. At a time when working-class voters are questioning whether Democrats care about them, state leaders should be promoting populist economic policies that help workers thrive—not the opposite.
Take the case of Polis in Colorado. His state still has on the books an anti-union “right to work” law—a vestige of early 20th-century wars that the coal industry waged against unions in that state. The Colorado law prevents a union that has won an election at a company from representing the whole workforce unless it also wins a second election by a 75 percent super-majority. Colorado unions and the state legislature are pushing for the state to stand with workers by repealing this anti-union artifact. Five former U.S. secretaries of labor joined them, releasing a public letter urging Polis and the legislature to repeal the law and its “unnecessary and unjust barriers to forming strong unions.” But Polis has called repeal of the law a “nonstarter”—siding with billionaires and corporations that benefit from our broken labor law system.
In Michigan, the debate is over whether to guarantee workers paid sick leave and raise the minimum wage for tipped workers—both key issues that disproportionately affect working women. Paid leave has been a top policy issue for centrist and progressive candidates in recent years—voters overwhelmingly back it even in red states like Missouri, Nebraska, and Alaska. And the tipped worker minimum wage is a key worker justice issue for restaurant workers who are overwhelmingly women, and many of whom are people of color. These workers have more than double the poverty rate of the workforce as a whole—in large part because the federal tipped worker minimum wage has been frozen at a shocking $2.13 an hour for more than 30 years.
To address both issues, Michigan worker groups put a voter initiative on the ballot to guarantee paid sick leave and a $15 minimum wage, including for tipped workers. Outrageously, the former Republican-controlled legislature used a sleazy maneuver to block it from going to the voters. Worker groups sued, and fortunately, the Michigan Supreme Court declared the legislature’s action unconstitutional and reinstated the paid sick leave and minimum wage increases, effective this month
One would have thought Democratic leaders would celebrate the court’s decision. But in a head-spinning turn of events, the Democrat-led state senate joined with the Republican-controlled house to roll it back. Opponents claim that raising the tipped wage will somehow hurt tipped workers, and that the higher minimum wage and paid leave requirements would not be manageable for businesses. That’s nonsense. The states that already guarantee tipped workers the full minimum wage have enjoyed both better pay for wait staff and strong restaurant job growth. There are also many states where small businesses have thrived for years under similar paid leave requirements.
Nonetheless, the Michigan legislature blocked the tipped minimum wage increase and watered down the paid leave protections. Even worse, Whitmer signed the legislation, and attempted to spin the roll-back as a win for workers.
At a time when the Trump administration is promoting phony proposals, like “no tax on tips,” that will do little to help most workers, a long-overdue raise in the tipped minimum wage is the most important thing leaders like Whitmer can do to combat the affordability crisis facing restaurant workers. The fact that Whitmer, a possible future national standard-bearer for the Democratic Party, sided with big restaurant corporations and the Chamber of Commerce to sign the wage and sick leave roll-back is shocking. Similar tipped wage roll-back legislation has also been introduced in Colorado and labor groups are concerned that Polis may support it. This is no way to begin rebuilding the confidence of working-class voters.
President Donald Trump is currently dismantling the federal agencies that protect workers and consumers, even though 70 percent of the U.S. public supports unions. Rather than siding with corporations as Polis and Whitmer are doing, elected leaders need to be showing working-class voters that they have solutions for the affordability crisis and will help them achieve a secure future. Making it easier for them to get family-supporting union jobs and boosting the meager paychecks of waiters and waitresses are exactly what these leaders should be standing for.
Read at Newsweek.com
by nelpaction | Sep 19, 2024 | Op-Ed
By Paul Sonn, Director, NELP Action
New waves of workers are standing up and demanding fair treatment on the job — from the fast food workers of the Fight for $15 to the workers at companies like Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and Volkswagen that are fighting for a union and a fair contract.
But as these workers have made significant gains, they’ve simultaneously run into huge barriers: our broken democratic systems. That’s why one of the most important priorities for advancing worker power is democracy reform.
In particular, that means reforming the anti-democratic filibuster in the U.S. Senate and ending partisan and racial gerrymandering, which have made state legislatures unresponsive to worker needs.
Take the Fight for $15. Over the last decade, the brave workers driving this inspiring campaign have won wage increases in half the states and scores of cities. As a result, about half of our workforce will soon be covered by a $15 minimum wage — one of the highest among industrialized countries. But the other half languishes with one of the lowest minimum wages in the developed world. The federal minimum wage remains frozen at a paltry $7.25.
Despite the fact that more than 80 percent of Democratic, independent, and Republican voters want to raise the minimum wage, no Republican-led legislature has passed a genuine increase in decades. Many have not only blocked state wage increases, but also passed punitive “preemption” laws to prevent cities from stepping in to ensure fair wages. Not coincidentally, many of these are among the most gerrymandered.
At the federal level, there’s a similar dynamic: Republicans in the Senate have used the anti-democratic filibuster for years to block increases in the federal minimum wage despite strong voter support.
Workers fighting to form a union face similar roadblocks. Employees who demand a fair shake routinely face retaliation from their employers — and those who defy the odds and win a union election often endure years of stonewalling as corporations refuse to negotiate a contract. Others, such as app-based workers at Uber and Doordash, have been denied the right to unionize at all.
The PRO Act would remove these roadblocks and modernize our broken labor laws to give workers a real opportunity to join a union and negotiate with their employers over fair pay and benefits, protection against extreme heat, how AI is deployed in their workplaces, and more.
But while 70 percent of voters, including a majority of Republicans, back the PRO Act, the threat of a Republican filibuster in the Senate prevents it from advancing.
Fortunately, there’s new and long overdue momentum for addressing these anti-democratic roadblocks.
Senator Chuck Schumer announced recently that if they win this year, Democrats plan to prioritize key democracy reforms, including reforming the filibuster to empower a simple majority of the Senate to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Act. These crucial voting rights bills include new limits on racial and partisan gerrymandering — the practices that have made many state legislatures so unresponsive to worker needs.
But safeguarding fair elections is only the first step. The next step must be removing the filibuster — which has a long and ugly history of being used to deny people of color basic rights in our nation — as an obstacle to restoring protections for workers. In an echo of Jim Crow, senators today are using the threat of a filibuster to protect a broken labor law system that denies all workers, and especially workers of color, a fair chance to join a union and earn a decent minimum wage.
The rights of workers to earn a living wage and have a voice in their workplaces are fundamental for our democracy. The key next steps for making those rights real is to restore our democracy by ending both gerrymandering and the filibuster.
Paul Sonn is the Director of National Employment Law Project (NELP) Action. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.
by nelpaction | Jul 11, 2024 | Op-Ed
By Paul Sonn, Director, NELP Action
On the heels of the Supreme Court‘s attack on federal agencies’ ability to protect the public last week, a federal judge in Texas appointed by former president Donald Trump blocked a Biden administration rule banning corporations from locking workers into jobs with so-called “non-compete” requirements, which prevent workers from quitting to take better jobs.
The ban on non-competes was just one of many urgently needed and broadly popular protections for working families rolled out by the Biden administration. Others include making more workers eligible for overtime pay and preventing employers from misclassifying workers as independent contractors. All of these policies help working families struggling with the high cost of living by boosting their pay and ensuring access to better jobs.
But these pro-worker protections are being attacked and blocked by Trump-packed courts. Following the same playbook they used to roll back reproductive freedom, activist right-wing judges are erasing workers’ rights and undermining the government’s ability to crack down on abusive corporations.
Working families need state legislatures and governors to step in and protect them in the same way they’re doing when it comes to reproductive rights: by locking these standards into state law to safeguard workers.
The Biden administration has been actively updating worker protections to crack down on businesses’ unfair and abusive practices. In April, the Federal Trade Commission banned virtually all non-compete restrictions, which deny workers one of their most basic means of economic mobility: quitting a job for a better position with another employer. Non-competes are especially abusive when companies use them to lock workers into low-paying jobs, but they harm workers at all income levels. They have been shown to drive down pay, impede economic innovation, and even prevent workers from escaping abusive workplaces where they face sexual harassment.
That same month, the Labor Department updated overtime protections to restore the 40-hour workweek and promote work-life balance by ensuring that millions more workers are guaranteed time-and-a-half pay when they work long hours. And earlier this year, it issued new “independent contractor” guidance clarifying when workers are truly running their own businesses and so are not covered by federal minimum wage and overtime protections—guidance that will prevent companies from evading labor protections by claiming their workers are independent businesspeople rather than employees.
But all of these crucial new worker gains are now threatened by activist Trump-appointed federal judges. As with so many other issues, these judges are distorting legal doctrine to undermine government agencies’ long-established authority to protect workers and the public.
Last week’s ruling blocking the Biden non-competes ban—and the many other legal attacks—should be reversed on appeal. But because business groups manipulate the litigation process to bring these lawsuits before hand-picked conservative judges in regions of the country where they will then be reviewed by appellate courts dominated by Trump judges, the outcome is uncertain and pro-worker policies may be blocked in the end. The fast-approaching presidential election injects even more uncertainty into this picture, raising the possibility that many common-sense job protections could be undone even if they are upheld.
That’s why workers across the country need state leaders to step in to protect them, in the same way they have done to safeguard reproductive rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. States should start by banning non-competes—and they should do it for workers in all industries and all income levels, as California, North Dakota, and Oklahoma did more than a century ago and Minnesota did last year.
States should do the same for the Biden administration’s other key new worker protections, which are under attack by the Trump courts. They should restore a guarantee of overtime pay for far more workers—as states like Colorado and Washington have done. And they should protect workers from being stripped of fundamental employment protections, like the minimum wage and unemployment insurance, by adopting clear independent contractor standards that ensure that only persons who truly operate their own independent businesses are excluded, as Massachusetts and other states have done.
The judicial hijacking of the federal government’s ability to protect the public poses a grave threat to U.S. workers. More states need to act quickly to head it off.
This column originally appeared on Newsweek.com.
