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.
