Setback for Scalia in Attempt to Curtail Labor Rights

[Omaha Steve]

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http://truth-out.org/news/item/20727-setback-for-scalia-in-attempt-to-curtail-labor-rights

By Amy B Dean, Truthout


U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. (Photo: United States Mission Geneva / Flickr)

Last week the Supreme Court decided against ruling on a legal decision from a lower court which, if broadly applied, could have undermined some of the few remaining effective union organizing techniques: neutrality and card check agreements. These standards allow employees to organize in relative peace, without the threat of employer intimidation that is endemic to elections overseen by the National Labor Relation's Board (NLRB).

But in the cartoonish worldview of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, such agreements are merely an exercise in thuggish union intimidation. During the hearing for the recent case, UNITE HERE Local 355 v. Mulhall, Chief Justice John Roberts tried to paint a scenario of a union organizer who "comes up to you" and acts coercively, as Scalia rushed to add his own flourishes to the tale, interrupting to say: "And he's a big guy . . ."

"[Scalia's] still working off this weird stereotype of union thugs, like On The Waterfront," says Moshe Marvit, a Pittsburgh labor lawyer who has written about the case extensively. "They've painted this as an antidemocratic civil rights issue where workers are losing their right to have a free and fair election."

Scalia's colorful rhetoric was part of an attempt to depict employees' organizations as anti-American special-interest groups, rather than democratic institutions that working people choose themselves. The National Right To Work Foundation deployed this same rhetoric in the initial 11th Circuit case, exploiting an obscure anticorruption clause in the 1947 Taft-Hartley law to argue that any agreement by an employer to act with neutrality during an organizing campaign should be considered a bribe to the union (which, in this circumstance, would be a federal crime). Similar language implying corruption and violence was used to tear down the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made nontraditional union organizing easier. Opponents commissioned videos starring Sopranos actors as labor bosses to play up their narrative of card check as a thuggish process, while Grover Norquist's organization made a video game where the protagonist is pursued by corrupt and parasitical union organizers.

FULL story at link.

[PowerToThePeople]

1. Scalia's the thug here. n/t

[Cha]

2. Scalia is as ugly as he is mean and stupid.