No coincidence
Campaign to weaken labor standards at the state level is coordinated nationally
Last Oct. 31, political scientist
Gordon Lafer released a quiet bomb-
shell. In a 79-page paper, Lafer made
a case that there’s a nationally coor-
dinated corporate-backed campaign
to lower wages and weaken labor
standards — at the state level. Lafer,
associate professor at University of
Oregon’s Labor Education and Re-
search Service (LERC), spent
months studying attempts to pass
bills and laws in state legislatures all
around the country. In his report, en-
titled “The Legislative Attack on
American Wages and Labor Stan-
dards,” he says the campaigns go far
beyond attacks on public employee
union rights in Wisconsin and Ohio,
or Michigan’s newly passed right-to-
work law. Lafer found near-identical
efforts in state after state to weaken
the minimum wage, make it easier
for employers to steal wages or mis-
classify workers as “independent
contractors,” undermine unemploy-
ment insurance, reduce public serv-
ices, bar project labor agreements in
public construction, even lessen re-
strictions on child labor. The North-
west Labor Press interviewed Lafer
by phone about the report, which can
be read in its entirety at epi.org/pub-
lication/attack-on-american-labor-
standards.
You write that state legislators
aren’t responding to local condi-
tions with these laws. They’re fol-
lowing an economic and policy
agenda fueled by national corpo-
rate lobbies?
I think what we get taught in
school turns out to be far from the
truth, especially since the Citizens
United Supreme Court decision
opened the door to corporate spend-
ing. In areas of legislation that are
important to the big corporate lob-
bies (which tend to be important to
everybody trying to make a living),
increasingly what we see is national
model legislation backed by na-
tional money being spent in a smart,
coordinated way. They draft the
law, fund legislators’ campaigns,
and also fund state-level think tanks
like the Cascade Policy Institute
here in Oregon that produce white
papers and talking heads for the
news. And ALEC (American Leg-
islative Exchange Council) is where
the players come together. It’s not
just the place where they write the
laws; it’s also the nexus where those
relationships are made.
We really have in many cases
lost popular control of the legisla-
tive process at the state level. I
wouldn’t say that’s true in Oregon,
because the politics don’t quite
work that way. I would guess that
the vast majority of Americans can’t
name who their state legislator is.
That means it’s relatively cheap for
corporate lobbies to buy state leg-
islative races, much cheaper than
but at least I have that.”
buying a Congressional race. So for
that reason and because the federal
government has been stuck, the ac-
tion has shifted to the states.
Most of your examples of extreme
rollback on workers rights are in
states in the deep South that were
always hostile to workers rights, or
places where Republicans had a
political opportunity, like control-
ling both legislative chambers plus
the governors office. Should work-
ers in other states, like Oregon, be
worried too?
Oregon is pretty closely balanced
between the political parties. Right
now the Democrats have an edge,
but it’s gone back and forth. A cou-
ple years ago one of the chambers
was exactly evenly split. If you have
one legislative cycle in which a
party gets control of all three
branches of government and abol-
ishes the state’s minimum wage, it
can be very hard to roll back. In
2010, Republicans newly got con-
trol of all three branches of the gov-
ernment in what were traditionally
strong union states — Wisconsin
and Michigan. And I think they
acted like, “We have to do these
things now because we might only
have power for two or four years.”
Both states made it illegal for union
dues to be deducted by the elec-
tronic payroll system for public em-
ployees, regardless of whether you
GORDON LAFER
voluntarily chose to pay dues. It’s
very hard to recover from things
like that, because they do what
they’re designed to do: They under-
cut the organizational feasibility of
unions and workers organizations.
Your study looked at develop-
ments in 2011 and 2012. What
would change if you updated it for
2013?
I’d have no life. It made sense to
start with the legislators elected in
the fall of 2010, because they were
the first elected under the Citizens
United rules. It was an exhaustive
process to collect all that stuff.
There’s no other comprehensive list
like the one I put together.
What would America look like if
these attacks succeed?
Very dark. The result of their leg-
islation would be to make life hard-
er and worse for the vast majority of
the people in the country. It would-
n’t happen all at once, but living
standards for most people would
move gradually toward Mexico or a
country like it.
The Koch brothers and the Wal-
tons [heirs to the Walmart fortune],
the real 1 percenters, their political
challenge is to pursue a political
agenda that makes the country ever
more unequal without producing a
political backlash. And part of that
is having all the rest of us scale
back what we think we have a right
to expect, either from our jobs or
the government. You lower people’s
expectations, make people feel
lucky to have for what they’ve got.
Like, “Okay, my kid is in a class
with 30 kids, but at least she’s not in
a class with 40 kids. Or, “I only
have catastrophic health insurance,
FEBRUARY 21, 2014
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
Your focus isn’t on bills that specif-
ically weaken unions; in fact the ti-
tle of your report is the legislative
attack on American wages and la-
bor standards. You write that “the
agenda to undermine wages and
working conditions is aimed pri-
marily at non-union, private-sector
employees.” This is fundamentally
about an employing class trying to
change laws to tilt the labor mar-
ket further in the employers’ favor.
What are some examples?
Almost everything I write about
in that report is things that affect
nonunion workers. These are not
“one-off” things, like make your
pension 4 percent instead of 5 per-
cent. They’re things that structurally
change the underlying balance of
power between workers and em-
ployers in ways that are designed to
make workers more afraid. For in-
stance, cut off and eliminate unem-
ployment insurance. If you know
that when you’re out of work, you
have nothing, it’s potentially life
threatening. It’s horrifying for most
people who don’t have any cushion
to fall back on. Restricting unem-
ployment benefits doesn’t just mean
employers will save more money
because they won’t be paying as
much in unemployment tax. It
means that everybody who is em-
ployed will be more cowed, and
more scared, whether it’s to organ-
ize a union, or ask for a pay raise, or
complain about working overtime
or unsafe conditions. What we’re
seeing is more and more trying to
change the structural terms of the
ways working people as a whole
have any kind of leverage in the la-
bor market. That includes undercut-
ting unions, trying to ban wage theft
ordinances trying to lower and get
rid of the minimum wage, and cut-
ting unemployment insurance and
(Turn to Page 8)
ATU-TriMet talks
move to mediation
Negotiations between Amalgamated
Transit Union Local 757 and TriMet
will move to mediation April 8. Con-
ciliator Janet Gillman of the Oregon
Employment Relations Board will me-
diate the talks.
The sides completed the state-man-
dated 150 days of bargaining on Feb. 4,
and TriMet immediately requested me-
diation. Sticking points are active and
retiree health care costs, and wages.
The previous contract expired Nov.
30, 2012, and by law union members
cannot strike. If a settlement cannot be
reached via negotiations, an arbitrator
selects one of the party’s proposals in
its entirety through binding interest ar-
bitration for the contract period.
PAGE 7