Over the weekend, Pierce focused in on Kavanaugh’s thoughts relating to labor rights, and in typical 21st Century GOP fashion, they seemed to be based out of the thinking of the 19th Century.
Much of the attention— rightly—will be drawn to Kavanaugh's dreadful history on reproductive rights, as well as to whatever is stashed away in the 100,000 documents that the administration* is keeping buried regarding what Kavanaugh did during the torture years under President George W. Bush. But it shouldn't be overlooked that his record on labor issues is every bit as retrograde as any other part of his Federalist Society bona fides. From Mother Jones:If we go back to that mentality at SCOTUS, it's going in the opposite direction that the country is going, as Americans increasingly reawaken to the fact that corporations aren’t going to give the 99% of us anything unless it is demanded and taken from them, a GOP government that received well less than half of the votes of its citizens is installing laws all around America that are designed to make that inequality even worse.Kavanaugh joined two other Republican-appointed judges in a unanimous 2012 ruling in favor of the Trump Organization, after company executives asked the NLRB to throw out the results of a union election at Trump Plaza, arguing that support from politicians had introduced bias. As a July Bloomberg article points out, in 2015 Kavanaugh sided with the management of Sheldon Adelson’s Venetian Casino Resort in a similar case, authoring a majority opinion upholding the casino’s First Amendment right to summon police to issue citations to union protesters trespassing on company propertyFrom 1897 until approximately 1937—the end date is a matter of some dispute—the court's relation to labor was defined by the horrendous decision in Lochner v. New York. Citing "freedom of contract" as a constitutional right, the decision was used through the decade to strike down all manner of regulations touching on business large and small. (Lochner itself was about working conditions in bakeries.) Unions, of course, came along with the deal. In Adair v. United States, the Court struck down a law that would have made it illegal for a company to fire employees for trying to organize.
One of Kavanaugh’s most high-profile dissents of NLRB authority was in a 2014 case against SeaWorld’s Florida theme park involving events depicted in the documentary Blackfish. When a killer-whale trainer died during a live show in 2010—the second death at the location—the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) launched an investigation that found the theme park had willfully endangered its employees. The DC Circuit upheld the decision of a Department of Labor administrative judge, who ruled the theme park had violated OSHA guidelines and imposed a $7,000 fine. In his dissent, Kavanaugh said OSHA was uncharacteristically trying to “stretch its general authority.” He said the SeaWorld employees’ position was no different than any other occupation where workers consent to put themselves in danger, comparing their work to tiger taming and football.
“When should we as a society paternalistically decide that the participants in these sports and entertainment activities must be protected from themselves—that the risk of significant physical injury is simply too great even for eager and willing participants?” he asked, calling the “physical risk…among the greatest forms of personal achievement for many who take part in these activities.” …
Just look at these Koched-up jagbags.
With that in mind, let me point you to Harold Meyerson’s Labor Day column in the LA Times. In this column, Meyerson notes that Americans understand that the product of their labor is increasingly only helping the fat cats in the board rooms, and that people in real jobs are not getting the rewards of their work.
…In 2011, the chief investment officer of JP Morgan Chase calculated that three-quarters of the long-term increase in U.S. companies’ profit margins was due to the declining share going to wages and benefits. A study last year by Simcha Barkai, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Stigler Center, found that labor’s share of the national income has dropped by 6.7% since the mid-1980s, while the share of the nation’s income going to business investment in equipment, research, new hires and the like has dropped by 7.2%. Correspondingly, the share of the nation’s income going to shareholders (the lion’s share to the very wealthy, among them the CEOs who are compensated with shares) rose by 13.5%. That shift has put American workers at a double disadvantage, as their wages and the private-sector investment that creates jobs and boosts productivity have both hit the skids.
Like slowly simmering frogs, Americans have required some time to grasp just how dire their situation has become. On Labor Day 2018, however, it’s clear that most of them now realize the need to reshuffle the power structure. A Gallup Poll released on Friday showed support for unions at 62%, the highest level in 15 years, with majority backing from every demographic group except Republicans, and even they are evenly split, 45% to 47%.
The overwhelming public support for striking teachers this spring in such red states as West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona was no fluke; another recent poll, this from the venerable education pollster PDK, found 73% support for teachers’ strikes, and a remarkable 78% support from parents of school-age children. The two-to-one rejection of a right-to-work law this summer by Missouri voters is further evidence of a pro-labor shift in public opinion, as are the successful unionization campaigns over the past year of such not-easily-fired workers as university teaching assistants and journalists (including those at such venerable anti-union bastions as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times).
As was the case during the years when the Labor Question was first before the nation, the chief instrument the right relies on to diminish worker power is the courts. The Supreme Court’s decision in June in the Janus case, which was meant to reduce the membership and resources of public-sector unions, was just the latest in a string of rulings to advantage corporate and Republican interests. During the past year, however, progressives have put forth some of the most far-reaching proposals in many decades to rebalance economic clout, including bills from two Democratic senators – Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren and Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin – that would require corporations to divide their boards between representatives of workers and representatives of shareholders.
But instead of listening to the people’s increasing demands for corporate accountability and to stop having the playing the field be so slanted in favor of the money power, this minority Trump Administration and gerrymandered GOP Congress is going the other way. And they want to install paid-off, unqualified tools like Brett Kavanaugh onto judges’ benches to protect corporations from consequences when they do wrong, and to keep anti-worker laws in effect long after the GOP puppets in DC and the states are booted out of power.
If Kavanaugh’s appointment is jammed through the Senate and joins SCOTUS, there are currently only two ways an illegitimate “Justice” like him gets removed. Neither option is nice or lends itself to stable government, but they would likely have to be explored in the future, given that he and the equally illegitimate Neil Gorsuch likely lack the class to step down themselves.
Our current situation regarding economic inequality and our judicial system has become a characteristic of a Banana Republic(an). History shows that if these inequities aren’t allowed to be reversed at the ballot box, it often ends up with the people in power leaving in…less dignified ways.
So your choice, GOPs. Listen to the people, let the silenced majority win a few things, and you might be able to walk away with yourself and your (ill-gotten) fortunes largely intact. You don't, and you'll likely end up losing a lot more.
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