Bernie's Plan for Workplace Democracy Is the Boldest Presidential Plan for
Workers' Rights Ever
By Barry Eidlin, Jacobin
23 August 19
Bernie Sanders's Workplace Democracy Plan, unveiled yesterday, is the best
plan for promoting workers' rights ever proposed by a major US presidential
candidate. Whether they support or oppose it, all the other Democratic
candidates will have to respond to it.
Bernie Sanders unveiled his Workplace Democracy Plan (WDP) yesterday. The
plan is based in a deep and sophisticated understanding of the fundamental
problems facing workers today; it is the most serious, comprehensive, and
equitable plan for promoting workers' rights ever proposed by a major US
presidential candidate.
Just as he did with Medicare for All, Sanders's WDP will now set the terms
of the debate around workers' rights in the Democratic presidential primary.
Whether they support or oppose the WDP, all the other candidates will have
to respond to it.
The plan is a comprehensive effort to reorient labor policy around the idea
that these policies exist to actively promote workers' rights, as opposed to
setting up the state as an ostensibly "neutral" arbiter to balance labor and
management's competing interests. It recognizes and seeks to redress the
inherent power imbalance between workers and their employers, an imbalance
that derives from the simple fact that an individual worker's need to stay
employed is greater than an employer's need to keep that worker employed.
That's why the WDP removes barriers to workers' ability to join together in
unions by implementing a "majority sign-up" process, whereby workers
unionize when a majority in a workplace says they want a union by signing
authorization cards. It recognizes that the decision to unionize is one that
workers should make among themselves - without outside interference from
employers, as the current union recognition system allows for.
That's also why it restricts employers' ability to force workers to attend
anti-union meetings, requires employers to disclose when they use anti-union
consultants, and guarantees union organizers equal time in the workplace to
talk with workers. Once workers have unionized, it also requires employers
to negotiate a first contract or face binding arbitration. Additionally, it
extends union rights to all public sector workers, and finally removes the
arbitrary and racist exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from
labor law protections.
The WDP recognizes that workers' rights can only be exercised and enforced
collectively. Too often, employers and courts have used a warped
interpretation of individual rights to undermine workers' collective rights.
Nowhere is this more apparent than with "right-to-work" laws, which use the
pretext of protecting individual workers' right not to join a union to erode
union solidarity. They do so by allowing individuals in unionized workplaces
to avoid paying the costs associated with negotiating and enforcing the
contracts from which they benefit. The WDP would close that loophole by
banning right-to-work laws.
The WDP also promotes workers' ability to exercise their collective rights
by enforcing and expanding the right to strike. Sanders recognizes that this
is "a worker's line of defense." It's "the means that you have to tell your
employer, 'Hey, we're serious.'" To that end, it bans employers from using
permanent replacements ("scabs") when workers go on strike, expands the
right to strike to public-sector workers, and allows for "secondary
boycotts," where workers pressure their employer by taking action against
economically linked companies.
More broadly, the WDP proposes a set of policies that prevent employers from
shirking their responsibilities toward workers and sets standards for
workplace protections across the board. It would require employers to
demonstrate "just cause" before firing workers. It would prevent them from
misclassifying workers as "independent contractors" to deny them benefits
and protections, or avoid paying them overtime by deeming them
"supervisors." It would also block large corporations from hiding behind
franchising and contracting agreements to avoid responsibility for workers'
wages and working conditions by recognizing them as "joint employers."
Likewise, it would require companies to honor existing union agreements when
they merge. Additionally, it would set up a system to protect workers'
pensions, and ensure that employers transfer health-care cost savings
resulting from Medicare for All to workers in the form of wage and benefit
increases.
Most ambitiously, it proposes a system of sectoral bargaining and wage
boards to negotiate wages, benefits, and hours at an industry level instead
of firm-by-firm, the way many European countries currently do. Not only
would this increase work and living standards for millions of workers, but
it would curb race-to-the-bottom tendencies by limiting employers' ability
to undercut each other. With wages and benefits taken out of competition,
firms would instead have to compete based on quality, service, and
efficiency.
Taken together, the proposals in the WDP would amount to a fundamental shift
in the balance of power. And here is where Sanders's proposal is at its most
impressive.
Sanders understands that winning the WDP will require a mass mobilization of
people willing to fight for it. In other words, it is less of a policy
proposal than a call to arms: winning the reforms contained in the WDP will
be the result of mass mobilizations that shift the balance of power. They
will not themselves cause that shift.
In proposing the WDP, Sanders is setting a target that movements can shoot
for. It raises workers' expectations by laying out a vision of a world where
workers can exert meaningful control over their lives at work. In this, he
is fulfilling his self-described role as "organizer-in-chief."
While much of what Sanders is doing at this point is at the level of
rhetoric and symbolism, it's important not to underestimate how crucial this
rhetoric and symbolism is. Recall that in the early 1930s, shortly upon
taking office, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first attempt at promoting
workers' rights was part of something called the National Industrial
Recovery Act (NIRA). Section 7(a) of that law proclaimed that "employees
shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through
representatives of their own choosing." But the act itself was toothless,
providing no mechanisms for guaranteeing or exercising the right to
organize.
Nonetheless, union organizers seized on the language of Section 7(a) to
bring the message to workers across the country that "the president wants
you to join a union." The result was a spark of worker self-organizing that
lit the fuse for the explosion that came a few years later. The actual
content of Section 7(a) as a law was irrelevant. What was important was the
legitimacy it gave unions, and by extension the horizon it opened up for
workers, who could now see the idea of organizing a union as something
within reach.
Even without getting the WDP passed, Sanders can use the plan to galvanize
workers' movements by setting the bar high when it comes to what workers
deserve. The mobilization around the plan can shift the terms of debate and
the sense of what is possible, much as we have already seen happen around
the $15-per-hour minimum wage and Medicare for All.
Sanders has no illusions about what it's going to take to win workplace
democracy. He knows it will take a fight, and with the WDP, he is mobilizing
troops for battle. As he put it on Twitter on the same day he unveiled his
plan: "If there is going to be class warfare in this country, it's about
time the working class won that war."
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