Not Going Down Without a Fight In the 1950s and 60s, the left enjoyed tremendous support from the labor movement and had a lock on organized labor. To counterbalance the movement, corporate-backed think tanks like the Business Roundtable and the Heritage Foundation began targeting organized labor, setting out to divide, weaken, and defeat it. Aided by right-wing billionaires Charles and David Koch, the right has begun to set their sights on unions, seeking to cripple and defeat organized labor through relentless campaigning and lobbying, and by making it difficult for union members to make ends meet. It is only in recent years that unions have begun fighting back against the onslaught. In 2014, SEIU Local 1, representing grocery workers at national retailers Trader Joe’s and McDonald’s launched a legal challenge to overturn California’s recently passed union-busting “gig economy” laws. The California legislature passed the law, which makes it easier to bust unions and harder for workers to organize in order to provide more flexibility for so-called freelancers, who would do things like drive for Uber. The law also prohibits the enforcement of collective bargaining agreements at companies that use independent contractors. In March, as The Huffington Post reported, “A group of homecare providers brought the suit, arguing that the contracts they are forced to sign with the home care company are illegal, because they are not independent contractors but rather employees who perform work for the company. If the court were to accept this argument, it would set a precedent that could potentially overturn employment regulations across the country.” “Uber is at the vanguard of a dangerous trend to turn workers into modern-day serfs,” said SEIU Local 1 President David Rolf. “The gig economy is killing jobs, income and the middle class. These companies are getting rich off the hard work of millions of people.” Meanwhile, a recent case involving Walmart illustrates how difficult it can be to organize in an environment where companies try to prevent unions and workers’ associations from forming. In November 2014, when workers at a Walmart in Pico Rivera, California, attempted to form a union, management refused to bargain with the workers, telling them that the company was not unionized. The California National Labor Relations Board ruled in favor of the workers, holding that Walmart had unlawfully refused to bargain. But Walmart appealed, arguing that the National Labor Relations Act did not apply to the retail giant. In April 2016, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed the NLRB ruling and ruled that the retail giant was not subject to the NLRA. On the federal level, the labor movement had a huge success in 2014. In the waning days of the Obama administration, Congress passed a compromise bill called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a multilateral trade agreement aimed at increasing trade and economic growth among countries throughout the Asia Pacific. Critics warned that the TPP would hurt workers and undermine democracy by allowing corporations to challenge governments for any laws they deemed to be an “unfair” impediment to corporate profits. Opponents feared that the deal would lead to massive job losses, erode labor protections, limit workers’ bargaining power, and destroy national sovereignty. Even before Congress approved the measure, however, the AFL-CIO issued a joint letter with several progressive groups, demanding that President Obama reject the TPP unless certain changes were made. The AFL-CIO and its allies argued that the deal would put “an end to government's ability to defend the public interest, and thus undercut its ability to protect the jobs of American workers.” Labor leaders had no choice but to take a stand, though it is unclear if they will be able to defeat the bill. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka admitted as much in a press conference shortly after Congress approved the measure. “We will fight like hell and we will win, but we have got to win this fast,” Trumka said. The vote on the TPP was over the Thanksgiving holiday, so Trumka had to be careful not to appear too eager. He added, “We are not getting a better deal than in the countries we already trade with.” In the end, the Trumka and his allies couldn’t stop the TPP. But they did slow it down, and in 2016, when Trump was elected president, all signs indicated that labor and environmentalists were ready to pick up the fight against the TPP by fighting a Trump administration that was already out of step with labor and so-called progressive forces in the Democratic Party. As the AFL-CIO’s website explains, “AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and many others in the labor movement, including organized labor, environmentalists, unions, civil rights groups, the Fight for $15 movement, social justice advocates, the Green Party, pro-Israel forces and other progressives, made clear their intention to fight the TPP through Trump’s campaign. The AFL-CIO even went so far as to create a website specifically aimed at defeating the TPP and ‘failing globalist trade deals.'” The TPP was dead when Trump entered office, but the labor movement is still going strong. The AFL-CIO, for one, has made a big push against the Republican tax plan, which it claims will hurt the working class. The union joined with environmentalists to stop what they called “dirty energy” and organized a protest at Trump’s campaign stop in West Virginia, as well as at his Pennsylvania rally in October, both events during the tax plan’s unveiling. It is not yet clear if unions will take another go at organizing new workers as a result of the labor movement’s pushback against right-wing trade deals like the TPP. For his part, Trump has vowed to kill the TPP if he is elected. There are still plenty of fights ahead, and many of them may not be fought along the lines of the labor movement. A Grassroots Campaign Just as the labor movement looks set to continue to fight against right-wing trade deals, other progressive groups are fighting for workers who have already fallen victim to anti-union corporate attacks. On a cold night in Philadelphia in February, workers at the Starbucks café near the University of Pennsylvania campus joined a number of other progressives in taking part in a peaceful protest demanding the reinstatement of four workers who had been fired by the coffee giant as a result of their efforts to form a union. A Starbucks store manager had told the four workers that they would be dismissed if they did not turn over a document they had obtained at a union meeting. That document had been obtained illegally. Two of the workers were pregnant and one had a baby at home. With their supporters on hand, Starbucks workers marched to a store where the four women worked and handed out fliers calling on customers to boycott the store. The protests got the attention of local media and were covered by publications like the Huffington Post. They received so much attention that the four employees who had been fired were offered their jobs back at the end of April, just five months after they had been fired. The workers announced that they would return to work on May 4. The victory came after workers organized with Jobs With Justice, a national organization that is part of the AFL-CIO. According to Jobs With Justice organizer Kevin Kruger, the union also played a significant role in helping to organize the protest, along with local progressive leaders. “We provided staffing support and helped build community support by passing out hundreds of fliers and talking to the press,” Kruger told The Huffington Post. “What’s most important is that we were able to use online organizing to spread the word about this injustice and build support for the workers and their demands.” Not all progressive groups helped the Starbucks workers. A group called Philly Communities for Change, which has a number of ties to organizations that are funding Democratic Party candidates, posted flyers at the Starbucks urging customers to boycott the store, but Kruger slammed the group’s actions. “It saddens me that a Philadelphia union fighting for its workers is being attacked by outside forces and that support has been withdrawn,” said Kruger. “It’s disgusting that people would be turned away from a place where they work just because they want to collectively bargain.” It is not known who the workers were boycotting when they were fired in February. But it is clear that Starbucks fired a number of workers for their efforts to join a union, showing that workers seeking to unionize have become targets of an American business sector that is controlled by companies like Wal-Mart. Starbucks is hardly alone. As The Nation reported earlier this year, a number of workers have been fired since 2012 at McDonald’s franchises in Washington State, because the workers wanted to join a union. So far, there has not been a huge labor movement push to support workers who are organizing to form unions, which seems to be partly because unions may be focused more on the fight against anti-union corporate interests, rather than supporting workers who are actually organizing to gain a better life. But the push for better wages and working conditions is sure to get even stronger as more and more workers are locked out of their jobs. “Progressives,” wrote journalist David Cay Johnston in the May 2016 issue of The American Prospect, “should demand that corporations, which are people, be allowed to organize. We can’t have a democracy if half the electorate can’t get its act together.”