Amazon's War On Workers (It Wants To Destroy The NLRB)

The following post is by David Firestone in The New York Times:

It’s been clear for a while that Amazon doesn’t want unions at its warehouses. The company has fought every attempt to organize its workers, targeting union supporters, holding anti-union meetingsand challenging union elections. But last week Amazon went a big step further and tried to upend the whole American labor movement.

In a legal filing on Thursday, the company argued that the National Labor Relations Board, which supervises and enforces labor law, was unconstitutional. It came up with various spurious reasons for this argument — the board violates the Constitution’s separation of powers, its actions violate Amazon’s Fifth Amendment rights, it violates Article III by acting like a court, etc. — but the upshot was that it doesn’t think any federal agency has the right to oversee its relationship with its employees.

And if there’s no agency to enforce labor law, there won’t be much of a labor movement left. Companies would have a much easier time essentially doing whatever they wanted to their employees with little fear of oversight. (Which sometimes happens during Republican administrations, but at least the board is there to protect the most fundamental rights.)

Its filing puts Amazon in the company of Elon Musk, whose SpaceX outfit made a similar argument in a lawsuit last month. But the issue really goes back to the New Deal. Many tycoons were furious when the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935, but the Supreme Court clearly upheld the legality of the board in a 1937 case. That doesn’t seem to matter to a new breed of mogul like Musk and Jeff Bezos, who want to return to the Herbert Hoover era.

“Some of these tech-bro types are getting increasingly ready to flex their muscles and push back against the regulatory resurgence that’s underway,” Robert Hockett, a law professor at Cornell, told me. “And they’re emboldened by some of these Trump-era judicial appointments, which include some crazy right-wing pre-New-Dealer types.”

Essentially, the tech bros are hoping a different Supreme Court might give the business world a gift that the 1937 court took away. Amazon isn’t content to just disrupt American retailing; now it wants to disrupt the hard-won rights of millions of American workers.