ACSBlog

by Ellen Dannin. She is the author of  Taking Back the Workers’ Law - How to Fight the Assault on Labor Rights (Cornell University Press) and the Fannie Weiss Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson School of Law.

Through the decades, many proposals have been made to replace, repeal, or amend the National Labor Relations Act. Most have foundered for good reason. Amending the NLRA requires applying the precautionary principle – first, do no harm. 

In the case of the NLRA, proposed amendments should be justified by showing that a change will promote the NLRA’s purposes and policies. The ultimate policy is to restore equality of bargaining power between employers and employees by “encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.”  The basic goal was to balance the power corporation and partnership law gave employers to become collective with a law that gave employees the right to take collective action to improve working conditions.

The standard to measure the value of proposals to change the NLRA is not whether the change would increase the number of union members – although that certainly matters. It is whether the change would increase employee bargaining power. The purpose of increasing employee bargaining power was to improve the quality of work, and, ultimately, promote a fairer, more prosperous, more democratic society.

Congress was impelled to pass the NLRA because the increase in power employers had, as a result of corporation and partnership laws, so skewed power toward employers that wages and working conditions had spiraled down and led to economic collapse.

We have seen similar dynamics during the Great Recession with attacks on employee working conditions, and especially attacks on public sector employee wages and benefits – as well as through privatization. The ferocity of those attacks in recent years and the low percentage of union members raise concerns that the spiraling down of working conditions will lead to economic disaster. Desperate times seem to call for desperate measures.

However, these days, most people have little to no first-hand knowledge of how the National Labor Relations Board operates or of the purpose of the law. Here, then, is a brief NLRA / NLRB primer.

by Amanda Simon

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Gideon vs. Wainwright, a landmark case in which the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the right to counsel for criminal defendants under the Sixth Amendment. To kick off our work on this important anniversary, ACS has released a new Issue Brief analyzing five Supreme Court decisions from last term that affect the right to counsel. The brief “Are We Closer to Fulfilling Gideon’s Promise?: The Effects of the Supreme Court’s ‘Right-to-Counsel Term’” was written by Christopher Durocher, government affairs counsel at The Constitution Project.

In its unanimous opinion on March 18, 1963, the Court ruled “any person haled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.”

Durocher explains why the most recent Court session expands on Gideon in the Issue Brief, writing“Supreme Court handed down decisions in five cases that open the door to expanding and better protecting the availability of effective counsel in both the pre-trial and post-conviction stages. These decisions recognized the realities of our 21st century criminal justice system and proved that the Court’s last term deserved the sobriquet the ‘Right-to-Counsel Term.’”

However, when it comes to indigent defense, Durocher, also notes the strain on our system, noting, “It is well-documented that indigent defense providers across the nation are overworked and have too few resources.”