One of the cruel truths about the Republican Party is that they hate the common laborer. Trump even argued that America’s minimum wage was too high. Once in office, Trump and the GOP Congress sought to gut public health insurance from the poor, cut taxes on the wealthy, deny guaranteed overtime pay to 12.5 million workers, undermine workplace safety standards, and erect new barriers to union organizing.
Workers, especially in so-called “right to work” states, are completely at the mercy of their employer, whom they are forced to count on to support a baseline of security for their entire family. (“Right-to-work” laws prohibit unions from requiring nonunion employees to contribute to the costs of union representation.) A worker’s only leverage is through a functioning union, which can credibly threaten to disrupt a business by withdrawing labor en masse through a strike or work stoppage. Every major concession that workers have won in American history, from the two-day weekend to employer-provided health coverage to the 40-hour work week, was won through unions. It’s also why the GOP has tried for decades to destroy them.
Yet a current Supreme Court case being heard right now may utterly gut the power of a union, rendering them toothless by taking away their constitutional right to strike. Even though a decision to do so would completely overturn decades of established precedent, the conservative majority has already made abundantly clear there isn’t anything they won’t do to reshape American society into a conservative hellhole. This is one of the most important labor cases in decades and it’s getting very little attention from the media.