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Worker Rights are Shaping up a Key Issue in 2020. Who Has the Best Ideas?

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers scores significant, preliminary win against Boeing on alleged retaliatory firings. Boeing is expected to appeal.

Last month, the National Labor Relations Board sought an unprecedented injunction against Laborers Local 79 in Staten Island to stop them from inflating a rat balloon. Unions must fight back.

The Volkswagen plant would boost UAW's flagging membership, way down because of plant closings and automation. It represented more than 1 million people at auto assembly plants in the 1980s, but only 155,000 at GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler today.

“This has been a terrible 18 months-plus for working people in this country,” said Celine McNicholas, director of labor law and policy at the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s an unprecedented attack on workers.”

Charges have been filed against Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to the National Labor Relations Board in Fort Worth, after he made statements threatening to bench players who did not stand for the national anthem.

A new Republican-controlled National Labor Relations Board could roll back pro-union decisions dating back decades. This could be devastating to already weakened unions. With private sector union membership hovering at a dismal 6.4 percent – down from about 17 percent in 1983 – nothing short of the end of the labor movement could be at stake.

The complaint is part of a lengthy battle over the NLRB's recognition of the vote by roughly 160 skilled workers at VW's Chattanooga plant in Tennessee to be represented by the United Auto Workers union. The German automaker has argued against allowing a small group within the plant to have union representation, maintaining that all 1,500 hourly workers should be treated as one unit.

Unions were finally on an upswing. Now, they’re staring down the barrel of the GOP’s gun.

“The original, Southern desire to preserve an exploited, economically deprived non-white agricultural labor force pinned to the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy continues to manifest itself full force,” Law Professor Juan Perea of Loyola University said. “The only difference today is now it’s brown and black people.”