Trumka, labor and the Supreme Court
Two years this September, Greene County’s Rich Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, spoke to Yale University law students in the middle of the contentious Senate fight over the elevation of Brett Kavanaugh to the high court.
Unlike many others, who raked Judge Kavanaugh over the coals for an alleged sexual assault while in high school, Trumka decried Kavanaugh’s rulings as a member of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in D.C. in cases involving worker rights.
Kavanaugh, Trumka said, was a “devoted champion of corporate interests.” He gave two examples. One Kavanaugh ruling held that undocumented workers at a Brooklyn processing plant, fired for union organizing, could not collect back pay.
The now-associate justice of the Supreme Court “asserted that undocumented workers are not even employees at all,” Trumka told the law students. “Kavanaugh would have simply erased 12 million working people from U.S. labor law.”
The second example concerned Kavanaugh’s disdain for the wellbeing of workers, especially in cases involving the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
“[Kavanaugh’s] opinions drip with contempt for OSHA and other agencies,” Trumka argued.
While the exact shape of the hearings into the qualifications of Ginsburg’s replacement can not be known, it is almost certainly true that Trumka and organized labor will line up in the camp opposite President Trump and to what the AFL-CIO chief sees as the court’s anti-labor trends and tendencies.
“Without a serious course correction, America is in danger of becoming a company nation,” Trumka said at Yale.
According to Trumka, the federal judiciary, from the Supreme Court on down, is decidedly anti-worker, thanks to years of court-packing by Republican-led Senates.
Thus, there “is a systemic problem throughout the federal judiciary” regarding labor matters.
“Federal judges at the district and appeals court levels often have the final say in [National Labor Relations Board] and OSHA cases.
“While the Supreme Court decides approximately 80 cases each year, the circuit courts decide some 55,000. So we are absolutely concerned that the Senate is confirming lower court ideologues at an alarming rate, many with no litigation experience and open hostility to civil and workers’ rights.”
Trumka called out “the Supreme Court’s pro-corporate, activist wing of justices who wax poetic about precedent and judicial restraint, yet regularly bend over backwards to serve the interests of the wealthy, the powerful and the privileged.”
He continued: “Starting with Bush v. Gore in 2000 and continuing through Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 earlier this summer, the Court has used its authority to entrench economic and political power in the hands of the elites against a growing number of Americans, and increasingly to foster division on racial, religious and ethnic lines.
“It is impossible to read the Court’s decisions in major cases over the past two decades without coming to the conclusion that they amount to deck stacking – an effort by the Court in tandem with reactionary political forces to ensure that justice is available only to the wealthy and well-connected.”
Trumka said that beginning with his study of the law at Villanova, he had always revered the Supreme Court for its adherence to facts and the law. No more. The court-majority is now driven by a common ideological bent: the elevation of corporate rights over people rights.
He cited the fact that business interests, with the concurrence of a majority of Supreme Court justices, of course, had recently taken to using the First Amendment as a bludgeon against ordinary Americans.
Only 20 percent of First Amendment cases decided by the Court were brought by business interests in the 1950-1970 period. As of 2018, he noted, the figure was 90 percent.
Trumka cited Tim Wu of Columbia Law School, who wrote: “‘Once the patron saint of protesters and the disenfranchised, the First Amendment has become the darling of economic libertarians and corporate lawyers who have recognized its power to immunize private enterprise from legal restraint.'”
Trumka mentioned to the Ivy Leaguers that he grew up in a Western Pennsylvania mining patch. “One night when I was little, I was complaining to my grandfather about the way the coal company was treating miners like him. He asked what I planned to do about it. ‘When I grow up, I could be a politician.’ … Wrong answer. So then I said: ‘How about a lawyer so I can stand up for workers?’ Bingo.
“… Then my grandfather said something that has always stuck with me: ‘If you want to help workers, you first need to help people.’ It was a message about fairness, dignity and justice for all, one the Supreme Court could use a reminder of today.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book “JFK Rising” is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.