 Settle down. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome, and thank you for being here. I am Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute. And on behalf of EPI, I'd like to thank our great partners, the National Employment Law Project and Jobs of Justice for joining us in convening this extraordinary group of people for this urgent conversation at this pivotal moment in history. And I wanted to let everybody know if you want to tweet, we have a hashtag, hashtag worker power. That's an easy one to remember, and might be good for other things besides just today's event as well. So I think I and Chris Owens and Erica Smiley are all going to say a few words of welcome on behalf of our organizations. And I wanted to get us started by talking about the fact that the world is changing around us in very consequential ways. And some of those are long and slow, and some of them are cataclysmic. And I would put in the long and slow category the growth of wage inequality and the erosion of worker power over four decades. And in the cataclysmic category, the election of Donald Trump and all its consequences. But the confluence of these two kinds of trends has created a moment of truth. And the truth is that our economy is weak today because we have allowed decades of public policy to bash working people and their unions. And there are a lot of different ways we can talk about it. And the economist speaks, since we're here at EPI, we talk about secular stagnation. That's just another way of saying there is a lack of demand in the economy. When you spend decades eroding wages and enriching the wealthy, you wreck the consumption capacity of your economy. And the US economy is 70% powered by consumption. So when you take money away from working people and you put it into the pockets of wealthy people and corporations who stick it in their bank accounts or buy another yacht with it, it doesn't stimulate the economy the way it ought to. And what we see the consequence of that, the very real consequence, is the slow bounce back from ever deeper financial collapses. It took almost a decade to rebuild real family income after the Great Recession. And I think all those things tells it's not that the attack on worker power is not just about individual workers finding it hard and it's about an economy that is not resilient, that is not dynamic, that is not delivering for ordinary people. And the consequence of that is the repeated political upheavals that we've seen. Mike Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO used to talk about every election is a change election these days. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 was a change election. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a change election. And the reason people are looking for change is that working people, black, brown, and white, men and women, urban and rural, and actually up and down the education scale, are fine that they are working harder or not working at all and that their kids are facing enormous challenges, that the American dream, as we talked about, where your kids do better than you, has really faded for a lot of people. And a lot of people see it in the consequences of their everyday lives. And people talk about unaffordable health care, unaffordable housing, unaffordable education. All of those things are just different ways of saying wages are too low. And this same issue, the erosion of unions and the growth of inequality, also has consequences for our democracy. And we're going to talk about all of this today. People are going to talk about it a lot more depth than I will, but if you think about it, just to sort of concentrate your minds as we get started in this important conversation, the great blue wall through Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio, that used to be kind of a dependable deliverer of pro-worker, progressive voting blocks, powered in large part by union mobilization and union money, was dynamited by Scott Walker, John Kasich, and the Koch brothers. And when they dynamited the great blue wall and the union density and the union power in those states, they splintered the working class, sometimes along race, racial lines and gender lines. But the entire progressive movement suffered. And so hopefully, and I'm always hopeful, I'm just an optimistic person by nature, we are now, we find ourselves at a moment where the need for unity across all the different movements of the progressive world is clear. And that's one of the reasons we are happy to find ourselves in this room with all of you today to have this conversation. So what do we do? We want to get off the defensive and on the offensive and make the big consequential changes that can really be game changers in terms of worker power. And that's what we want to talk about with all of you, whether it's changes in labor law, in macroeconomic policy, in racial and gender justice. All of these things are the key building blocks, but we can't be tinkering around the edges anymore. We need to be thinking bigger and bolder. And we are delighted to be here with all of you today. I'm looking forward to the presentations. We have some extraordinary folks lined up to talk to you. But I'm also interested in this as a learning community and an opportunity for us to bounce ideas off of each other in a safe space and really help us figure out where we need to go from here. And with that, I would like to turn over to Chris Owens, my longtime friend, mentor and partner, the head of the National Employment Law Project for just a little bit longer. But she's been, Chris was a colleague of mine at the AFL-CIO, and she has been a great friend and advisor to me when I came over to EPI, giving all the wisdom and the great experience that she amassed at NELP, which she has really built an extraordinary organization that we love working with here at EPI. It's one of our favorite partner organizations. And I also want to just take two seconds to thank Salih McNicholas, Heidi Shearholds, and Margaret Poidock, the EPI policy staff for their great work in helping to pull together today's event. Chris, the floor is yours. So I love Thea. I've never thought of myself as her mentor. I always tell her it's only because I'm taller than she is right now. But anyway, we are so glad to be here. Well, I'd like to. We are glad to be here today to share, to have this time with you and to learn from all of you. When we began these conversations a few months back about working together to sort of lift up the issue of worker power, it really grew out of our concern about not just the attacks on unions, which are significant, and our panelists will talk about that, I suspect, but really the attack on the ability of workers to act collectively in any manner. So it's the assaults on private sector unions through right to work. It's the assault on public sector through Janus, the attempt now to bankrupt public sector unions as part of the post-Janus strategy, the forced arbitration, keeping workers out of court, eliminating class arbitration basically, the Supreme Court's latest decision on that is such an outrage that I know someone who clerked for Robertson who said, I couldn't even believe they issued that decision. So, and then the sort of restrictions on class action litigation generally have all combined to really drive an isolating and atomizing of the workforce to undermine collective action. And that is in part to undermine the ability of workers to come together to have a voice in the economy to advocate for better terms and conditions at work. But it is also as Thea mentioned about democracy because we know that union members have a higher propensity to vote, they voted higher rates. We also know that states that have adopted right to work have seen a net decline in votes, in voting have seen a one to two point decline in voting and presidential elections have seen a decline in working class people being able to run for and win elections and a decline in the ability of pro worker candidates to win. And then that of course has a snowballing effect because as the landscape, the electoral landscape shifts in the states and the composition of state legislatures shift, we see a rise of voter suppression legislation, we see more gerrymandering and we see a reification of this whole process that we now see also at the federal level in the Supreme Court, for example, that will take us decades to recover from unless we figure out how to crack this nut and restore the right of workers to act collectively. And so that's what today is about, this is what the work that EPI and Jobs with Justice, our other wonderful partner and NELP will be doing together in the years ahead in partnership with the labor movement in partnership with the worker center movement and in partnership with all people who love and believe in democracy. Thanks a lot. All right, I'll be brief because Chris and Thea said most of it, good morning by the way, see many of your faces. I'm Smiley, I'm originally from North Carolina and I'm also excited to be a part of this discussion, maybe for some different reasons. I don't know if many of you know about North Carolina and our fantastic democracy. I think that one of the things that Chris said that's really important is that this work of restoring and building worker power and for many for the first time isn't just a rights-based thing, just to restore some rights to a handful of union members. This is actually a really core and central fight to building and healthy and powerful democracy in the country. And I think that for what I'll just contribute to the opening before we get into our panel and get into the guts of this is that I really wanna encourage us to think bigger today. I wanna go beyond thinking about policies that will just get us back to 1950 something or 1970 something. I mean, frankly, just for my ancestry, that won't fly and that's not actually gonna help us build for the future, build for 21st century economy. And so wanna definitely build and centralize the battle against white supremacy in this and to really think ahead about how we're building power in a way that unifies workers of color, particularly black workers and white workers against a common enemy in the battle and confrontation of white supremacy. And then last, I think it's really easy for us to and because of the way that a lot of us are oriented even here today, it's really easy for us to think solely about associational forms of worker power, of voting, of electing people to then pass great laws and that's really important piece of it. However, at the same time, coming from an organization where our mission and values are about getting working people into a position to collectively negotiate for themselves and to be able to take collective action like Chris said in ways that leverage power, not just associational power, but our power to control different marketplaces, our power to control production, like to actually really be specific about what we mean when we talk about worker power today and the policies that we're trying to win because we don't wanna just put some good words on paper that don't ultimately build power for real people in context to corporations. We want to actually put policies in place that create on ramps for workers to build real power in each of those categories and others. So despite the fact that I'm super excited that worker power is kind of the new black right now, it's totally sexy, so that's really fantastic, but I also don't wanna romanticize it in a way, I wanna make sure that we're talking about things that are actually gonna build it and not just create really good new policies that may or may not get enforced. So all that said, really stoked to be here and wanna also just put a little bit of urgency on what we're doing because as much particularly here in DC that we like to have these types of conversations and someone summarizes them and we say we did such a great job, it actually really matters to people back in my hometown and to people where I'm from, like it really, what we're talking about now will matter for decades to come and the opportunities and experiments that we make in this moment really have to make a difference in our lives for the survival of our democracy and for the well-being of the people in it. So thank you for being here and let's get started. Thank you so much, Miley and thank you, Chris. I think you can all see why these three organizations are at the center of convening today's thing, today's event. And I wanted to, before we launch into the first panel which we're really excited about, I wanted to thank one more extraordinary individual, Judy Conti, who has been a great partner and a great friend and who is as always tireless and very energetic in helping to make this a terrific and successful event and to fill the room today. But with that, let me introduce the moderator of our first panel, strengthening the right to unionize and collective bargaining. It is Celine McNicholas, the wonderful director of government affairs at EPI. We are so lucky to have her and with that, the floor is yours, Celine. Thank you. Thanks, Thea and I'll just thank Judy who's been a wonderful partner on this as well and Margaret for all of her help. So we've heard already this morning really compelling reasons why it's so important that we have conversations around building worker power and why it's fundamental that a critical piece of those discussions focus on building collective bargaining rights. And that's exactly what the first panel today is gonna talk about. We're gonna examine reform efforts at the federal level to expand collective bargaining rights and also state actions. And so I'm joined today in this conversation by the wonderful Nikki McKinney who's the Labor Policy Director for the Senate Help Committee. And she's gonna focus her remarks on federal reform efforts. Her boss introduced a bill earlier this year the Protecting the Right to Organize Act or the PRO Act. And she's gonna talk to us a bit about that. And then Steve Kreisberg who is the Director of Research and Collective Bargaining at AFSCME is gonna talk about state level efforts to expand and safeguard collective bargaining. And then Lynn Reinhart who most recently was the General Counsel at the AFL-CIO from 2009 through 2018 and who we at EPI are so fortunate to have as a senior fellow is gonna talk about efforts to repeal right to work laws. So we've got a lot of ground to cover this morning. So I'm gonna turn it over to Nikki but be thinking of your questions for sure. Thanks. Good morning everyone. I wanna thank NELP, EPI and Jobs with Justice for inviting me to participate in this event. It's sometimes surreal for me to sit on panels like this because when they say it takes a village to raise a labor policy director, that's really true. Absent three women in this room, Sharon Block, Judy Conti and Celine, I would still be a stupid Republican labor policy staffer on the hill. Yeah, they didn't tell you they invited a Republican, did they? But they raised me into the Labor Policy Director for the Democratic staff. And so that's why I'm here today. So I wanna thank the three of them. I need the transformation. Right, thank you. Thank you, Smiley. Thank you. So I really appreciate the framing that Thea and Chris and Smiley gave for today's discussion. Everyone in this room has for years even before it was hip and trendy been arguing that workers deserve a stronger voice in the workplace. And those efforts have made a difference. Over the past 15 years, I have seen a noticeable shift in how Congress has talked about work and workers in this country during the lowest points of the recession. Congress was focused on ensuring workers, particularly those hardest hit by the downturn had access to safety nets that would allow them and their families to remain afloat. As we began to see the economy rebound, the focus was on jobs. Every member wanted to introduce a new jobs bill that would somehow magically create jobs where they didn't exist previously. Then the turn was to not just people having a job but that those jobs being good jobs with a living wage. But more recently, and due in large part to the efforts of the folks in this room, Congress is recognizing that many of the issues impacting workers are directly related to the imbalance of power between workers and their employers. People are talking about worker voice, corporate power and the centrality of unions to combating inequality. It is this shift in the focus of the conversation that led Leader Schumer to release the Better Deal paper on worker power. That in turn led to policy conversations with many of the folks in this room and folks on this panel out of which the Workers' Freedom to Negotiate Act now, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act was born. Because most of you helped distract it, I'm not gonna bore you with all the details. But many of its many provisions, the Pro Act would authorize meaningful penalties for employers that violate workers' rights, strengthen support for workers who suffer retaliation when they're for exercising their rights, create a private right of action for violations of workers' rights under the NLRA, prevent employers from interfering in union elections, enhance workers' rights to support boycotts, strikes or other acts of solidarity, overturn the Supreme Court's decision in epic systems and ensure that unions can collect fair share fees. With the rights of workers being eroded by legal challenges brought by corporate special interests, the power of corporations going largely unchecked and the structure of the modern place making it nearly impossible for workers to know for whom they work, congressional action to restore workers' rights is long overdue. I won't pretend that the Pro Act is gonna solve every worker's problems, but it is a comprehensive approach to restoring workers' ability to stand together and demand changes in their workplace. I'm not delusional about the prospects of passing the Pro Act in the next six months, in the next six years. The road ahead of us is long, but I know that it is conversations like this and the conversations that you all have when you go up to the Hill that are critically important for us as we try to make headway in this space. So I appreciate the support of the organizations and people in this room who helped us think through the Pro Act, who helped make it better at each step along the way and who encouraged members to co-sponsor. I also wanna thank our counterparts on the House side in Chairman Bobby Scott's office. I also have to give a particular shout out to John DeLea, a former member of the Help Committee without whom this bill would not exist. I hope he is watching somewhere. I look forward to standing next to each of you in a very crowded room in the White House one day as this bill is signed in. Why are you laughing at me? I am very serious about that. I want the room to be even more crowded than this one when it is signed into law and that will in fact happen as discussions like this. Make sure we get there. So thank you. Thanks Nikki. Sure. Well thanks, it's a pleasure to be here and I appreciate EPI and NELP and JWJ for inviting me. So picking up on what Nikki just said, I just finished my 25th year at AFSCME and one of my first assignments when I arrived was to draft a state employees collective bargaining bill for the state employees in Nevada. Yesterday, the governor signed that bill which is the good news. The bad news is it wasn't exactly the one I drafted although he did commit when he was a candidate that he would sign that bill. It did change a little bit along the way but the good news is state employees in Nevada for the first time have the right to collective bargaining and that's extremely important to us. It's not something that happened by accident, right? It wasn't just a confluence of events that occurred here over the last few months because we finally have a democratic legislature and a democratic governor. This is a lot of intense work over many years. Just five years ago, for instance, that state was all red, right? Completely Republican controlled legislature, Governor Sandoval who was relatively moderate as Republicans go these days but it didn't stop them from doing all sorts of anti-labor, anti-education, anti-social service things. So the Democrats had a lot of pent up demands and really restored some economic, racial and social justice to the state and included in that was collective bargaining for state workers which is really one of the three strategies that we deploy to grow our union and to bring collective bargaining to public employees but also trying to bring representation and collective bargaining to private sector workers who do public services. So the traditional approach is what we did in Nevada, right? We pass a law and we authorize collective bargaining for public employees. Public employees are not covered by any national law that provides them with that right although we're trying to change that as well. There is some federal legislation that'll be announced shortly and some hearing shortly that will hopefully provide some impetus to move forward. Again, that's not going to be adopted anytime soon perhaps. I don't think Mitch McConnell is a co-sponsor but we're working on Mitch but the idea is really for us is we work these things at the state level. So we're trying to bring collective bargaining to those states that don't authorize it. Now Nevada turns and we've got it, right? It's the first time in 16 years a state has adopted a statewide law for public employees. So which is the next state that could possibly do this, right? We look at Virginia, maybe, but right now Virginia has a law in its books that prohibits public sector employees from having collective bargaining agreements. It's not just silent on it, it actively prohibits. North Carolina has a similar law. Texas has a similar law with some exception. So Virginia is a possibility. They haven't had Democratic control in that state since, I don't know, probably Chuck Robb was governor and he supported a right to work. So we look at Arizona. Is that a possibility? We could look at Colorado where our partners at SEIU and AFT have a state employee affiliate that made a run at the same thing we did in Nevada this year came up a little bit short in part because, well, I don't like the governor so I'll just leave it at that. But he's not a pro-labor guy. Colorado is a very difficult state for labor. They are trending Democratic but they're environmental Democrats. There's some belief in economic justice, not as much belief in labor, right? In labor rights and collective bargaining. It's just not that kind of state. And so it's an uphill battle. We were successful in Nevada in large part because of culinary, right? You know, the United here local in Las Vegas was extremely powerful, extremely active and unbelievably supportive of our effort and they deserve a lot of credit for the passage of this bill. But the other approach is in states where we've had collective bargaining but yet there are large swaths of employees that are excluded. This year in Washington state, for example, we brought collective bargaining rights to the Attorney General's office, not just to the Oracle staff which we've always had rights for but to the assistant attorney generals. That's unusual for assistant attorney generals to have bargaining rights. But they do in Washington state now because we've expanded to these kinds of residual groups of employees that have not had rights that have been left out. We did something similar in Maryland a few years ago where there were constitutional officers like the Comptroller's office and so on that were left out. In New Jersey a couple years ago, groups of temporary workers were excluded from the statute from coverage and we brought coverage to temporary employees. So we continue to look at these residual workers, again, through the state law approach of expanding bargaining rights. There's another group of workers that many of you are familiar with called independent providers. We call them IPs. They're often paid by the Medicaid program or the childcare development block grant programs. So these are childcare providers who work in their own homes very often. Or alternatively, in Medicaid, they're working in their clients' homes, right? And they provide custodial care, in-home support services, not medical care. Paid by Medicaid because it's an alternative to nursing home care or other institutional care. And these workers are essentially paid minimum wage at best in some states. And we have brought collective bargaining rights to them in a number of states. SEIU has been much more active in this regard than we have, although we have shared representation rights with SEIU. And this particular year, we feel very good about bringing collective bargaining rights to childcare providers in the state of California. So we're hoping that by the end of this month, that group of providers will also have collective bargaining rights, which would be pretty exciting for them and for us. And their representation rights with SEIU, we have an agreement about how to organize and share jurisdiction in that particular group. So the final of the three is what some of you know as labor peace. I could use that term or I could use other terms, but let me just briefly describe what it is we're talking about. This is trying to leverage the government's power as body that procures services in the marketplace, right? Government contracts for all sorts of services. It could be behavioral health care. It could be UPK programs. We know that there's all sorts of procurement that the government engages in at the state municipal levels. What we want to do is leverage that purchasing power to have employers stand down in its efforts to defeat unions, right? To create neutrality or card check agreements. The government cannot do this at the local level as a regulator of behavior. It has to do this as a marketplace participant. In other words, the government has to show that it has a stake in the economic success of that particular enterprise and that's why that justifies the labor peace requirements. So it's a fairly high bar. We're concerned that if we're too adventurous in this particular endeavor, the five guys in the Supreme Court that we all know and love will just eliminate this, right? I mean, look, they're gonna eliminate abortion rights for God's sakes. They'll eliminate this. So we have to be very careful and strategic about how we deploy this, but we are looking at this approach, right? We have many public employees who are denied the right to strike. So it would make sense when the government procures services in certain critical areas that they would also not want to see disruption of services. They would not want to see strikes and lockouts because they want to make sure for the government's interest in those services that there's uninterrupted service delivery. So basically that's the approach we have to deploy and we're looking at that. So it's not the kind of policy that we would have a state law and say all state contracts have to include labor peace requirements. That would probably fail the test, but very strategic and kind of through the procurement process where we can justify it is where we're looking to grow our union and looking to kind of check employer behavior into opposition to us. So I'll turn it over to Lynn. Great. Thanks. I wanna add my thanks to EPI and NELP and Jobs with Justice for inviting me to participate today. This is a terrific gathering and I'm really looking forward to the conversation. And so you've just heard two fairly inspiring presentations by Nikki and by Steve about things that are happening, things that are possible. I'm gonna be the person who's gonna talk about damage control. So it's less inspiring, but it's also important. I'm gonna talk about damage control and that is right to work and how we stop it from spreading. Before I jump into that though, I just wanna compliment Steve, your description of labor peace and the parameters around it was excellent. And as the former general counsel of the AFL-CIO who's talked about the legal structure around that a lot, I just kudos to you, man. That was good. Okay. So I wanna talk about right to work. Just very briefly remind us what is it? Remind us why it's evil and then talk about what it is we're gonna do to stop it or overturn it. So just to make sure that we're all on the same baseline here of what is right to work, the quick refresher. Under our legal system, if workers at a particular facility, a majority of those workers vote that they wanna have a union, they wanna form a union at their workplace, then the union comes in and has the legal obligation subject to enforcement through lawsuits and damages and it's real. The legal obligation to represent everybody in the workplace regardless of whether or not an individual worker joins the union or pays dues to the union. It's called exclusive representation and that's been the bedrock of our legal system in the private sector for the whole time that we've had a private sector labor law. So the union has to represent everybody and so fairness dictates that everybody who gets the benefit of having union representation, the higher wages, the better benefits, the representation through the grievance and arbitration process and so forth would pay a fair share toward that representation and the benefits that they're receiving and they pay that fair share either by joining the union and paying union dues or paying a fair share fee also known as an agency fee. So everybody shares in the cost of the benefits that they're receiving being part of a unionized workplace. That is our legal system today except that this evil called so-called right to work which isn't about working and it doesn't create jobs and I know that because Heidi Sherholds put out a study here at EPI that told me that and along the way here I'm going to be quoting studies from Heidi and others at EPI from Alex Hotel Fernandez from Bill Spriggs over at the AFL-CIO very smart economists who put really great research together David Maddlin sitting right here very great research together that helps all of us be smarter and sound smarter about these issues when we talk about them. So I just want to credit that work that I'm stealing here in the course of my remarks. So I described the system and as it should be with everybody paying toward cost of representation but in 27 states it was 28 until Missouri voters repealed through a citizens veto right to work in Missouri. The system has changed for private sector workers and the state has made it illegal for unions and employers to agree that everybody should pay a fair share fee. That's what right to work is it's banning private agreements between unions and employers that fair share should be the system in their workplace. Okay. So you know unions don't automatically get fair share just because they're there. They have to negotiate that and include that as part of their agreements with employers. Many employers include it because it's good policy. It creates unity in the workplace but not all do. For example, the Washington Post down the street does not have fair share at their workplace. So it's a private agreement that is banned in the 27 states that have right to work. So that's just our thumbnail refresher of what right to work is. And now I'm going to turn to why it's evil. So let's talk about why it's evil in the workplace. Well, so you have a group of workers who are all represented by the union and get the benefits of union representation but they can decide whether or not they want to pay anything for that. So you can decide and right to work creates this incredible financial incentive for workers to decide, you know what actually, I'd like to get those benefits for free. I'd like to have the union represent me if I have a problem on the job but I'm not going to pay for it. Steve's going to pay for it. Steve's a good union member who's paying his dues is going to pay for the union to represent Lynn, the freeloader who's getting something for free. What does that do to solidarity in the workplace? What does that do to, it creates divisiveness and resentment and it also, at the workplace level, that's a problem. And then at the union level, it keeps resources from the union so that the union has to do more with less. They have to provide the representation, as I mentioned at the beginning, they're legally obligated to provide that representation but they're not getting any money for it from the workers who've decided to drop out and be freeloader. So it's a financial drain on unions. It creates divisiveness and undermines solidarity in the workplace. That's all bad. Now it gets worse. Ready? Right to work. In the states that have adopted right to work, wages go down, not just for unionized workers but for all workers. And again, I know this because Heidi Shearholz told me that right to work, lower wages for all workers union and non-union in right to work states by 3%. 3%. That's a lot of money. That's bigger than the raises that many workers get each year. So that's real money that is not going into workers' pockets, that is not being spent on consumer goods so it weakens our economy. It also is money that taxes aren't being paid on so it hurts state and local governments who don't get taxes. And then, as I said, it weakens unions because they have less resources. And when you have weak unions, what you have is less investment in education in a state. You have fewer people covered by health insurance in a state. You have more statutes passed preempting local labor standards. There's studies that show the more you have right to work, the more you have the bad guys coming in to preempt strong, local labor standards. And you have more voter suppression laws. And it gets better, worse. Hold on. As Thea, I believe, alluded to in her remarks or Chris did, right to work actually reduces participation in elections. And this has been documented through research by Alex Fratell-Fernandez and others that in states that have gone right to work, voter turnout is 2% to 3% less in various levels of elections, 2% less in the last presidential elections. So think about this. Michigan, Wisconsin, adopted right to work. Who lost Michigan and Wisconsin by less than a percentage point? Right to work suppresses voter turnout by 2%, OK? Like there's like a serious correlation here. So Alex found this quote from the state policy network which is part of the group of right wing think tanks that are pushing their anti-worker, anti-progressive agenda. And they said in a fundraising appeal for their efforts to adopt right to work that the point of this campaign is to quote, defund and defang one of our freedom movements most powerful opponents. We must clear pathways towards passage of so many other pro-freedom initiatives in the states. So they say it. That's what it's about. It's about power and shifting power away from workers at the workplace to corporations and the wealthy so that they can ram their agenda through in the states. And they do. Right to work comes with a package of other anti-worker, anti-progressive legislation. And so people like to think about it as being about unions and as institutions and money. And it does hurt unions' pocket books, but it's much more than that. It's about this whole agenda and it's about pushing through and eroding worker power and progressive power in the states and hurting all workers, not just union workers, but all workers. And that is why it's so evil. So what are we going to do about it? OK, a few things. One is we need to really expose right to work for what it is. That it is not about unions. It is about a power grab by corporations and the wealthy to take power away from all working people, whether or not they have unions. OK? And we just need to talk about it more like that so people understand what it is, what the real evils are, and what the agenda is of the people who are pushing right to work in the states. So that's one. Two, we need to stop it from spreading. We really need to be all in to stop it from popping up elsewhere. And that's at both the state and the local level. For the last few years, we've had this little problem, erupting in communities around the country in a few states, where red areas in blue states have passed local right to work, which is, of course, preposterous and illegal because the National Labor Relations Act says states can pass right to work. It doesn't say cities can pass right to work. But it's all being litigated and going to this Supreme Court with those five gentlemen you referenced, Steve. Fortunately, the case is not going to the Supreme Court right now because Illinois and New Mexico passed legislation to moot out the cases that were burbling their way up. But we need to stop it from spreading at the state and at the local level. And then we need to look at repealing it. So let's see. The win in Missouri was absolutely inspiring. It was a fantastic win. Voters rejected right to work in Missouri by a 2 to 1 margin. It was a fantastic campaign that really energized the labor movement and progressives in the state. It was fantastic. And you look at that and you're like, yeah, let's do that everywhere. Let's do that in 27 more states. Well, sure. But it's a big deal. And it's a big decision. And there are some really serious discussions going on around this and around picking where and when and whether to go after right to work in a state. It's a big deal to overturn a law that's been on the books for 50 years where a culture has built up around it. You can do it. But it takes some real doing. And it takes a lot of money. The campaign in Missouri was quite expensive. It was great. We won. Yay. But it takes a lot of money. So it's a timing decision. It's a resources decision. It's a what are the other priorities decision. Steve just talked about winning collective bargaining rights for public sector employees in Nevada. That's awesome. That's huge. That's going to build work or power for a group of people there who haven't had it up to this point. So in a state, there might be that going on. There might be the right to work discussion going on. There might be other organizing legislation that's on the table. So it's a question of where does this fit with the priorities. And then there's also the recognition that if you go down this road and decide to launch one of these campaigns, it brings out the other side big time. The business community does not want and the right-wing think tanks do not want right to work overturned in these states. And they're going to throw down big if labor and its allies come forward with a campaign to repeal right to work. Sure, yeah, great. Let's do it. But it's going to be a very deliberate and strategic informed discussion by the unions in the state to decide whether it's the right thing to do. And at the moment, there aren't a whole lot of states where the political representation lines up so that it's even realistic right at the moment. So I think we have to take the long view on this and see where this strategic discussion lands and then when it's made be all in to support repeal of this evil law. Thank you. So folks can be thinking of their questions, but I definitely have a few. But I'll try not to dominate. I am actually not at all optimistic by nature, unlike Thea. But I do feel optimistic right now because even though I am not an economist, the numbers I do know are 40 cosponsors in the Senate right now for the Pro Act. And I think that that is very significant in terms of letting folks know that at least policymakers recognize that there is the need for reform in this area. And the bill has not been introduced for long, but in the house we have over 150 cosponsors. But for those of us who have worked on legislation, it's like it is a steep climb. And the political climate is what it is. But you have a lot of folks in this room who are researchers, grassroots organizers, and advocates. And so what can we do? I mean, we've heard and I'd ask the same thing to Steve, but I'll start with Nikki. Like what can we do as researchers, as advocates, folks who have grassroots components to support and continue to build momentum? I mean, we need to hold policymakers accountable. It isn't going to be this Congress that something gets enacted. But how do we get from A to B, what can we be doing to support your efforts? Great question. I have four asks. None of them are particularly easy. One is I really need more education of members, both new and old, quite honestly, on both sides in both chambers, about what the National Labor Relations Act is, does, and why it is important to reverse the trend that has chipped away at the rights within it. They just don't simply understand the act. We all in here are talking about all of these things and we understand them inherently. They do not understand them inherently. And so not only is educating them important, but making sure that the Pro Act remains on your list of legislative topics when you or your flying in members of your organizations to meet with members, keep talking about the Pro Act. Thank the members who have cosponsored and in the House side and the Senate side for the folks who are not on, encourage them to join. It will not be the end of their political careers if they cosponsor the Pro Act. Part of what is difficult about explaining what's in the Pro Act, I think, is that the concepts are relatively abstract. It is particularly helpful if we find when we find their constituents who have had a problem organizing, who have experienced retaliation when they have attempted to exercise their rights, and being able to say here is a real world example of someone from your state or your district who has experienced an issue and here is the solution in the Pro Act for them. That is a tangible way of selling the bill that I, quite honestly, have not done a great job of doing it yet. It is, I will say, we had a good example of this and it was one of the reasons Senator Tester joined the bill and that there was a lockout of workers at a bakery in Montana. And we were able to say, here are the workers, you're trying to create a solution for them. We have a solution for them and it was the Pro Act. That's been one tangible example, and so that's why I know it works. So if you can find those, it's important. And then last, I would be remiss if I did not say from a Senate perspective, we have to pay closer attention to judicial nominations. I know why is why don't people keep laughing at me? Nobody's laughing at Lynn or Steve. You're just that big kid and he's resonating. We are about to, even if I get the Pro Act right, even if we do all the things when we get the Pro Act passed, the judiciary we are facing from now until the end of time, because they are nominating 12-year-olds, it seems like, are going to just chip away at it in the same way. We just cannot, the conversation has been important and been dominated, I think, by the impact on reproductive rights and it tends to be sort of in a reproductive rights and environment. We have to call out their record on labor case. We have to say, this is going to be bad for workers, because there seems to be some momentum around members of Congress. Our presidentials are talking about workers in a way I have not heard them talk about them before. Amy Klobuchar stood out in the snow and said things I did not think I'd ever hear come out of her mouth and that is because everybody is recognizing that worker-in-worker power is important. So all that's to say is if we need to highlight their, how this conservative judiciary is going to negatively impact workers, I know it may not prevent everybody from getting confirmed, but we have to highlight it. So those are my four asks. Great, so Lynn's dying to say something. I can't help myself. I have to underscore something that Nikki said here because it's huge that there is this comprehensive strong labor law bill introduced in the Senate in the House but in the Senate with 40 co-sponsors. I mean, that's huge. So credit to Nikki and her boss and to everybody in the Senate who's been working on this. I mean, frankly, when that better deal paper came out a year ago, there were things in there that we hadn't talked about in the labor movement for a long time because they were kind of out there. And now they're in this bill that's got 40 co-sponsors, which is really awesome. But and I just want to endorse what Nikki said about the need for all of us in the worker rights community to talk about this and to, I would urge us to make it a central part of the conversation. It's not an add-on. It's not a special interest bill for unions. This is about rebuilding worker power at a moment where the balance in our economy is so off. It's about rebuilding worker power for the benefit of all of us. We're not going to get strong labor standards. We're not going to get strong anti-discrimination laws. We're not going to get those laws enforced. We're going to have more voter suppression if we don't have a strong labor movement. So I just really urge us to make it a central part of the conversation and for groups that aren't unions, frankly, to get out there and talk about this as being a central part of how it is that we all get our collective agenda advanced. So the more we can do that and the sooner we can do that because we know the bill's been introduced and we got to build for passage the better. So that's my plug. Thank you. Yeah, it would be a good panel without a little bit of dissent. So anybody remember the name Kay Hagan? Yes. How about Blanche Lincoln? How about David Pryor? What do those three people have in common? They were co-sponsors of the Employee Free Choice Act and voted against culture. So 40 sponsors is great. We had a super majority of sponsors in 2009 for the Employee Free Choice Act and we couldn't get a vote in the Senate on the merits of the bill. So we all know that, right? We all know that politicians' commitments really don't mean a lot. So we have to be sober about this. So I talked about Nevada. So we thought we had a commitment from a governor. Six weeks ago, he tells us he wants to do a task force to study collective bargaining. That's where they wound up in Colorado. We fortunately overcame that. Then he told us he didn't want to bargain over economic issues. And we fortunately overcame that. We got a bill. Like I said, it's not, you know, it gives us probably 80% of what we want. But the point of the story is that if we're not building power on the ground, we're not going to be able to move the politics to sustain the kinds of commitments that we get in September and October, right? Detailer, the President of United Heirs said it best at a rally. We had just a couple of weeks ago. You can't be our friend in September and October and November and forget about us in January, February, March, April, and May. And too many politicians, and that's the legislative session in Nevada, too many politicians behave that way, right? So the way we're trying to achieve success is this balance, right? You put too much pressure on some of these governors. They go the wrong way is part of it. And governors are powerful people. So we have to be strategic about this. But if we're too reliant on our political system, we're not going to achieve the gains we need to achieve. I think we've seen that, right? The pendulum swings, it's swinging much more rapidly. I think it was, I think it was Thea that said that all the change elections have pot hours that we're talking about, right? So we're looking for things that are more durable. And the only things that are durable in our view is membership power, right? If we're not building our membership or if we're not building the union on the ground, we're not going to be able to sustain gains. We saw, I mean, we made errors in how we responded to Scott Walker, right? And so we lost our organization. So we learned from those mistakes, but it's very difficult for a public sector union that is dependent upon government policy to maintain its strength in the face of that kind of harsh political attack. So these are challenges. So when we talk about going on the offensive for us, we can't adopt favorable legislation in the absence of building an organization on the ground. That's probably the most fundamental lesson that we've learned over the last couple of decades. You know, back in the 80s, we can do a very transactional deal with politicians and get collective bargaining legislation. That's maybe what we did with Governor Celeste in Ohio, for instance. We had Republicans supporting us, right? Governor Thompson in Illinois, Governor Ray in Iowa, they were champions of the collective bargaining bills in their states and they were Republicans. Those days are gone, right? Those days are gone at least for the foreseeable future. So in light of that, we have to have greater strength in the ground. And part of that is not just our own membership, but building the kind of coalitions of other progressive groups. We can't be as insular as we've been. We have to, as labor, reach out more broadly to the community, whether it's environmental, racial and social justice groups, poverty groups. We have to be much more inclusive and build those bridges if we're going to succeed. Great, thanks. So I think we have a mic somewhere. Folks from the audience have questions and if not, I'll continue to take up everybody's time here. Any questions? Okay. I'm not totally familiar with it, but what are your thoughts about essentially an anti-preemption provision? It simply says that the National Labor Relations Act does not pre-empt local and state labor initiatives, maybe sets a floor. There is a provision in the National Labor Relations Act for deferring to state agencies under certain circumstances that we're helping some places, hurting other places. What are your thoughts about that? I would say that when we were thinking about the Pro Act specifically, we had a sort of a list of greatest hits of that which we had seen employers and legal challenges chip away at. And so that was the basis from where we started the conversations for the Pro Act. I think your idea is interesting and one that would require a lot more socialization in order to make what we would consider mainstream. Steve is correct, 40 co-sponsors on this bill doesn't really mean a whole. And it is important it doesn't mean a whole lot. We were able to get 40 co-sponsors because we were very clear eyed about some of the provisions. We don't repeal 14B in our bill. That was a strategic decision in the hopes of getting some members on. It didn't pan out. But your idea is an interesting one. The 14B is actually an anti-preemption provision. It's a state-wide provision. Right. Why all the way out of the state? Can I jump in on this? Yeah. There's a very active debate that's happened over the last, I don't know, I guess since 1935 when the labor law was passed about what it should say about states ability to move on labor relations. And as far as I know, the debate hasn't died down at all recently. And the reason for the debate, and I mean you sort of think about the point of the question of why not let states go do progressive labor policy. Sure, why not? The thing is that for labor relations, it's really hard to define what's the floor. This isn't like minimum wage. The floor is $15, right? It's gonna be 15, the floor is gonna be $15. Yep. It's not like that. This is labor relations, which is messier than that. You've got a labor law that says that employees have the right to form and join unions, and they have the right to refrain from forming and joining unions. So in those red states, if you open up the door for red states to legislate labor relations, they're gonna be like, oh yeah, let's load up on that right to refrain stuff. And by the way, no card check, and we have to have elections, and the elections are gonna be every year, and yada, yada, yada. And there are a lot of red states. And then in the blue states, we could probably get some really good stuff passed. But there's just a lot of concern about if you open the door, are we gonna lose more in the red states than we're able to gain in the blue states? And that is something, Nikki, you're right, that they need a lot more focus and study and analysis. She's gonna, I mean, I'm gonna name her again, Heidi Schirholz and Gordon Laffer did a really interesting paper on this a couple of years ago, comparing winners and losers in red states and blue states and what it might look like if you change the rules on preemption. And I really encourage folks to take a look at it because it's like, our sentiment is all, I think, in the same place, but it's just really hard when you get down to the practicalities of what it would mean in real terms in the state, because it's not like the minimum wage or five paid sick days. It's just hard. Absolutely. Are there any other audience questions? I'm Dr. Caroline Pomplin. I grew up at a time when labor was at its most powerful in the 50s and 60s. I'm just curious from Mr. Kreisberg. What did you do wrong in this hot water, in the campaign to get rid of Walker? How much time do we have? No, I mean, I think the single biggest thing in the interest of time, the single biggest mistake we made is we focused on Walker. We didn't focus on our members, right? So we brought, we were able to bring tens of thousands of people to the capitals, not us alone, which was great and exciting and powerful. We really were excited about it. But he won and we lost. Right, but that's, well, no, the point is, but there's a point there, right? So we mobilized. We mobilized around that, but we didn't connect enough with our membership. And so we learned from that, right? So we knew, for instance, that we were going to face an attack and it wasn't just us. I mean, AFT, NEA, SEIU, the four major public sector unions understood what the Janus decision might do, which created right to work throughout the entire public sector if you're not familiar. So we knew this was coming. And instead of like being externally focused, we focused on our own membership and built that loyalty and that connection, right? In Iowa, where we faced basically the same bill that they adopted in Wisconsin. And as we saw that coming, we moved our members off of payroll deduction of union dues to bank draft, simple things like that, because we were focused internally as well as the external. So the biggest single mistake was almost an exclusive external focus, like we were gonna beat him in the legislature. And like I said, there's plenty of other things I could talk about, but I think that's the, to me, that was the strategic error we made. Okay, yeah, sure. One more. Hi, Sunu Chandi, National Women's Law Center. I'm curious about the overall framing about it being a moment of work or power being chipped away. I think that's true in all the ways that folks have said. Coming from a women's rights group and sex harassment and seeing all of the collective action on that front, which is a workplace justice context. There's been many, many bills at the local and state level, expanding protections, expanding workplaces where those protections happen and lowering the standards and all the things we wanted on federal efforts. So I'm curious how these two movements intersect because they're all about workplace justice. And I have a specific question about Colorado. I was just with the Colorado Women's Bar Association. They had worked on an equal pay bill that was being signed by the governor. And I believe it was signed, again, creating better standards for bringing equal pay claims for women in the workplace. So it's just curious to me how these things are happening at the same time and wondering if the panelists can talk about how we can help that create better outcomes for everyone. Sure. Anybody want to start? Go ahead. Well, I guess from my perspective, when we build, when we create collective bargaining rights and we have more workers in unions, it gives us a strategic advantage long-term to adopt and enact favorable labor policy at a labor standards level like you're discussing. So I think that to me is one of the weaknesses that we have in Colorado, right? Though we can protect workers through labor standards, but we're not willing in Colorado to build worker power. When we have strong unions, we have greater voter turnout, as Lynn pointed out. And frankly, we're electing more progressive politicians. As we described to the governor in Nevada, they're trying not to be Wyoming anymore, right? They're trying to be a state that's a little bit more diverse in terms of its economy. But they have a revenue collection system that looks a lot like Wyoming, like a backwater. So we can't sustain what they're trying to do. Labor leads those revenue coalitions. We help put them together, which creates the funding for all the kinds of programs that we like to see that go beyond labor. The same thing for labor policy more generally, or employment policy more generally. So the right understands this, the left doesn't, right? Republicans pay a lot more attention to labor than Democrats do, typically. That may be changing, but that's been the problem. That was the problem for most of this decade. That's probably been the problem for most of the last 30 years. So until we, you know, I think we have to look at this strategically. Yeah, it's self-serving for me to say that. I know that, but I think the evidence is there that when we have a strong labor movement, take a look at the laws in California and New York, right? It's not an accident. Take a look at what we've been able to do in Washington as labor's gotten stronger over the last 10 years. Oregon, where labor's gotten stronger over the last 10, 15, 20 years, what we've been able to accomplish. The evidence is there for us. So I do think we have to kind of coalesce on the employment side around the idea that we need more people in unions. And it creates, I think, the kind of the sustained momentum for employment policy and positive change. Can I, I'm gonna just pile on briefly to what Steve said, and I agree with everything you said, but I also think to just emphasize that the best way to advance women's equality in the workplace is through strong unions. If you want equal pay, it's in the collective bargaining agreement. If you want paid sick days, it's in the collective bargaining agreement. Protections against sexual harassment, it's in the collective bargaining agreement. And the labor movement at this point is almost majority women. It is a huge women's movement. I think we need to do more to lift that up and to really build the link between the women's movement and the labor movement, but they really are the same movement striving for the same goals. And you can see it in those collective bargaining agreements in the workplace. So great question. Thanks for it. Well, thank you. Thanks to our wonderful panel. We wanna be respectful and keep the conversation going. So I'll turn it back to Thea. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much to that panel. That was extraordinarily helpful and a lot of information condensed into a short time period. So thank you. I feel like we could have gone on for a couple of hours, but we're not. We're moving on to the next piece of the program. We are delighted to have with us today Sharon Block, the executive director of the Labor and Work Life Program at Harvard Law School. Many of you know her. She served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Labor Department and Senior Counselor to Secretary Perez. At Harvard Law School, Sharon and Professor Ben Sacks are leading the Clean Slate Project, which is an exciting effort to engage leading thinkers across the labor and progressive movements to reimagine labor laws. Many of the people in this room, I think, are involved in that effort because it is wide-ranging. And it has, I think, producing a lot of really exciting new thinking and opening new doors. And so Sharon is with us today to share with us some of the ideas that the project is diving into. Please welcome Sharon Block. So thank you, Thea, for that kind introduction. And I want to start by thanking everyone at EPI, NALP, and Jobs with Justice. I am so grateful for the collaborations and partnerships that I've shared with all three organizations. And more importantly, with the amazing leaders and teams at each one, I really feel like I'm here with family today. But I want to, as Thea said, I want to share with you some of the strategies for building worker power that we're working on in the project that I launched with Professor Ben Sacks at Harvard that we call Rebalancing Economic and Political Power, a Clean Slate for the future, excuse me, future of labor law. And we launched this project from a belief that pushing for fundamental labor law reform is what these times require. And I don't come to this dire warning easily, nor is it comfortable for me to stand before you and say that for the most part, I believe we need to scrap the National Labor Relations Act and start over from a clean statutory slate. I have spent most of my career thinking about and trying to protect the National Labor Relations Act, along with, as I look out, many, many people in this room. I mean, let's remember the preamble of the NLRA says that it's the act's purpose to encourage the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and to protect the exercise by workers of full freedom of association. Those are great aspirational goals, but I have come to the conclusion, during this work I don't wanna say for how long, that the preamble and the rights and procedures defined in the rest of the act are not consistent with each other, but rather they are in conflict. And this conclusion has led me to believe it's necessary to think about labor law reform, not as amendments to the act, but as something that has to happen from the statutory clean slate. And I just wanna be clear, I'm certainly not saying that we should throw out the existing institutions, but we need to look at the economy and politics as they exist today, as our previous panel so eloquently described, and build a new legal architecture for empowering workers and their organizations. And one important aspect of this approach to reform is that it gives us the opportunity to rethink the rights and institutions created and enabled by our current labor law to ensure that going forward, they're centered on all workers and not held back by structures that originally were designed in part to hold back black workers, immigrants, and women. So to accomplish this rather ambitious goal, I have spent most of the past 18 months on the clean slate project with the help of many, many people, including approximately 80 who are regularly engaged in working groups at the core of the project and many of whom are in this room and I am so incredibly grateful and really Ben and I are humbled by how much support and help and investment of time and resources that people have put into doing this work with us. So we are trying to come up with big reform ideas that we believe are necessary to rebuild labor law to meet today's challenges. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time making the case in this room that the law is broken. You all know the statistics. In fact, most of them emanate from this very room, this organization. But there's one statistic that I find surprising and definitive in making the case that our labor law system is profoundly broken. The percentage of Americans who are members of unions is lower now than before the National Labor Relations Act passed. Put another way, workers were more likely to be union members when they had no right to do so than they are now after more than 80 years of having a federally protected right. And as this decline has occurred, we have seen this corresponding decline in the basic measures of economic fairness and equality as EPI consistently helps us see. So an important step in building a new architecture for labor law is diagnosing the problem with the existing architecture. My thesis is that there exists across the National Labor Relations Act a pattern of driving the aggregation of worker power towards the smaller and narrower field of contestation rather than the bigger and broader. The law operates with an inherent bias towards less rather than more which constrains the aggregation of power. This pattern can be seen most dramatically across the following areas. Who has the right to bargain? The level at which bargaining happens. Subjects of bargaining and how collective power can be exercised. And this bias towards the small and the narrow requires workers to expand great resources on endless rounds of process to gain voice but then renders that voice inadequate to build real collective power. So I'd like to spend the rest of my time giving you a peek at what a legal regime that goes big might look like in each of the areas that I just noted are bedeviled by narrowing and limiting principles. I can't tell you what Clean Slate will recommend ultimately because we're not there yet and we have a commitment to a collaborative participatory process but I'm happy to tell you some of the big ideas that our working groups are debating and if they don't end up in the final recommendations I'll come back. We can have a debate over whether they should have. In terms of expanding who should have the right to collective bargaining one straightforward yet profound solution is to eliminate the occupational exclusions. The new deal that gave birth to the NLRA had a racial element hidden just beneath the surface of these facially raised neutral exclusions for domestic workers and agricultural workers. And these statutory occupational exclusions had the intentional effect of writing primarily people of color out of the acts protections at the demand of racist mostly southern politicians. I'm looking at Lane, you probably know more about this than I do. So any questions about that talk to Lane. But these statutory exclusions are disempowering not only because they narrow the absolute number of workers covered by the act but also because they exploit the historically toxic racial divide between workers who might otherwise share an economic and class struggle. So we also need to ensure that workers write to the dignity and power that comes from collective action is not dependent on their immigration status. That must mean not only that workers are covered irrespective of their immigration status but also that they're entitled to adequate remedies and protected from having their rights held hostage based on their status. Another obviously necessary step seems to be to give independent contractors the right to act concertedly. This goal could be accomplished one of two ways either by including them within the collective bargaining law that covers employees so effectively eliminating the distinction between employees and independent contractors or by amending the anti-trust law to remove that as a barrier to them working together. A more complicated change that we're considering is to redefine who sits at each side of the bargaining table to better reflect alignment of interests instead of job titles or placements on an org chart. So we're looking at how to better identify those supervisors and managers who are currently taken out of the acts protections but whose economic interests and ability to exercise power align more closely with employees and then how can we allow them to bargain with rank and file. We're also considering a couple of really big ideas that would greatly impact how many workers are engaged in collective bargaining. So we're looking at perhaps recommending that every worker should have some form of representation at work. The premises that workplace democracy should be a right, not a fight. That's how our political democracy works. We don't go to the polls in November to decide whether we should have a democracy. Instead, we decide who should represent us. So we're looking at whether the same should be true for workplace democracy and that background right to representation may be a union or maybe something more like a works council. But the point is to have a channel for voice everywhere. With our current system of at best enterprise-based bargaining, it's impossible for workers to build real power or at least very difficult. There's too much incentive for employers to fight unionization because of what they too often perceive as the economic disadvantage it creates in relation to the rest of their non-union industry. So to address the constraints on the level at which bargaining takes place, we are looking at recommending a system that would move at least some bargaining from the enterprise level up to the sectoral level in some fashion. Such a move would address this competitive disadvantage problem effectively taking wages out of competition. Moreover, there's research that shows that it is good for the economy overall. There are recent OECD studies showing that sectoral bargaining yields lower unemployment rates for youth, women and low-skilled workers, and very importantly, lessons income inequality. We're looking at international examples since this is the way that much of the rest of the world does collective bargaining. And at the historical examples in the United States, we're multi-employer bargaining approach sectoral bargaining, primarily through pattern bargaining such as in the auto industry. And finally, we're looking at some contemporary developments in the U.S., including Fight for 15 campaign in the fast food sector and the New York State wage boards that were used to set minimum wages for that sector as a whole. But very importantly, we're looking at how a combination of these strategies could work together. We're exploring how to move away from the current winner-take-all system of representation and move towards a system that may have through graduated representational rights based on a sliding scale of support within a workplace or within a sector. We have a vision of a multi-layered system of voice that works councils, worksite bargaining, and then sectoral bargaining at the top. Our working groups are also looking at how to redefine the firm for purposes of collective bargaining. So we're considering new definitions of joint employer that could put whole supply chains at the bargaining table together, as well as franchisors and franchisees, all the employers in a fishered workplace. This is hard. But we're trying to think about how a system that expands both horizontally and vertically can work to adapt to the complex business models that predominate today. So the idea is to follow as businesses are sort of changing their relationships to find systems of bargaining that will match those changes. We have some big ideas about what topics should be on the bargaining table to expand workers' influence beyond the current law's narrow definition of wages, hours, and terms and conditions of employment. This narrow definition excludes workers from having influence over the decisions that actually drive the economic conditions within their industries and firms. So one broad fix to the problem by the law's distinction between mandatory and permissive subjects of bargaining would be to just eliminate that distinction. Or you can look at ways to just free workers to bring their collective power to bear on the subjects that are most important to them, their families, their communities, including those now considered managerial or entrepreneurial, but really focusing on how do you give workers' voice on those issues that have significant effects on their livelihoods. Finally, I wanna share our big ideas for ensuring that collective action can leverage power that is sort of the point of the exercise. The ban on secondary activity in the law now requires workers to abandon logic when they choose a target for collective action. Again, the most obvious answer is to do away with any of the limitations on secondary activity and to free unions to analyze power relationships and exercise collective power strategically, whether that's looking at supply chains or who the investors are or who the corporate parents are. A key precondition for workers to be able to choose the right strategic target, however, is access to information about these corporate relationships. So we're examining whether to require corporations to provide workers information about these relationships, which can often be shrouded in secrecy. We're also looking at ways to expand the possibility of collective action by making it less risky for workers by enhancing protections from retaliation and constraining employer interference. In this vein, we're exploring ideas such as expanding protections for intermittent strikes, banning permanent striker replacements, establishing a generalized strike fund, expanding the range of subjects over which workers have the right to act concertedly beyond this frequently litigated definition of what is mutual aid and protection and possibly even adopting a just cause dismissal standard. Finally, with so much collective action moving into cyberspace, we're examining whether the law needs to do more to protect workers' access to the online space. As the law now stands, nothing would preclude Facebook or any other social media company from banning all worker organizing from their sites. And the NLRB is threatening to take away protection for workers' access to employer email systems. So we're delving into how online access could be better protected by the law. And this is one of my favorite parts of the project. We're looking at what the digital equivalent of a picket line could be and how the law could protect it once we figure out what that would be, which I really don't understand as something to do with terms of service and things like that. But I love the idea. We're working on reform ideas in a few additional areas. For example, we're considering whether enforcement of labor standards could involve worker organizations in a way that is empowering, such as some kind of incentive for or mandate for co-enforcement models. Similarly, we've tasked a working group with exploring how the administration of benefits programs could help build new powerful worker organizations. So we're looking at things like against system, but also the millions of ideas that are percolating around about creating portable benefit systems. In addition, we're looking at reforms to corporate law to better put it in service of building worker power as opposed to destroying worker power. So we're looking at ideas like creating a federal charter mandate that could be conditioned on adoption of pro-worker policies, like having workers on corporate boards or neutrality in organizing campaigns. So as you can see, we have no lack of ambition in the Clean Slate project. And our focus may seem to be just on adjusting economic power, but as Chris in opening remarks and as we've heard from our panel and really from everybody, equally important is the impact that reforms we're considering could have in rebalancing political power in our country. There can be no doubt that the public policy in the US is disproportionately responsive to the wealthy and under responsive to poor and middle class workers. But the Clean Slate project is looking at recommendations that could address the role of workers in the political system directly, such as mandating workers get paid time off to vote or even engage in civic activity. And we're exploring how to clean up the campaign finance laws, the tree corporations and unions the same way, even though we all know they are profoundly different kinds of organizations. But a core premise of the project, and again I think Lynn was saying right at the end here of the previous panel, the presence of strong worker organizations in the economy will lead to a strong voice for workers in the political process, even if you don't do any of these direct interventions. And we believe, agree with everybody here who's been speaking, that restoring that voice is essential to restoring our country to a functional democracy. So although I don't know what the final recommendations will be, I do know that they will not be timid. I hope I've given you a lot to think about in terms of how the rules of the game could better support and expand the voice of workers in our economy and consequently in our political life. And I appreciate the opportunity to share these ideas with all of you. Sure, if folks have questions, optional. And I should say that I'm grateful for the support that we have received from many people in this room, not just in their time, but in actual resources. So Bob, please. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to support. So my question is whether this is the PRO Act or the Clean Slate Project, to what extent is there any thinking about ideas for better equipping workers to be able to exercise power within the state around governance of labor law? I mean, it sounds like one thing that I've heard from the PRO Act is opening up opportunities for private enforcement, which is outstanding. And then you talked about other sort of modes of participation and enforcement. But one thing that strikes me is, say when you look at, say, the core environmental laws versus the NLRA, you know, in the modern administrative law agencies have mandatory nondiscretionary duties that empower workers to sue the government when it's failing to do its job and do its job well. And one of the strengths of the NLRA or the NLRB is also one of its sort of weaknesses from our perspective, which is that it's so flexible that it can like overrule itself when we always have these sort of massacres periodically of labor rights. You know, and to what extent is some cabining of that from a worker's perspective possible or imagined? No, I appreciate that question because obviously no rights are worth anything if you can't enforce them, right, if they're just words on a page. So we do have a working group that is looking at enforcement issues. You know, I'll be honest with you, this is a huge project and some of it is until we know what system we're creating. It's a little hard to think for particular, for collective bargaining rights, like what's the right enforcement mechanism? But they are looking at exactly like, you know, should we have a national paga? So the workers to, you know, because it is attention, like the more you put on the government, the more vulnerable you are when there's an administration. I don't know if it isn't particularly friendly to workers if you could imagine that. So we are looking at what is that balance between using the strength of the government to set, to signal this is important because I think that is important, right? What, do you want that signal that this is something that is our national policy but you want some kind of sort of backstop that has a more private workaround? So yeah, but our Terry Gerstein is leading that group. It was with Jose Garza, but Jose is now on to other things. But yeah, those are exactly the kind of ideas that we're trying to get them to think about on that side. You haven't mentioned, you haven't mentioned ASHA. That's a piece of labor legislation even though it's not part of the NLRA. And bad things are going on there and have been going on for a long time. It needs to be strengthened or maybe incorporated into what you're doing. The other thing is the financialization of the economy. It sounds like you are sort of looking at that. I mean, now what, instead of investing, what companies are doing is disinvesting. Instead of building out their company, they take over another company and then they strip and flip. That should be illegal. But workers should have a choice in that because what tends to happen, as you know, is the company that takes over or whatever immediately closes the smaller plans and takes the resources and concentrates them in the big plants or their plants or sends them overseas. Yeah, no, thank you for that. I mean, so I completely agree with you on both fronts. The lens of this project is to really look at how do you build processes that give worker power? So it feels vast and sprawling as it is and so we've tried to resist as much as we all care and everybody in the project cares about sort of all of these substantive areas. But we are thinking about how the processes we're coming up with would interact with the kinds of issues you're raising. So again, thinking about enforcement regimes of not just collective bargaining or collective action rights, but also about substantive labor standards, how can that enforcement be done in a way that gives workers more of a voice, both so they build organizations to do that work, but also so that it is more informed by what workers really want. So I think that's sort of the touch point with the OSH Act. On the financialization, you know, I totally agree and one aspiration of the project is to think about how workers can have voice in that those kinds of decisions where the law now really says that is not your business because it doesn't directly affect your paycheck, but obviously the amount of money that a corporation devotes to stock buybacks is going to drive how much money they have to pay wages. And so if you've got workers at corporate boards, if you've got information rights for everybody through works councils or whatever, this kind of background right to representation, you expand what can be at the bargaining table, you know, topics at the bargaining table, you're creating that process by which they can, workers can have more of a voice in those kinds of decisions. Erin, it's Kim from NELP. Would it, you be able to expand a little more on what a digital picket line would look like or is there anyone from here from the project who could talk a little bit more? So I wish I understood it well enough, but here, so here's the, this is the idea. If workers are having a labor dispute, I don't know, let's say with Amazon, that is there a way, just for example, is there a way that, all right, so where are you gonna go, right? Where are you gonna pick it at Amazon? You're gonna go to distribution center, like no one's gonna see you, they're not gonna care. What if though, any consumer who went to the Amazon website that day had to click and say, I understand there's a labor dispute here, and I am choosing to cross this digital picket line? That's my vision. Now, what I understand now is if certainly employees who did that, which probably be the people who would understand the most about how to do that, they'd get fired, that would be okay. But even if I could figure it out as like a consumer, it would violate my terms of service. So we're looking at not so much technically, I mean, I think we have to understand that and we have some technologists, I'm supposed to call them, who are helping us understand how to do that, but then thinking about what are the obstacles in the law now to be, if we could figure it out to be able to do it or to protect people's rights to be able to do that. And I think with the Uber strikes and stuff, there is some, there's more activity in that area. So last question. From the Solidarity Center, working on the international front of worker rights and was glad to hear you mentioned that you're bringing in international examples for sector-wide bargaining, because if we look around the world, a lot of countries, even from the global south, have much more progressive coverage for collective rights, not least of which what you mentioned in access to information for collective bargaining. And so I encourage you to link in the Solidarity Center's working on an international project called the I-Law Network, which is an international labor lawyers network. Oh yeah, with John. With John Hyatt. Right. And the other piece is on portability of benefits, which in Chile, I don't know if you know the model, but the domestic workers that many Peruvians and others go to Chile and are able to move back and forth and have their social security benefits, their health coverage, et cetera. And so I just, you know, a plug to continue within the project to doing that, because I think we have a lot to learn from the rest of the world. Yeah, no, thank you. It's really, it's been fascinating for me. I mean, I don't know a lot about international labor law, but we start, we have now in an international advisory group that's about 15 labor law professors, union folks, practitioners from all over the world. We started really focusing on Western Europe because we're all like, oh, well, they do sectoral bargaining, Germany, France, whatever. But really who we are learning the most from, I mean, we've learned a lot from them in the Scandinavian countries, obviously. But also South Africa, Argentina, you know, you have in the UK and now in Australia, where they are trying to develop, you know, this transition to sectoral bargaining. So there's just tremendous learning all over the world. So thank you, I appreciate that. Great, thank you. Thank you so much to Sharon for that thoughtful, creative, and inspiring set of policy options that will, I hope, expand our concept of what is possible. But thanks also to all of you, because those were some excellent questions and we covered a lot of great ground. We are gonna take a short coffee break, come back here at 11.20 sharp for our last panel of the morning. So there's coffee and refreshments out that way. There are bathrooms out in the hallway. Come on back by 11.20. Thank you so much. I traded them out. I'm so excited to introduce you. We are delighted to introduce, I am delighted to introduce the moderator of the next panel, Judy Conti, from NELP, who's been our awesome partner on all of this. We are very excited about welcoming the speakers for our next panel. It's gonna be another dynamic conversation without further ado, Judy Conti from NELP. Hi, everybody. Thank you for coming back. We've worked to try to cool the room down a little bit. We've got a great problem that the room is so full and it's a little warm. So we appreciate you coming back and sticking with us. And I think it just speaks to the enthusiasm for this issue and how important it is. And we view this today as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of it or not the be all and end all. So we're gonna be coming back to all of you and folks in your organization's time and time again over the years because we really need to up our game on this worker power issue and certainly plan to. I've got four fabulous panelists today that I'm gonna introduce briefly. I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail because as you hear them, you are going to realize for yourself how magnificent they are and the amazing work that they and their organizations are doing. And then we're gonna have a moderated discussion for a while and then we'll open things up for questions. So let me see from the far end down to this end. We've got Sean Richmond, who is the program director at the Harry Van Arsdale Junior Center for Labor Studies at SUNY Empire State. Marcella Diaz, who's the executive director at Somos Un Pueblo Unido in New Mexico. Unidos, excuse me. We've got Smiley again, the co-director of Jobs with Justice. And then finally, Elizabeth Liz Nichols, who's a staff attorney for Worker Justice at the Center for Popular Democracy. So please welcome them and we'll get going. Okay. I'm gonna, I don't usually have trouble being part of it. I was gonna say, I get to say, I'll do the text up. Can you hear me in the back? Can you hear me in the back? So I guess a couple of things just to give a quick overview here. Is this better? All right, great, great. A couple of things. And first of all, I'm excited to do this panel. We had originally hoped that my organizing director could do it, but she is at the National Labor Leadership Institute. So I'm gonna step in and share some of the exciting stuff that we're paying attention to. But just to get it started, I think the key thing to remember in all of this and in all the amazing stuff that Sharon laid out as well, is that the first thing we have to do is get people to think that organizing and collective bargaining is something that they should have. And at this point, you know, you go to my home state, you go to Greensboro, you go to Memphis where my family's from. And you know, you say, you have the right to vote, right? You don't say you have the right to elect a senator. They get that, you have the right to vote. We should have the right to vote, whether you have it or not. You know, overwhelming majority of people in Florida said they have the right to vote, or returning citizens should have the right to vote. And so, you know, in a way, part of this conversation has to start with talking to people about their ability not just to govern politically through voting, but to also govern economically through organizing and collective bargaining rights. Switch out the mic, sorry. Do you want me to move again? Okay. We just need to use that for the time being, reclaiming my time, reclaiming my time. Thank you, thank you. So anyway, I say this because there is actually a much bigger project to actually get regular everyday people, people who have not been in relationship with unions, for in some instances, multiple generations, to understand that it's not just the institution, although I agree what was said earlier that the institution is key in enforcing and actually moving the stuff, but that they have to actually first understand the power that we're trying to give them. And so, in that sense, one of the things that we've developed is this idea of a new map. And I've really talked to some of you about this and I'm really excited to talk. Like, we talk about this a lot in the context of red states versus blue states. And to us, that's actually not gonna help us get at the bold 21st century ideas and protections that we need to get the majority of people in this country in a position to organize and collectively bargain. And what I like to do instead is look at states in relationship to their understanding of 20th century power. Can they still access political power, electoral power, and bargaining power from 20th century laws and regulations? If so, great, they tend to be the coast. That's wonderful, we should keep winning there. But I also wanna look at the states who have recently lost access to that power, like in the Midwest, or in my case, states that have long lost, if they ever had access to that power. And I think this is really important when we talk about the context of race and gender, because a lot of people will say, oh, the majority of people, or the population that has the highest propensity to join a union is like black people, particularly black women, join union at high rates. And the majority of black people are still populated in the Southern United States. So if you don't actually have a strategy to reach them, then we're just losing. We're just continuing to lose. And so thinking about the map a little differently, not just as red states and blue states, but looking at where people have relationship to 20th century power also tells us where they have an appetite for bold ideas. Because people who haven't had access to 20th century forms of political and economic power for a long time have a much larger appetite for 21st century ideas. Because the old stuff clearly didn't work for them. And for us, I'll speak for myself. And in fact, we need something new to allow us to do that. So all that is to say, some of the bold ideas we've been exploring and working with partners on, and I'll get into the examples later in the panel, but some of the broad strokes ideas is certainly where we can win a traditional union contract. We're fighting like hell to support workers in doing that. In places where we can't, we're exploring ideas of redefining the firm, as Sharon was saying, or we call it bargaining with the 110th or the 1%. We're really looking at the people behind the firm who actually is wielding the power and how we're negotiating with them. And we've seen unions do this in their own contract negotiations with the firm. Certainly globally, we've had to do this out of force, out of the nature of transnational corporations to win supply chain and migration chain agreements. But to really redefine the firm and negotiate with the top 110th or the 1% that's behind the company. The other framework is this idea of, and I'm loving all of the language from Clean Slate, but really looking at the subjects of bargaining, and the most common and popular phrase of this, I think was coined by a Comanivance Institute, which is the bargaining for the common good, and introducing new ideas for what people can negotiate over in the context of traditional bargaining. And certainly we've seen this a lot with educators, and with public schools, of course, being the last kind of public good that we've all touched in some way, that seeing them actually bring the issues of communities and their families into negotiations. And then last, community-driven strategies, because I think that one of the really important things, and why I actually love this idea that it's not just about rebuilding the NLRA, but really creating a new foundation, a new framework for protecting workers' ability to organize and collectively bargain, is that this notion of being able to sit across a table from capital, from your decision-makers, it doesn't just happen at the work site. We've got tenants around the country beginning to mimic models of collective bargaining with large building owners. We certainly have homeowners beginning to mimic models of unionizations and union bargaining with finance years and big banks. And part of what we're saying is that in a healthy democracy, what we actually need is for people not just to be able to vote or hear what other people are saying in lobby or representatives, but to actually have direct channels for everyday people to govern themselves at all levels. And that happens at work, it happens in our homes, it happens in our communities, and that's the type of expanded bargaining practice that we're exploring. That's great, thank you, Smiley. And I think our microphones are working again. I'm gonna turn to Marcella now. And your organization comes at this from a slightly different angle, although you work on public policy campaigns and we'll talk more about that later. Your bread and butter is about building powered individual workplaces. So can you tell us a little bit about how you do that and your worker committees and the successes that you've had? Sure, thank you. So it's almost like we're either a statewide immigrant-based civil and workers' rights organization or racial justice and worker justice organization. And we were born traditionally in Immigrants Rights Group 25 years ago. But when you are a membership-based organization with a really active membership of low-wage workers, you will inevitably become a workers' rights organization. And so in 2012, we opened officially our worker center, which is called the United Workers Center of New Mexico. We engage in many different strategies to build worker power. We'll continue to have a conversation about what that means to us and what the components are, which our members can recite off the top of their heads very quickly of building power in their local communities. But we have organized, over the last, I would say, 10 years, we've really honed a model of building blocks, of organizing building blocks in individual worksites in New Mexico and other parts, in Santa Fe and other parts of New Mexico. So we organized our first a workers' worksite committee in 2008, sort of accidentally. It was at a local Hilton Hotel in Santa Fe and 12 immigrant housekeepers, angry about having to clean 23 rooms each in one shift. We're terminated one day because they were demanding, collectively, at their workplace to meet with their general manager. They were thrown off the property and got into their cars and immediately drove to their community organization, which was almost un pueblo nido. So I kind of figured out, through many different ways, what could be done after the fact, in this case. And after several months of public accountability actions, the filing of several administrative complaints, including with the National Labor Relations Board, they were able to win their back pay and a monetary settlement in lieu of a reinstatement. And it was a very public thing. And very quickly, we started seeing other workers, immigrant workers, approaching Somos and saying, we wanna do what those Hilton housekeepers did. And so that's sort of how our model was born. And we've honed the model since. As we continue to rack up policy wins for immigrants and workers locally and at the state level, our members, very empowered and impactful in their communities, clearly remained extremely vulnerable to wage theft, discrimination, unsaved working conditions, favoritism, harassment, arbitrary terminations and a general lack of job security in their workplaces. And when you have a membership that's incredibly powerful in these other areas of their activism, that vulnerability and lack of power in their everyday work lives was a little too much to bear. And so that's how we sort of started continuing to build this model and give folks an opportunity in a very intense way to reach out to other workers in their actual work sites and beat back. And we'll talk a little bit more about how we use one of our tools in filing charges with the NLRB that really been able to beat back retaliation, grow leadership skills in a very intense way in their work site that are used in the work that we do to build worker power in our larger community and now at the state level and also to just change the worker organizing culture in a place like Santa Fe. We've really been able to see those differences. One of the other things that it has allowed us to do, Judy, is it's allowed us to inoculate workers in the work site as we continue to do the broader policy campaign work that we're doing. And in a place the size of Santa Fe, this model may not work everywhere, in the place the size of Santa Fe, this is just an incredible tool that we've had. So we've formed in Santa Fe in the last 10 years, over 75 work site committees, mostly in restaurants, hotels, landscaping companies, nursing homes, and not all of them are super active, but it's interesting, every week our organizers will talk about how something happens and even if a work site committee very emboldened and protected in many work sites against retaliation because they've won, which we'll talk a little bit about later, how this happens, how they've sort of won their NLRB cases or they've won reinstatement or back pay and in a very public way. They have really, they always know that they have that support with their coworkers, with the NLRB decisions. In some cases, in most of these cases, we haven't had to go to the NLRB, but that's how we've been able to change the culture because now in Santa Fe, this issue of retaliation is an issue that everyone knows about and we can talk about the mechanics about it a little bit later, because I know that we'll continue to talk about that, but yeah, but I do wanna say that it's the broader organizing work and clarity of purpose that we really, that our members and our leaders are really clear about. What are we doing? We're not just changing work site policies, although in the last 10 years, we've changed hundreds of work site policies and local and statewide policies, pro worker policies, social policies, but also it's that as you talk about smiley, it's being able to sit across the table with your supervisor without, unfortunately, the support of low wage worker unions. We just don't have low wage worker unions in New Mexico. That's just not a reality in our state, although we're connected to and our worker center is affiliated with the Northern New Mexico Central Labor Council. We do that because whenever we're in a dispute, we have our mayor, our churches, and our unions with us at every protest, with us at every step of the way and they think and see each of our work site committees that come and give reports about what's happening in their work site as fellow union members, even though they're not officially unionized. So it kind of gives you a back, sort of a backdrop of what we're doing in New Mexico and we've really been able to see some major power shifts in our state. That's exciting, thank you. And Liz, I'd love to turn to you now. And one of the issues that the Center for Popular for Democracy is digging in on in particular and doing a lot of work with EPI on this in particular, NELP as well, is the issue of forced arbitration. So if you could give us a little bit of the context of the rise of forced arbitration and how it hinders enforcement of workplace laws and how it hinders building worker power as well, that would be great. I think if I, probably the most important thing I can say about forced arbitration and the rise is that it is not by accident. It's been intentional, it's been calculated. I think it's something that's been kind of like a theme throughout all of our discussion here, that what has been happening with organized money, organized capital, aka corporations and their lobbyists, they know what the threat is to their power. So they have been intentional about legislating around that and forced arbitration is one of the things that they have done to challenge workers and collective power. So a point of clarification, an important point of clarification here is to be clear about the arbitration I'm talking about because there's arbitration that exists within the union context I'm talking about within the private sector. And I would venture to say that probably everyone in this room has either signed or checked off an arbitration clause if you have a cell phone, credit card agreement, all of you have said, sure I'll arbitrate, but not really because you didn't know that it was there. It was just like you wanted to purchase something. You wanted to have your cell phone. You wanted to have your app. So then you said, sure. Now the corporations who have made, have hidden these arbitration clauses and these agreements. Agreements I will say with quotations because again, there was no meeting of the minds. You didn't really know that it was there. I read the 18 pages of social media. I mean, after law school I started to as well. And still I will admit I have openly agreed to say, yes, Apple, I will agree to this because I want my iPhone. So in the late 90s, a group of Wall Street corporate attorneys got together and tried to think through, well, how can we deal with class actions? What can we do to block class actions? And the reason why they were targeting class actions is because they know that it is a tool that workers can use to address corporate abuse. And it's an expensive tool and workers have been using it effectively. The reason why it's been in place is to make sure that all of us know when workers are able to get together and use their voices together on issues around racial justice, gender justice, fill in the blank. They're able to advance rather than one worker against a mighty corporation. So these corporate counsel, they got together and they said, what can we do to block class actions? So they started to work around forced arbitration agreements and something that's important to also note here too is that even our current Chief Justice, John Roberts, he was corporate counsel who would try to advance legalizing forced arbitration. So late 90s and over the last two decades, corporations have been steadily, slowly but surely making it so that forced arbitration agreements are in all of, like even I would say nursing home agreements. Like so someone's trying to bring their loved one to a nursing home. And I mean in this situation is also particularly egregious because they're explicit about it. They'll say, you cannot have your loved one here unless you sign this forced arbitration agreement. But so it's widespread, it's problematic and specifically in the worker context, in 2011, 2013, the Supreme Court says sure, you can have these forced arbitration clauses in consumer contracts to ban class actions. And then 2018, epic systems. And I mean, I don't create hashtags but I'd be like hashtag epic fail. It was awful. Just last year the Supreme Court says, sure, it is fine to have these forced arbitration agreements now with Chief Justice John Roberts now on the other side taking this case and saying yes, it is fine to have these in employment agreements whether or not people actually know about it. Chief Justice Gorsuch, the way the opinion is even penned is he starts it off with, he says, when an employer and an employee agree to arbitrate. When we all know that workers don't even know that these agreements are there. So I can also just step back and just describe the arbitration process. It is private, there's no judge, there's no jury. The arbitrators are chosen by the corporations and often the arbitrators are chosen because they know the people in charge of the corporations. These arbitrations can happen. I live in New York state but the arbitration can happen somewhere in Arizona or in Hawaii, somewhere that would be inconvenient for me to get to. And if I hypothetically, if I lose the arbitration I have to pay the cost for the corporation. So 98% of workers don't choose arbitration when that's the only option that they have because people are smart. Then they know that it's stacked against them and corporations are scheming and they know that this system is built for them. So 2018 Epic Systems Supreme Court says it is fine to have these source arbitration clauses in employment contracts and it requires workers to go individually, to individually arbitrate. So again, you don't have collective action. You have people approaching their employer one by one. And so one of the reasons why forced arbitration has at least on some level come in more into the public imagination has been because of the hashtag me too movement. It has been incredibly helpful for bringing to the fore. People have been outraged about the fact that now you can't bring sexual harassment cases, gender discrimination cases. There have been people who have been like why because of forced arbitration clauses. So thankfully there have been courageous workers Google even companies like Riot that have been vocal. Like Google had a walk out just a few months ago, 20,000 employees worldwide who said this is unacceptable. The fact that workers cannot be able to talk about this corporate abuse that doesn't everyone knows, well not everyone. Lots of folks know that with the corporate abuse it's not just one individual or two. It's often thousands. And the only way to address this kind of widespread abuse is collectively. And it's something that's affecting our communities. It's affecting people's income. So any advance that we are trying to make in workers' rights or advances at least in the private sector or hopes for advance in workers' rights is being threatened by the rise of forced arbitration which as I said has been intentional and it's been calculated. So the thing that I was at a talk where someone referred to the Koch brothers as revolutionaries and I was just like really? They explained, they gave context to that and they said that it's because they've got the long view that they are planning things out. Organized money is planning things out 20, 30, 40 years out. And that is something that needs to happen on the other side as well. And that's why I'm excited about communities like this because this is part of that. What we need to do is develop strategies and schemes on our side so that we are planning 20, 30 years out to make sure that what's the threat to collective power is something that we're not just responding to. We're not just defending, we're on the offense. We're planning on the other side. So that's just some of the context for the price. So one of the things that I am most particularly excited about and I've wanted to work on for pretty much the 25 years of my legal career so far is trying to expand the notion of just cause standards for termination so that it's not just for people that have contracts, not just for people that are in unions. We borrow our system of employment at will from English common law, from the days when we were still colonies and Europe has repudiated employment at will long ago. Yet here we are still holding so fast to it. And we're seeing the first wave of campaigns that are really starting to look at this issue. The Center for Popular Democracy, NELP and SEIU32BJ put out a report this year called Fired on a WIM that shows how difficult it is for low-wage workers to enforce employment discrimination laws and how unstable employment in certain sectors is. Last month, the Philadelphia City Council passed a just cause employment law for parking lot workers after by a campaign by non-union workers who were backed by 32BJ. And in New York City, NELP and CPD are supporting a similar campaign by Fast Food Justice and 32BJ. Sean Richmond has also been working with us in these groups, helping with a lot of the intellectual underpinnings as well. And we're looking to, you know, NELP and CPD and we're hoping to expand the group tremendously or are gonna be looking to incubate and run campaigns across the country in sectors and states and cities where possible. And we've even been exploring this with potential federal legislation. So Sean, I would love for you to talk about in particular why you think this is an issue whose time has come and how does this play a role in helping to facilitate collective action by workers? And I've been asked to make sure we speak very directly into the microphones. Okay, we are in, I think, very uncharted territory, politically speaking. The fact that there's an increasing recognition that our crisis of democracy is intimately tied up in our crisis in worker power and representation creates some space where a lot more issues can be put on the table, right? So the flip side of what Lynn Reinhardt had noted earlier, that when the Senate dam has put out the better deal, it's like, oh wow, there's a lot of really great stuff in here that we didn't even ask for. I experienced that as I started getting calls from congressional staffers in the summer of 17 because there was a recognition that we needed bigger, bolder ideas. And I can't stress this enough. I'm nobody. I just, I couldn't matter less in this world. All I did was publish a few articles and I'm getting these calls. So my occasional writing partner, Moshe Marvet, and I thought, let's make the most of this. Let's see if we can convince somebody to put out a really big, I'll use the word radical, radical idea and see if we can, it's a signal that actually we should be putting a lot more on the table, that there's a lot more sort of foundational workers' rights issues that are ready to be aired as just being named, named as a problem. And one reason why I think just cause it's time has come is when we got in our conversation with Keith Ellison, who is still in the house at the time, we had a laundry list of ideas, very clean slate style thinking. So we wage boards, dues check off by law, works councils, we get to just cause and they're like, that sounds great, of course. And I have not had a conversation with a single politician or a staffer where the response to just cause wasn't some variation of, that makes so much sense. Now, granted, once industry opposition comes up, things change, but in terms of an issue that cuts across lines that doesn't sound like a favor to the unions, that doesn't sound like a special interest thing, right? It's a universal right. It just, it has more, it gains more traction, I think. And so, there's a bill, it went through legislative council, it's a thing of beauty, it just brings it here to your eye to see it as an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act, but Keith decided to run for attorney general and so the bill never got introduced. But it's still got noticed. Just Moshe and I sort of advocating for this in the New York Times and in other places. And 32BJ noticed it and it has passed in Philadelphia and it's going to pass in New York City. And 32BJ, I think, is looking at this as, for the fight for 15, we're not gonna wait for McDonald's to sign a neutrality agreement. How do we get the functions of a union here and now for the workers who want it? And what they've come up with is, they have a wage board in New York, so that's how they address the wages issue. They have a dues check off law, which I think a lot of us should be paying a lot more attention to. I think it's absolutely a direction that we need to go in as a movement. And if they get just cause, rather than in a contract, but in the law, then you have a package of both service and advocacy and activism that totally justifies asking a worker to pay dues. And they've got workers that are paying dues. So that's one way to look at it. I don't look at just cause as merely sort of the service function. I think it's actually much more radical than that. I think that in ways that, because it's the air that we breathe, the at will employment standard, we don't tend to think of just how detrimental it is. Workers know that they will be fired if they speak out on any issue, if they act out on any issue. At will does not motivate workers to form a union. It demotivates them from forming a union. And we have protections for workers who organize and get retaliated against. Those protections get screwed up when they get into the courts with a bunch of judges who are looking at everybody else's at will. So maybe you actually did deserve to what you got fired for. Workers know that they're never gonna fire you for the reason they're firing you. They're gonna make up some justification. So if we had just cause as a universal right, I think you would see a lot more workers engaging in all kinds of protest activity, running up to union or less than that. But speaking out about unfair practices and eventually organizing in a collective manner. I would also, and I have one example of where you can go deeper on this, right? Cause you could just go out there and get members at a bunch of shops across the board, falling short of exclusive representation and they'll call you when they have a problem. And that's a valid organizational model that I think a lot of unions would actually gain thousands of members if they had that. But you also have the ability to sort of spark rebellions at individual workplaces. I ran the AFT's National Charter School Organizing division for a number of years. And when we finally organized our first charter school in New Orleans after all the teachers were fired after Katrina and the union had this major efficacy issue where everybody got fired and they had a contract. Everybody got fired. And the bosses were making them assign yellow dog contracts. The captive audience meeting is on a daily basis. It's on the overhead speakers. So there's a huge level of fear. And we're 10 years out now. I mean, the union is a myth and a legend. And at the one of the highest rated, depending on how you count, the highest rated high school in New Orleans, Benjamin Franklin High School, they tried to fire the Latin teacher. And people love the Latin teacher. And we, because of weird institutional history, that school decided that they needed to sort of maintain the vestiges of some sort of just cause and some sort of grievance procedure on a non-union basis, right? Because they wanted to actually keep their teachers because these are teachers that write the AP textbook and all that. So it was there. It was a totally bootleg process. The workers on their own, it's sort of a dead letter. But we came in and we represented Prof at an open school board meeting. So we provided staff representation. We also organized his colleagues to testify on his behalf, to be in the room, because it's an open school board meeting and the open access law, so wearing union colors. We did this before we ran for a union election. I wanted to go right for an NLRB election because we had just gotten a decision out of the NLRB that charter schools are our private sector. And I was like, let's do it, let's go. And my organizing director on the ground was like, no, no, no, we have to demonstrate efficacy. So we defended Prof's job successfully at an open school board meeting. And that was May. Before the school year is out, we have an organizing committee. They march on the boss with the petition, with representing 93% of the workers demanding collective bargaining. And they actually got another big open school board meeting. We got voluntarily recognized because what are you going to do, 93% of the teachers that write the AP textbook are demanding a union. So that's the clearest example I have from my experience of where Just Cause can let you go much deeper and can build on the workers' rights and build unions in the traditional sense. We got a contract in that case. That's great, thank you. I've got one more question for each of the panelists before we turn this over to you guys. And I will ask my panelists. We've gotten a lot out there already, which is great. I'll ask you guys to try to do tercer answers this time just because I want to make sure. I mean, every one of you could stand up here for five hours and talk and have everybody at wrapped attention. I know I speak for everybody in the room, but we also want to make sure we get some questions in. So I'm going to turn back to Marcella. And what I'd love you to do is sort of just give a brief overview of how successfully you used section seven and NLRB complaints. But also what I talked about when I was at the user, your full circle model, the way that your work side organizing plays into the section seven work and it's mutually reinforcing. And the way that those two things are also mutually reinforcing in the local and the state policy work that you do, it's not just anyone's strategy. They are all things that work to build power together. OK, I will try to be brief so that we can get to some really good conversation here. I'm glad that I'm following Sean because I would say, likewise, with our work site committee model, we really are able to, in work sites, be able to utilize our section seven protections or protected concerted activity to continue to organize and to keep people in their jobs to get them reinstated, to get their back pay. And so I mentioned about 75 work site committees in 16 cases or in the case of 16 work site committees, there was retaliation. And the retaliation for trying to, well, one, filing wage theft complaints, discrimination, OSHA complaints, or just coming together and saying, you know, there are two supervisors that are harassing us, that are humiliating us. Usually, by the time people come to Somos and Puedonito in the United Workers Center in New Mexico, it's because they've felt humiliated on the job. It's amazing how many years people will allow themselves to be subjected to wage theft. But it's when they're being yelled out in front of a client or a customer or a family member or a co-worker, or it's that extreme humiliation that sort of brings them. So often, when they come together or put together their committees, create really a contract with each other. That is our model, right? So they say, we're not going to talk to you. They have a list of rules that they all decide to follow and they are committed to each other. And what really allows for this to be a building block for our greater work really is that they are, in some cases, they're already doing press conferences, going to hearings, doing our strategy meetings, doing all the work that community-based organizations like ours do. But in the workplace, they have to recruit other members. They have to rely on their co-workers to make their work and their committee successful. And that is what is really allowing us to build that solidarity, that intense leadership development, that intense skill building that really does allow for the big ticket items that we're able to do and, again, that power shifting in our community. So in 16 cases, we filed 16 charges with the NLRB. In 15 of those cases, they resulted in formal complaints. And there was a whole host of results in those complaints. So in five of those cases, we got really strong decisions in the majority of the cases, settlements. But in all cases, people either had their reduced hours reinstated. They were reinstated in the workplace. In some cases, although this is less so more recently, they receive monetary settlements in lieu of reinstatement. That happened early on as we were honing our model. And now, what people can do is, when they're retaliated against for filing wage complaints for trying to change wages and conditions in their workplace, is they're able to go back into the workplace, which is this incredibly empowering thing, because they've already been trashed to other coworkers who didn't join the committees by their employers. But they've already had the support, not just of their individual worksite committee, but we sort of have what we call a central workers committee, where other worksite committees, they train each other, they do protests together. So you might have a worksite committee of six people, say, at a car wash, which we had a really successful worksite committee. And yet, when we protested because the day that our complaint, the official complaint, was filed by the NLRB in a very sort of big way, our mayor was there, our IOTC was there, because they get all of their cars washed at that particular car wash. And so they said, as long as you're in a labor dispute, we're not going to wash our cars there. AFSCME workers get their vehicles washed at that particular car wash. They said, we're not going to get our cars washed there. But they were flanked not just with those allies, by those allies, but also several other smallish worksite committees. And so this is the way we've really been able to beat back retaliation. When it comes to the full circle, again, a lot of the organizing building blocks start in the worksite committee. They develop those skills, and they are required to participate and send representatives from their worksite committee to participate in our broader policy campaigns and just in our work in general. And in many cases, we have brought people through the immigrants' rights side who are all low-wage workers participating in all of our low-wage worker campaigns and civil rights campaigns. And they decide, because they have this tool and this knowledge, to form worksite committees in their workplace. So we have workers that have these NLRB postings or the NLRB has come in and send people in where they get to stand with all of their other coworkers. And they get to, their employer has to tell in front of all of their coworkers, they have to tell their coworkers, you have the right to organize. You can't be retaliated against. We made these five or six individuals or 16 individuals whole. And you can continue to organize in this workplace. And so we have workers for years who carry a copy of that posting in their back pocket at their workplace. And other members come to them and say, hey, this is happening. This harassment's happening. This health and safety. They say, OK, let's get together. We go. And the first thing they do is show that posting and say, we just want to let you know you can't retaliate us. But these are the issues that we're having. So they're able to engage in a very intense way in our policy work. And so we've done impact, strategic impact litigation. We sued our Department of Labor, our State Department of Labor, for inadequately enforcing our minimum wage law that we passed. And so our work site committees were able to recruit plaintiffs in their work sites to be a part of that lawsuit. And they felt like they could do all of that without the risk of unfettered retaliation. We always say you can be retaliated against, but we have these tools to be able to get you reinstated. And then we just raised the minimum wage at the state level and many of our work site committees. So it's $12 over the course of three years in the state of New Mexico. So we do do those big ticket items both at the city of Santa Fe level, the county, as well as the state level. And people feel like they can do that, again, inoculating other workers in their work site, but also knowing that they have that protection against retaliation, which at the end of the day is a big deal. So we don't have just cause yet, but this is a way for us to be able to create a sense of job security in the workplace through these work site committees. And I'm going to turn back to Sean now, because you're lucky it sounds like you're in a region that actually is really a board region that's really taking things seriously and doing what it's supposed to do. Everybody in this room knows that not all board regions are created equally, right? So Sean, talk to us a bit. Put a little finer point on it. If you are in a region with a weak board, and God knows this NLRB is trying to make every board a weak one, every region a weak one, right? Where could just cause backfill the functions that the board is not doing? But also, let's be honest, what are the limitations of it and why we need to keep moving on all fronts, including labor law reform? I mean, the main thing that just cause does is it puts the onus on the employer to make an active and positive case that the firing is for good cause, right? Whereas right now, any kind of protection that you have, and there are certain protected categories of workers, but the onus is on the worker to say, they didn't fire me for the reason they said, it's actually for this other reason. The responsibility it just causes, it flips it on the other end. The employer has to say, this was a good firing, this was justified, they have to document it. So that changes, I think, everything. Because right now, even in good regions, you get bad decisions about worker termination because it's about facts and circumstances and life is messy and complicated and nobody's perfect. So, having that as the standard and then having the protections of the act as something that goes above and beyond a much better universal standard, I think would create a lot more protection for activists. How would just cause work as a law? If we did amend the Fair Labor Standards Act and it's out there, I mean, I think- And we didn't have forced arbitration so you could actually enforce it. Right, right, we do have to say this. You can't, you can't, you know, wave away our rights with mandatory arbitration. I think that there's some strategy that we have to have about what kind of enforcement mechanism we would want. And there's an argument for a very explicit enforcement mechanism that would say it, you know, that ultimately it does go to a mutually chosen arbitrator that the employer has to pay for and here's the process. There's an argument for spelling out what due process looks like and what sort of, what the grievance procedure would look like. There's an argument for that. There's also an argument for just sort of leaving it mute and counting on the fact that employers are gonna fuck it up on a non-union basis and that we're gonna swoop in when they fuck it up and we're gonna organize the workplace, right? Because I think what would happen is if it was left sort of mute, is employers would create bootleg grievance procedures just like Benjamin Franklin High School did. But because the worker would essentially have their day in court, there's totally a motivation to when they get to that point, they're gonna be calling around to worker centers to unions. They're gonna be looking for somebody to represent them. And instead of what happens now, because that happens of worker gets a write up at a non-union job, a worker is told they're gonna get fired. They call the union and what we have to say is, they are allowed to do that. There's that much we can, and the unions are, we have limited resources, we have to make tough decisions about it. You're not gonna build a campaign around the worker that's about to get fired. There's just, what does that committee look like? Or as if you had just cause, you could run a campaign to save that worker's job. You can form an organizing committee. You could reveal how broken the appeals process is without a union and educate the workers on why having a union contract would make those protections stronger. Thank you. And Liz, I'm gonna turn to you now. I'd love to hear a little bit more about the other campaigns that CPD is working on at the state level that are about building worker power. I know you've said we should be brief. So I'm gonna bullet point it. But do you know I'm from a storytelling culture. So I have so many stories that I could be, so you can talk to me afterwards. But so bullet pointing, there is a decline in private enforcement because of forced arbitration because of this intentional rise. Right now, over 50% of workers are covered by these forced arbitration clauses. A recent report put out by EPI, shout out to EPI in CPD. The forecast there is over in, within the next five years, 80% of workers are gonna be covered by these forced arbitration clauses. So now workers aren't gonna be able to have access to the courts. So what do you do? Public enforcement. There is a decline in public enforcement. Public enforcement agencies do not have the funds. Some argue that it's intentional in order to be able to address workers' rights violations. So you're left with issues on the public enforcement side and the private enforcement side. And the additional issue around preemption, which a number of us have been talking about working on, because I mean, the forced arbitration is governed by the Federal Arbitration Act, which I mean something that they completely don't talk about within the Supreme Court is the fact that the Federal Arbitration Act was supposed to govern relationships between corporations. Those are the ones who are supposed to be arbitring, not an individual and a corporation. So they just kind of like hopped up and skip over that and just say, oh, it's for everybody. So because of the preemption issue, you have to think very carefully about how you're gonna legislate to address forced arbitration. So CPD has been working in six states with whistleblower enforcement policies to address the forced arbitration crisis. So someone, I think Sharon had mentioned the idea of a national PAGA and some people know this acronym others don't. So what PAGA stands for is the Private Attorney General Act. And so that kind of legislation currently exists in California and has existed for the last 15 years. What that kind of legislation allows is for a worker to sue in the shoes of the state. On behalf of other workers, so they're able to have access to the court, they're able to access the court collectively, and they're able to address company-wide violations. So we're working in New York, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington to pass this kind of legislation. And this would give workers again the opportunity to access the court collectively and actually just have leverage. Quick story, the only story I'll tell here is just, before focusing on policy work, I represented low-wage workers in federal court cases. And I would successfully settle my cases and I had colleagues asking me, how are you successfully settling these cases? What is happening in your negotiations with corporate counsel? Because I'd have corporate counsel come out of the room and be like, oh my gosh, that was really horrible. Ms. Nicholas, this is highly unorthodox. They'd be really upset with me. I'd get these phone calls from them. They would say they weren't used to this kind of interaction. And my secret was that I made litigation incredibly expensive for them. They didn't care about the morality of what was happening. They didn't care about the fact that they weren't supposed to be discriminating, harassing or stealing from my clients. What they cared about was how expensive it was gonna be. So once you hit their bottom line, the money, that's what motivates them. So essentially with this kind of legislation, when you have workers acting collectively, it makes things hella expensive for corporations and they don't like that. So that's what's gonna change what they're doing, at least in part, in addition to public shame and collective worker rights. And that was a story worth telling. I am gonna ask Smiley to close this out and talk to us about on the ground, where is the most enthusiasm? What is capturing the attention of workers? Where are they the most engaged and what are the things you're most excited about? In four minutes or less? In four minutes or less, right, of course. You tell the Southerner to be brief, that's good luck. Okay, I'm gonna do my best. I really appreciate some of the last story that she shared as well is because I think that for us, where things are most exciting, it's not so much about the policies themselves, although we are excited about many of them, but about this need for organization. And like Marcela said, and even in the example that she shared about the United Worker Center in New Mexico, organization is always our best enforcement, whether it's a union, whether it's a group of worker councils in Santa Fe, a worker center somewhere, like that's gonna be our best enforcement to get these folks to act right into the table. And so of course, like a couple years ago, there was a report that came out from the chamber, many of you will remember, attacking worker centers and saying that they were unions. And of course they were doing this, not because they wanted to empower more people to join unions, they were doing this because they wanted to limit the activities of worker centers who were having some success. And so if that's the case, then one, we really have to actually fix labor law so that unionization isn't seen as like a limiting thing that corporations can do to people. But two, there were two responses that many worker centers had. One was, and rightfully so, right, because this was attacking their C3 status, to say, we're not union, we're not union, we're this different thing. But then there's this other response that actually leaned into it and was like, okay, well, fine. We're creating models for 21st century unionism and we should have these protections. That's actually what, this is what it looks like here. This is what it looks like in Santa Fe. It's what it looks like in Greensboro, North Carolina. So in a way, part of the examples and case studies that are exciting me in this moment are actually examples that give people a practice of coming together collectively to negotiate with capital, whatever that looks like. And because in many places, if you say, you've got the right to join a union, there's like blank stares, people are scared, they don't wanna talk to you, they start looking around to see who's listening, right? Like there's a taboo, particularly in southern states like where I'm from. When in fact, when you say, you should actually be able to govern and make decisions over these things, they very clearly listen, they agree, right? And so some of the examples include at the local level, looking at a company like Amazon or any other e-commerce company, and instead of treating them just as an employer to be organized, although we wanna support any union that does that, wanting to look at the worker and consumer base in any geographic market to say, how are we regulating this company, which is clearly creating more, acting more like a public utility. It's creating the highway for businesses to get to their consumer base. That's no longer a company. That is a railroad, that is a highway. And so what would it look like for individuals to form a new kind of bargaining unit and that type of labor market to negotiate over how a company like that can behave in a particular region? Those are really exciting. And at a similar level, or at a smaller scale, we've had some success with this in places like St. Louis before the elections, St. Louis had passed and increased the minimum wage, the state preempted it, not surprisingly, and they created almost a downtown bargaining unit of community leaders and workers that said to those corporations in that region that they had to, they were gonna keep it. They were gonna negotiate that they would keep the minimum wage regardless of preemption. Or in D.C., during the day without immigrants, where they organized solidarity squads in a particular labor market just to ensure that companies that people were gonna be walking out of wouldn't retaliate for them actually walking out for that particular activity in a way laying the groundwork for future negotiations around civic engagement and being able to protect civic engagement and prevent retaliation against civic engagement. Now, whether or not we think these contracts are strong, certainly they aren't necessarily as legally supported as a collective bargaining agreement which is the most powerful agreement we can have, but what they do is actually give people the experience of practicing this thing, this thing we call organizing collective bargaining because if they don't understand what it is, then when you come around to their job site and say we actually need to form a union here, they won't have the experience of it, right? And I really appreciated that part of your story, Marcello, when you were talking about how the experience of other workplace councils and allies coming out to support their action actually gives people a sense that when the retaliation or the injustice comes at their own site, they're now ready. They have an experience of what they can do. We used to do that when we picketed, or I shouldn't use the word picket, we would leaflet educationally outside of Walmarts in Massachusetts around minimum wage, or we would get on public transit and educate folks and build transit committees for riders and things like that, and that was actually how we built committees of retail workers at one point because they were on the bus. Now they were organized around a completely different thing. It was a community-based issue and yet we were getting them into a position where they were practicing this idea that they could have power, they could come together and negotiate with capital, and then when it came to their work site, they were ready, they had an experience of this. Last couple of things is just in terms of getting at this, what we call bargaining with the 1% or what Sharon was saying is kind of redefining the firm, redefining who actually benefits from our work, from our labor, who is profiting the most. And we've had a lot of success globally working with unions and non-union NGOs around the country who organized, around the world who organized workers. And what's interesting, and I wanna harken back to the question from the, I can't remember your name from National Women's Law Center, but- Soonu, what's that? Soonu. Soonu, I gotta meet you Soonu, can't wait. So one of the questions you raised, one of the things that really got people in a position to come together across border was this issue of gender-based violence. And what was interesting about it is that these companies who have been so, you know, deaf to the needs of workers on the floor were all of a sudden appalled, like did it, you know, American Eagles coming to the table with workers cross-country to talk through gender-based violence and what can we negotiate, what kind of, what does it look like to enforce? And they're using that then as a platform to organize and to actually form unions in places where they haven't had them before. Or likewise, the thing with the workers at Toys R Us recently, you have to give them props to actually show that we can drag hedge fund managers into this discussion, you can't just fire us, you're gonna actually have to pay us a legitimate claim. And so these are the types of experiments that when we're talking about the contract, when we're talking about redefining the firm, you know, that in many ways today looks like a migration corridor, right? The place where they're coming from the same town and the same country to come to the US at a certain time, like what does an agreement in that corridor look like that's not just about portable benefits but is an enforceable agreement with the company? Because they're operating that way, why aren't we operating that way? So those are a couple of examples and I just wanna underline that the current within them isn't so much that it's a new policy because workers will use any and every policy available to us to win, right? I mean, I think Lane was here earlier, Lane Wyndham's book, Knocking on Labor's Door. If you haven't read it, please do. It's one of the few labor history books that has multiple examples that are based in the South, which is rare. And it actually shows that people have been organizing, particularly women and people of color in the South and using things like the Civil Rights Act and other things in addition to labor law to try to leverage power in their communities. Likewise, today, when we talk about immigrant rights, we aren't just talking about some moralistic thing, that's important too, but we're talking about workers' rights, we're talking about protection against retaliation for people who have been brought to work. And so in a way, this is the type of thing that the policies have to serve the organizing. Like at the end of the day, the policies have to set us up to build workplace committees, marketplace committees, downtown neighborhood committees, tenant committees, whatever the committee is that allows people to both be in relationship with each other, to test this idea of what a bargaining unit is, and ultimately to practice democracy. Sorry. All right, what I would like to do is get three questions out before we give answers. I see the gentleman in the back, I see Paula here, one more person. Right there, that gentleman in the middle. If they could get them the microphones, if you could all ask your questions, and we'll try to see if we can answer them a bit together. The gentleman in the back first, Paula up here, right there. Paula, you're gonna go second, and then the gentleman in the back middle with the glasses, third. Yeah, Carl Polzer and I've been working a couple ways on the analytics side, exploring wealth concentration and income concentration, and then advocating for inclusion of low-wage workers in the economy. So I'm really fascinated by these workplace committees to follow the most recent comment. I'm not a labor lawyer, though. So I wondered, they seem to be empowering people without actually forming a union to exercise certain rights under federal law. So just on the technical side, how do they have standing? Is it the individual that has standing to go to the board, or does the committee have standing? Who else could have standing? And on the ground, do unions see this as a possible ally or is it as a competition? Could it be a mechanism where unions could pull their resources to kind of pre-negotiate? So those are my questions. Great, and while she's coming up here to give Paula the microphone, sir, I'm gonna ask you to make sure you meet my colleague Charlotte Noss, who's just right over there. Get one of her cards and talk to her because she specializes in this worker center issue and I think would have a lot of great feedback for you also, Paula. Paula Brantner, back in, I believe, 1998 when I was with the National Employment Lawyers Association, we did a series of focus groups on just cause and as Bob Scholl knows, about 10 years later, did some more focus groups and that's why we call it forced arbitration instead of mandatory binding arbitration. So, but when we talked to workers, we thought it was a no-brainer that this is something that workers would want and we found to our surprise that there was a lot of hostility towards it and I think it came from what I would call a scarcity mindset that workers thought it would make it too hard to fire bad workers and there was hostility amongst unions because, and again, the scarcity mindset, it would be like, well, if all workers have that, here's this unique thing that unions provide that won't be an incentive for people to organize anymore and so we didn't get very far with that but as we've discussed here today, we are getting places with both binding arbitration, forced arbitration and organizing around sexual harassment and those are issues that employment lawyers have known for decades have been major, major problems but I think employment lawyers are pretty crappy at organizing around it so my question is how do, whether it's unions or organizing groups like CPD and others get behind just cause in an effective way? Okay, and then the gentleman in the back? This question is in some ways for Sean but there's other folks in the panel I think could answer particularly well. I've been captivated by this idea of just causes the next labor standard we fight for for some time and I think there's many reasons you articulated why it's great I think the objections to it fail so I'm hoping that what you can articulate Sean and others is what do you think a national campaign would encompass to move towards this? You mentioned many in the Fair Labor Standards Act so far we have two examples on the local level so I think if you could articulate a vision for how this would be moved upon for organizers like me from a small service and hospitality workers organization what role that we can play and campaigners around the country can play to advances? I think it'd be helpful to hear people like you all. Thank you so we are very pressed for time cause there's an event here at one o'clock and EPI needs us out at 1230 so we can turn things over Thea is going to dismiss everybody much more graciously than that but I'm gonna be the bad guy and let you know that when we're done we're really done and we appreciate you leaving as much as we would love for you to be here all day and keep talking about this this is the first of many conversations to come but with that I would like each of my panelists to sort of close with if possible about 60 seconds of reflection that is either in direct response to a question or one more quick thing that you want to say and then we are going to turn this over to our gracious host Thea to say thank you I think what has changed since 1998 is that corporations are acting employers are acting with such impunity that everybody has horrible stories now that has happened to them a family member, a co-worker or they've heard stories cause social media has helped these stories get out so I'd love to see a focus group and see where workers are at I think their perspective has radically changed I think there is a real problem with unions embracing this as an issue and I'm not sure how to get there I'm saying let's put it on the table it should be one of the things that we're debating and discussing should it be our top priority I don't even take a position on that necessarily I actually think that where we want to get if 2021 looks like the kind of year that we're hoping for I think we want sort of an omnibus fair labor standards act amendment that is addressing a lot of things that corporations are doing or pushing for make workplaces fair again and I will just note that as we were discussing this with Mr. Ellison and his team last year the major unions were all at the table very constructively, very enthusiastically so there's not necessarily a dichotomy there there are certainly considerations to balance we don't want any sort of just cause standard to for example override a previously or future negotiated collective bargaining agreement but I think there's a broader recognition that again this is an issue whose time has come So I'll respond to the question from the gentleman in the back so you don't have to be a workers committee to enjoy the protections of the NLRA two or more workers come together and engage and protect a conservative activity and try to change their wages or conditions in the workplace they're protected against retaliation in that situation so obviously we want more workers usually we don't have workers committees of two we say you gotta get in there and you gotta recruit more people because there's more people that are involved in this the stronger your case will be so we actually they declare themselves as worksite committees and use a whole host of strategies to improve their wages and workplace conditions but they declare themselves very early on so that they do enjoy a little bit more than they already have job security so then the burden is on the employer to prove why they've retaliated against them or why they've fired them reduce their hours et cetera once they've formed the workers committee so they write everything is documented through writing so anytime any supervisor comes and says you guys are very problematic we're gonna get rid of you or we're gonna do X, Y and Z or they tell another worker they document it they create a really strong paper trail say you know and when they declare themselves these are the things that we just wanting to let you know that there are six of us or 10 of us or 12 of us or 20 of us that have decided to form a worksite committee and these are the things that we're interested in changing in our workplace we'd love to meet with you their employer could absolutely ignore them but often the employer gets upset and retaliates them against them or in many of our cases they've actually in some way shape or other negotiated with them for those conditions because they're so afraid that if they do retaliate and ignore them that they will be publicly shamed in our community so those are the rights that we have under the NLRA and no unions we'd love for unions and I've talked over the course of many years particularly in Santa Fe to figure out how we can start some campaigns in Santa Fe but they are not gonna organize restaurant workers or hotel workers in Santa Fe and so our public employee unions but they are happy to work with us in raising the floor for everyone and to have this incredible base of low wage workers supporting each other and unions. Smiley. Yeah, I'll try to put mine into three quick points and I really appreciate the discussion in the other panel of today so I've learned a ton myself. So the first thing I wanna say is that this current crisis we're feeling the struggle we've been feeling a lot of people and a lot of my people have been feeling this for a while. It's kind of like welcome, grab your bowl of top ramen and let's figure the strategy out, right? And so I wanna come back to making sure that we are building a movement that includes everyone that doesn't just fix or remedy things that a small percentage of the workforce have lost but actually build something that everyone can feel like they're a part of and can see themselves in. Secondly, I think that there was a question a little bit about the relationship to unions and worker centers and the other community groups and I think that it's actually really important in this moment for us to really recognize ourselves as one labor movement. Like it's not just unions and their allies and the community, that framework is done. It's over, I mean, we were founded on it in 1987. So it's just shaking us up too but it's just not real anymore because you've got on the one hand a union who may have locals in what's left of a formal part of a sector and you've got worker centers and community groups organizing those who are informally a part of that sector that the company is using or the sector is using to undermine the formal agreements that unions have made. Like until we actually are coming up with a shared strategy to negotiate with those sectors or those firms, we're losing. So this is a pivot point for us to actually see ourselves not as getting rid of unions but actually of building 21st century unions and a 21st century labor movement. And that said, I do think that when we put a viable strategy in front of workers that does that and that brings everybody in, right? Or at least leaves the door open, right? For everyone to see themselves as a part of it. Then I think we would be surprised by what people are willing to do. And despite all the talk about laws and policy and stuff that I wanna see passed and protections that I want, I'm also from a tradition that's very comfortable breaking rules when necessary. I mean, if my ancestors hadn't broken a free rules, I wouldn't be here, right? And so in a way, we actually are seeing this and again coming back to this, avoiding this dichotomy of blue states versus red states. When you look at the state map of West Virginia when the educators went out last year, the first counties that went out were deep red states. They were ready. They had an appetite when you started, when they started talking to them about what was at stake and what the issues were. And so in all of this, my last point is simply that we don't wanna underestimate the willingness and the resilience of everyday working people when we put a real strategy in front of them. All right, check back to follow. Is anybody can follow that on the list? Well, I mean, I will tell you a story, no for reals. So there is this story of this conversation between Dr. Cornell West and President Obama. And Cornell West was coming out against President Obama for his stance on multiple policies, multiple issues, and publicly tweeting at him and saying how problematic President Obama was. So the two of them had this four hour meeting. They talked about their differences and when they came out of it, Cornell West talked about he was just like, you know what, that brother is in a different lane. He's like, I'm an activist, I'm a professor, he's a politician. So they discussed the fact that they had similar goals but they had different ways of getting there. So there's mutual respect for that. And I think that that's part of what's needed in our movement to Smiley's points about the fact that we can come up with alignment and a shared strategy around a lot of this rather than the infighting. The economy of scarcity to address what you were saying earlier is part of the issue. Like people, I mean, the folks, organized money loves this, the fact that there's this infighting within the labor movement. And I don't believe it has to exist that way. There is a different way. And I think that that's part of what's being built. This shared alignment, organized strategy so that we can actually set up so that we can win. But the part of why I work at CPD is because I've seen them do that. They are able to work on the Toys R Us campaign and bring organized money to the table. They're able to make sure that Amazon is not in Long Island City. They're able to do all kinds of things, including forced arbitration, because they're looking for alignment with organizations that sometimes weren't in conversation with each other. But they said, let's get together, let's talk about it. You're in your lane, we're going to similar places and I respect where you are. And I think that's possible. And I think that's necessary because the threat that we're facing on multiple levels is essential for a lot of people. So it's something, it's like the time for infighting. I mean, I understand what happens, but I think what's needed is shared alignment, mutual respect. With that, let me just close with this remark. Those in the room who know me know that I am obsessed with Broadway musicals. Broadway in general, Broadway musicals in particular. So of course, Sunday night was like my night of the year, the Tony Awards. The woman who won Best Director for Musical noted that she was the only woman nominated for Director of Musical that year, and many years, and said, it's not a pipeline issue, it's a failure of imagination in a field where we are called on to be creative and imaginative. And it occurred to me that that is us as well. Who said it? Smiley, we are rule breakers by nature. None of us got into this field because we wanna just enforce the laws that already exist and we wanna stay within the norms that already exist. We got into this because we wanna create new norms. We have the creativity and the imagination in this community. And the only thing that is gonna stop us is our own selves, right? And how high we don't reach and how much we worry about scarcity instead of plenty. So I look forward to continuing this discussion with all of you, with your imagination at 100% with our creativity, with our belief and our knowledge that we don't need to be constrained by anything. So let me first thank this wonderful panel to turn everything back over to Thea for her closing remarks. Thank you. All right, so that was an awesome, awesome panel of rule breakers, deep thinkers, and organizers, exactly the kind of people we need to have in the room and at the table as we enter this next phase. So thanks to all of you for taking your morning and spending it with us. As Judy said, we are trying to turn the room over pretty quickly for another event at one o'clock so we appreciate your cooperation in helping us do that. So don't hang around, but go talk with folks outside and exchange cards and stay in touch. This is just the very beginning of a long and important conversation. Thanks so much for joining.