Trader Joe’s, SpaceX, and Meta are arguing in lawsuits that government agencies protecting workers and consumers—the NLRB and FTC—are “unconstitutional.”
Trader Joe’s has become the second company in a month to sue the National Labor Relations Board for being “unconstitutional,” following the lead of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, as both companies face board charges for firing employees. These two major corporations aren’t alone in attempting to protect their interests by undermining public institutions; Meta is also arguing in an ongoing lawsuit that the Federal Trade Commission is unconstitutional.
A legal expert told Motherboard that these companies are attempting to take advantage of what they believe is a friendly Supreme Court—judges currently lean right by a six-to-three margin—while they can.
one time i went to a labor studies department at a Big University and i said “i have a bachelors degree and i think i’d like to maybe go for an advanced degree in labor studies before i find myself singing union hymns on the street corner out of sheer frustration” and we talked for a while about the kind of organizing the professor himself had done and some of his colleagues, and i expressed frustration, then, with the existence of taft-hartley because it hamstrings union organizing so much, and the professor said, i shit you not “we got some good rulings out of the nlrb”
i was flabbergasted. we don’t need the nlrb if we can throw wildcat strikes and solidarity strikes, which the NLRB will never support.
all this to say i hope the nlrb is abolished because then the professional labor organizing people won’t have an excuse not to attack the real problem.