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<\/a>According to Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta, our future would be a lot brighter and our democracy much healthier if collective bargaining were much more widespread and applied to economic encounters beyond the workplace. \u00a0Smiley is Executive Director of Jobs with Justice, and Gupta is currently the Ford Foundation\u2019s Vice President of US Programs. Both authors are seasoned collective bargainers and movement builders.<\/p>\nWhat is this magic bullet that will, Smiley and Gupta maintain, safeguard both economic and political rights? \u201cTraditional worksite-based collective bargaining is a system by which working people can exercise collective power and directly confront the owners of capital in a way that reclaims portions of that capital for working people and their communities.\u201d The authors argue for far wider application of collective bargaining: \u201cthe process whereby working people take collective action in negotiating with any<\/em> entity that has power over their rights, living conditions, and overall economic well-being in a way that produces an enforceable agreement that can be renegotiated as conditions change.\u201d<\/p>\n Collective Bargaining and the History of Labor<\/strong><\/u><\/p>\n In a chapter in which the authors relate the history of collective bargaining to the history of the U.S. Labor Movement, they focus, not on the obvious choices such as the American Federation of Labor, but on the mass refusal of Black slaves to work, midway through the Civil War and the successful citywide strike for better pay of Atlanta washerwomen in the 1880s.<\/p>\n In their brief history of U.S. labor, Smiley and Gupta do not assess the role of the CIO in relation to issues of both race and gender, despite its generally being regarded as more progressive than the AFL in these regards. Nor do they allude to the role of the Communist Party or its members in furthering racial justice in the labor movement.<\/p>\n The authors draw some lessons from the history of US labor. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 which robbed labor of important rights by banning secondary boycotts and exempting millions of workers from NLRA protection \u201cillustrates how quickly a federal government that appears to be firmly on the side of workers can be twisted in the opposite direction when workers themselves fail to be vigilant about not just winning the game but also changing the rules to protect and maintain those victories.\u201d The authors, however, provide no evidence of declining worker vigilance. The story of labor\u2019s response to Taft-Hartley is a complicated one that includes compromise on the part of labor movement leaders but widespread workers\u2019 protest.<\/p>\n In discussing \u201cgovernment,\u201d the authors tend to omit the difference between the two major parties, the Democrats being moderately pro-labor for a short time in the 1930s and the Republicans largely hostile to labor. Republicans dominated the 80th Congress that enacted Taft-Hartley over the veto of Democrat, President Harry S. Truman. In both Houses of Congress the number of Democrats voting not to sustain Truman\u2019s veto narrowly outnumbered those voting to sustain the pro-labor veto. Missing from the authors\u2019 analysis of labor\u2019s decline is the Democratic Party\u2019s lack of support for labor in the last sixty years, despite heavy electoral support for Democratic candidates on the part of organized labor\u2014what labor economist Richard McIntyre refers to as \u201cunrequited love.\u201d<\/p>\n The Great Rollback<\/u><\/p>\n A chapter on \u201cThe Great Rollback\u201d emphasizes globalization and the consequent ability of global corporations to outsource production tasks to countries where workers\u2019 rights are fewer, government regulations are scarce, and salaries much lower than in the US. \u00a0With financial capitalism, the successor to managerial capitalism, investors gamble with companies and other economic entities in order to maximize profits–with severely negative consequences for wages, safety, healthcare and other social needs. Redoubled use of the divide and conquer tools of white supremacy, patriarchy, and xenophobia on the part of today\u2019s Right is a feature of the rollback emphasized by Smiley and Gupta.<\/p>\n Contingent work\u2014subcontracted, temporary, part-time, or otherwise precarious work is a \u201cpowerful antilabor trend\u201d associated with the rollback. Some contingent workers are indirectly employed and unable to negotiate with their \u201creal bosses.\u201d Some are misclassified as independent contractors, hence outside the legal framework of the NLRA as well as denied such safety net protections as unemployment insurance. The authors also take a look at the gig economy, concluding that \u201cit is far from the worker-empowering revolution that companies are marketing and far less sizable.\u201d This is a conclusion similar to that reached by labor historian Frank Stricker in his NJFAN Newsletter<\/em> article, \u201cThe Gig Economy: Pushing Back against the Rollback<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n Much of The Future We Need <\/em>is devoted to a discussion of how labor can push back against a system that isn\u2019t working for most of us\u2014one epitomized by a choice for many working people between covering the rent and putting enough food on the table. Stories told by workers who are <\/em>pushing back are a welcome feature of this book. Workers\u2019 stories are preceded by their portraits, painted in the innovative style of queer, feminist artist Gwenn Seemel.<\/p>\n In their section on the labor movement Smiley and Gupta call for broadening our image of US workers\u2014beyond the stereotype of \u201ca strong white man wielding a pickaxe or a hammer while building one of the major industries of the twentieth century\u2014steel, automaking, or mining.\u201d The 10 workers featured in this book hardly fit that outdated stereotype. Only one man! These workers are teachers and employees in a department store, domestic service, school food service, an auto manufacturing plant, a packing house, and multinational retail and fast food enterprises.\u00a0 Most of these workers are black or brown, all but one is a woman, and none wields an axe at work.<\/p>\n The workers featured in The Future We Need<\/em> are pushing back against age-old challenges that were tamed by civil rights and women\u2019s movements but resurgent in the pushback. Capital\u2019s traditional divide-and-conquer strategy for weakening labor is alive and deadly in today\u2019s effort of bosses to pit whites against blacks, women against men, and native workers against immigrants. And the workers\u2019 stories, moreover, emphasize the sheer immiseration of people who do the hard and necessary work for us\u2014work that was only deemed \u201cessential\u201d when a pandemic demonstrated how much we need them. Some Walmart\u2019s workers, we learn, spend their days off at a food bank. Unable to afford a car, an older worker featured in this book walks seven blocks to a bus stop, takes four hours each way to get to work at McDonald\u2019s, and sometimes is employed only four hours of work when she gets there. Not to mention the lack of respect from managers that comes through in these stories.<\/p>\n Rubynell Walker-Barbee, a food service worker at Morehouse College in Georgia, organized a successful drive for membership in the SEIU. After three years working at Morehouse, she had been rewarded for good work with a $.02 increase! She started \u201casking around\u201d and realized fellow workers weren\u2019t even making the minimum wage. Unionization, however, did not prevent the state labor commissioner\u2019s arbitrary revocation of the unemployment insurance benefits that school-service workers rely on during the three-month school vacation–a loss that created great hardship for workers earning low wages to begin with. The workers, union and nonunion, organized, rallied outside worksites, even went to the labor commissioner\u2019s house. And they succeeded in having the governor overturn the commissioner\u2019s denial.<\/p>\n Lidia Victoria, a Dominican immigrant helped with the fight to gain union recognition for Smithfield Packing in North Carolina which has a very diverse workforce. \u201cOf course, the company knew our chances of winning decreased the more divided we were. And they played on this.\u201d<\/p>\n Sanchioni Butler, a UAW organizer, found that Nissan in Canton, Mississippi \u201cused their money to divide the workers.\u201d \u201cThey would encourage white workers in the plant, who were in just as bad shape as everyone else, to still feel privileged over Black workers.\u201d Many of them \u201chad their own \u2018aha\u2019 moments after they experienced an injury and saw how the company treated them just as badly as they had treated Black workers who had been injured.\u201d \u00a0Smiley and Gupta regard white supremacy \u201cas a tool of capitalist dominance for white people\u201d\u2014one supported by Sanchioni Butler\u2019s observation of how white workers were led to feel privileged over black workers but were treated just as badly. \u00a0The authors emphasize that \u201cpatriarchy, like white supremacy, must be centrally targeted by labor organizers and others who want to build a truly effective movement for economic democracy.<\/p>\n Kimberly Mitchell is a union organizer who was a shop steward at Macy\u2019s in DC. The authors relate her self-description to the concept of intersectionality or intersecting identities and the consequent need for twenty-first century collective bargaining to consider the whole person:<\/p>\n If all you see when you meet me is that I\u2019m a worker, you\u2019re missing the entire point. I am a whole person. I should be able to exercise control of my life in all aspects\u2014at work, in my home, and in relationship to the big banks and the large corporations who shape so much of our society. If we fail to see people like me as whole people, then we\u2019re losing good soldiers who could be in this fight with us, this fight for dignity and respect.<\/em><\/p>\n A chapter titled \u201cBeyond the Red and Blue\u201d tells the story of the successful teachers strike in West Virginia, one of the states that adopted right-to-work laws in the last 30 years. Smiley and Gupta consider it \u201ca remarkable anomaly\u201d that the first of the 55 West Virginia counties to implement the work stoppage were more conservative than those in other parts of the state. All three are red counties, one of them 98 percent white and relatively poor (median income $36,000). These counties, however, located in the epicenter of the mine wars after World War I \u201cidentify with the ideals of dignity and respect for working people.\u201d Smiley and Gupta conclude that \u201corganizing people is not about their ideology. It is about appealing to the values that drive them.\u201d Apart from the difficulty of distinguishing between ideology and values, this is a rather small sample to draw conclusions about going beyond the Red and Blue.<\/p>\n Heather Deluca-Nestor, president of her county union local, emphasizes that West Virginia teachers who participated in the work stoppage were doing more than protecting their rights as workers. \u201cI guess you would call us the standard-bearers of public education and defending our children.\u201d Deluca-Nestor contrasts teachers who defend public schools–their employers–with her steel-worker relatives who strike against<\/em> their company for fair wages. What goes for teachers also applies to other public-service workers who are allied with their employers when it comes to gaining public support for these services.<\/p>\n New Challenges for Collective Bargaining<\/strong><\/u><\/p>\n While challenges like the divide-and-conquer strategy are age old, some of the direct-bargaining examples in this book address new challenges. One is \u201cthe fissured workplace\u201d which David Weil, former labor administrator in the Obama administration, describes as: \u201ca constellation of different companies delivering what the consumer may think of as simply \u2018the Marriott experience.\u2019\u201d In such workplaces, it is difficult for workers to know who their real boss is and with whom to negotiate. In the world of global capital, Smiley and Gupta emphasize, the \u201cultimate profiteers\u201d <\/em>must be confronted directly. Another newer challenge is what sociologist Beverly Silver calls the \u201cspatial fix\u201d <\/em>or the avoidance of labor militancy and power by relocating sites of production. Here again, the real boss is not at hand.<\/p>\n Smiley and Gupta cite several initiatives to overcome the spatial fix. One is the Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA), \u201ca strategic network of garment-sector unions and other worker organizations from countries across the continent.\u201d The network seeks to form \u201ca global bargaining unit with an equal role in governing the industry rather than allowing suppliers and the global retail brands to pit working people from one country against those from other countries.\u201d The authors report that \u201cthe AFWA continues to thrive even in the harsh circumstances presented by the COVID-10 pandemic and the ongoing shifts in global capital.\u201d However, Smiley and Gupta provide no examples of AFWA success. The Accord on Fire Safety in Bangladesh is an example of \u201cintensive collaboration around bargaining demands and organizing goals across national borders\u201d that is necessitated by the global economy. However, US retail giants that sell Bangladesh-made garments had refused to sign on to the accord at the time when this book was written. Global Union Federations (GUF) are international union federations that attempt to construct global framework agreements (GFAs), but these agreements \u201coften lack real enforceability.\u201d<\/p>\n The stories of Bettie Douglas, a Black grandmother employed at McDonald\u2019s in St. Louis, and Cynthia Murray who works at Walmart in Maryland, provide examples of the need to target the ultimate profiteer rather than a local franchise owner. When Douglas tried to bargain with the franchise owner, her direct boss, she realized it was not a decision he could make and that \u201cWe had to try to engage the executives at the top of the McDonald\u2019s corporation.\u201d And she has overcome the nervousness she first felt in testifying about her experiences before a large audience that included McDonald\u2019s executives. Douglas has gained personal strength from expressing her true feelings and expresses hope that face-to-face meeting with executives will make each understand where the other is coming from. But there is no report of worker gains from these meetings.<\/p>\n Cynthia Murray recognized that \u201cWith a company like Walmart, you can\u2019t just go store to store. We had to get to the top of the company.\u201d Murray tells of a face-to-face encounter with a Walmart executive in which she and her colleagues made him listen to a story of how one of them lost her baby when, while pregnant, she was forced to pull a pallet jack. For the first time she could see he was human and realized they were too. Yet, Murray relates no gains for Walmart workers from this encounter.<\/p>\n Community-Driven Bargaining<\/strong><\/u><\/p>\n Workers are whole people whose daily interactions and struggles with the economy go far beyond the workplace. Therefore, while a union contract at work is an important step toward economic democracy, working people must also be able to collectively negotiate economic relationships far beyond their worksites, in all aspects of their lives. This is what \u201ccommunity-driven bargaining\u201d is all about.<\/em><\/p>\n This opening paragraph of the section, \u201cWhat is Community-Driven Bargaining?\u201d sums up a central theme of The Future We Need<\/em> and the authors\u2019 justification for extending the powerful tool of collective bargaining to the full range of workers\u2019 encounters with capital. What follows are descriptions of the kinds of economic encounters that community-driven bargaining is designed to address: renters versus corporate landlords; debtors versus big banks; and consumers versus corporations. In each of these the individual deals with powerful, remote entities\u2014for example, instead of an on-site landlord a company that owns over 150,000 rental properties, including apartments, manufactured homes, and RV parks.<\/p>\n Deloris Wright is a Jamaican immigrant who is an activist in Domestic Workers United and in its six-year, successful campaign to achieve a New York State Domestic Bill of Rights. But her struggle for economic rights did not stop with her role as a worker. As an apartment dweller in Brooklyn\u2019s Crown Heights neighborhood, she encountered many of the problems that plague lower-income tenants–rent costs \u201cthrough the roof\u201d and neighbors being manipulated into moving out so that landlords could increase the rent. \u201cI couldn\u2019t sit by and watch,\u201d writes Ms. Wright who joined the Crown Heights Tenant Union which has been able to negotiate with landlords and building owners and to accompany their neighbors to housing court when they are summoned so that they don\u2019t have to navigate the system by themselves.<\/p>\n Throughout US history, the authors write, the consumers-against-corporations strategy aided causes ranging from the abolition of slavery to unfair labor practices and civil rights. One might add to their historical examples an in-depth by labor historian Anne-Lise Orleck: the successful housewives\u2019 boycotts over food and housing costs in a number of cities that peaked during the Great Depression, a Communist-backed movement led by women whose organizing skills were honed in the labor movement.[1] Today, we have no nationwide consumer movement of consumers-against-corporations. Think what such a movement might have done to counter the current inflation–by targeting price-gouging corporations instead of workers\u2019 jobs and wages.<\/p>\n Smiley and Gupta hold that instead of settling for enacting policy changes or electing like-minded people to office, community collective bargaining should \u201cHelp to Govern.\u201d \u00a0They suggest the creation and administration of a trust board that governs a public fund which advances community interests. An example the authors give of the \u201cHelp to Govern\u201d approach is a Connecticut Campaign for Worthy Wages focusing on legislation that would charge employers who pay less than $15 an hour a \u201cMcWalmart Fee\u201d to retrieve the cost to the state of public-assistance fees resulting from their workers\u2019 insufficient incomes. These revenues would be used to pay for the senior-care and childcare services needed by many McDonald\u2019s, Walmart, and other low-wage workers. The legislation failed, but the Connecticut insurance giant Aetna, raised its starting wage to $16 and reduced out-of-pocket-care expenses for its lowest-paid employees. An effort in Cook County, Illinois to establish a similar fund also failed, and so did a Maine initiative to establish the right to home care supports and services for Mainers with disabilities. \u00a0Such efforts, though they may fall short of objectives, can tarnish the image of large corporations and raise public awareness of economic injustice.<\/p>\n Among \u201cCommunity Pathways to Workplace Bargaining,\u201d the authors discuss coenforcement and procurement strategies.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cCoenforcement is a means by which workers can broaden the scope of bargaining by negotiating with government or private actors to play a formal role in enforcing labor and employment laws.\u201d Jeff Crosby, a veteran labor activist who tells his story, provides an example of coenforcement. In addition to leadership in the workplace, he is a member of a Labor Council that includes organizations ranging from a Worker Center to the Chamber of Commerce. When an anti-wage theft policy was enacted, they wrote themselves into it as an advisory committee because they knew the city didn\u2019t have the money to hire someone to enforce it.<\/p>\n Largely confined to negotiating over wages and working conditions in the post- World War II period, unions have been attempting to broaden the scope of bargaining to include employers\u2019 impact on workers\u2019 communities. This social movement unionism <\/em>has been more common in the public sector where, as mentioned, teachers see themselves as defending public education as well as their rights as workers. Smilely and Gupta report that teachers in St. Paul Minnesota, for example, inserted in their negotiations that the district cease all business with banks that foreclose on families with school-aged children during the school year.<\/p>\n Technological Change: Who Benefits?<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n New technology, Smiley and Gupta emphasize, is neither good nor bad for workers. \u201cWhen working people can inset themselves directly into the processes of designing, adopting, and governing new technologies and shifting the organization of work, the result will be overwhelmingly positive for much larger groups of people.\u201d Their section on technological change tells two stories\u2014one in which collective bargaining led to good outcomes for workers in a company adopting new technology and one in which the views of working people were disregarded, and both the company and workers were losers.<\/p>\n In the success story the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE) and Allen-Bradley Automation in Milwaukee were able to negotiate benefits for workers as the company was adopting new technologies. A core issue was increasing the opportunity for workers with seniority to be trained for new, more technically advanced jobs. Another was the creation of apprenticeship programs available to people whose jobs were being eliminated. By contrast, in building its Factory of the Future, General Electric did not heed the advice of a workers\u2019 technology committee that workers learn multiple skills as opposed to deskilling their work. The result: the company built \u201cone of the world\u2019s most inflexible machining centers\u201d which was shut down after ten years.<\/p>\n The Future We Need<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n I am in accord with Smiley and Gupta\u2019s analysis of the conditions that have led to the decline of labor density and collective bargaining. Their proposals for countering some effects of the \u201cGreat Rollback\u201d are also on the mark. Their section on Community-Driven Bargaining is comprehensive in its identification of strategies that take collective bargaining beyond the workplace. And the workers\u2019 stories in this book undergird the authors\u2019 analyses of the problems and their solutions. I recommend The Future We Need<\/em> to all who aspire to make workplaces and communities more democratic and better able to resist the egregious economic inequality of 21st<\/sup> century global capitalism and the means by which it achieves and maintains hegemony\u2014financialization, fissured workplaces, and the divisive effects of white supremacy and patriarchy.<\/p>\n Collective bargaining is a strategy, a means to an end. The authors assume that collective bargaining will be used to further the progressive goals or ends they espouse. And that is largely the case. Yet, they point out that many Black and Brown workers today \u201cexperience labor unions in part via unionized government agencies like US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local police departments\u2014both negative, violent forces that often terrorize these communities.\u201d Smiley and Gupta note that the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis helped prevent the removal from the police force of police officer Derek Chauvin who subsequently murdered George Floyd. Moreover, the authors point out that the AFL-CIO defended the membership of the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA) in the federation while calling for some general reforms that IUPA was still heavily offended by.\u201d However effective they are at collecting bargaining, the unions that abet racism must be opposed vigorously by the labor movement and other progressive forces.<\/p>\n Largely missing in this book is a consideration of the role of federal government policy in achieving a brighter future and of movement action in pursuit of progressive government policies. The authors recognize the importance of such legislation as the National Labor Relations Act and, in fact, note that when protection from the NLRA became less effective in the 1970s and 1980s, working people turned to other federal laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (that prohibits sex discrimination in programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance). Their section on negotiating beyond the workplace refers to some failed efforts to enact state legislation, but influencing federal policy is not included.<\/p>\n A statement of the authors quoted earlier in this review suggests that influencing government policy is not a priority in \u201corganizing for a better democracy\u201d: \u201cWhile voting, lobbying, and other forms of policy and legal work are important forms of democratic participation, collective bargaining\u2014both at work and elsewhere\u2014applies democratic practices to economic relationships.\u201d Perhaps that is one reason why some critical future needs that can only be achieved by changes in federal and state policy are not addressed in this work– climate change and the future of the planet itself; the almost unthinkable proliferation of battlefield weapons that make our schools and our streets scenes of deadly violence; and a swollen military budget and nuclear arsenal that also threaten the survival of the human race. Moreover, the goal of full employment as a means of achieving good jobs for all is not mentioned in this work, despite the importance of tight labor markets to strength at the bargaining table. This book–as the authors make explicit in the final chapter of their book–is about the future of the labor movement and its potential contribution to the important goal of economic democracy.<\/p>\n As a member of the unit of the American Association of University Professors at Adelphi University I was aware of how leaders of our faculty union were able to use collective bargaining skills, developed in the workplace, in a successful, wider effort to save the university from a hostile right-wing takeover. As chair of the National Jobs for All Network, I think of the \u201cfuture we need\u201d as \u00a0more than the future of the labor movement or collective bargaining-, however more powerful in workplace\u00a0 and \u00a0more widely directed to economic issues beyond the workplace.<\/p>\n Admittedly, the enactment of federal policies that limit the ravages of capital are very difficult, perhaps impossible, to achieve. But what else will give us the future we as a nation really need? One that affects the well-being of the planet and its inhabitants, world-wide. If wider and more effective practice of collective bargaining is the route to this, then I wish the authors would have said so and shown how and why–including how widely practiced it must be in order to lead us to the future we need. In theory, democratic government can limit the inequality generated by capital, but that is unlikely when capital invades democratic government through unlimited campaign contributions. In fact, Smiley and Gupta call attention to this problem: \u201cThe amount of money that corporations can spend to influence elections has skyrocketed in the last half century,\u201d and they add that the trend began long before Citizens United.<\/em> Mass movements like those that gave us a civil rights revolution or women\u2019s suffrage have forced our federal government to limit patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist hegemony, albeit insufficiently and impermanently. Smiley and Gupta propose strategies for limiting anti-democratic capitalist control of workplaces and some other institutions. Is that enough to achieve \u201cthe future we need?\u201d Or should they have been more modest in claiming what collective bargaining can achieve?<\/p>\n [1] Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States,1900-1965, <\/em>2nd<\/sup> ed., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Trudy Goldberg According to Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta, our future would be a lot brighter and our democracy much healthier if collective bargaining were much more widespread and applied to economic encounters beyond the workplace. \u00a0Smiley is Executive Director of Jobs with Justice, and Gupta is currently the Ford Foundation\u2019s Vice President of… Read More Review of The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century\u00a0by Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta, ILR Press, 2022<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,170,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-constituents","category-labor","category-labor-community"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13395"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13406,"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13395\/revisions\/13406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nHow Big, How Bad?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Included in the armory of capital \u201crollback\u201d by Smiley and Gupta are the skyrocketing sums that corporations can spend to influence U.S. elections, a trend well-established before the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. Another Supreme Court blow to labor that noted by the authors is the 2018 Janus ruling that non-union government workers cannot be required to pay union fees as a condition of working in public service.<\/p>\n