Another Reason for Aggressive Antitrust Activities

Because right now, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Albrecht's (Trader Joes) are trying to reverse 90 years of precedent and get the courts to declare that labor unions are illegal.

These parasites need to be opposed, and, where possible, charged criminally and frog marched out of their offices in handcuffs:

Fourscore and seven years ago—1937, to be exact—our fathers on the Supreme Court (well, five of them, which was just enough) brought forth a new nation: New Deal America. In that year, the justices ruled that the most fundamental legislative works of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency—Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)—were constitutional. So said the Court; so said, in the NLRA case, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the decision’s author, who had been the Republican candidate for president in 1916. From these decisions, which saved seniors from destitution and enabled workers to form unions, a broadly shared prosperity emerged that gave the nation a middle-class majority for the three decades after World War II.

Now we are engaged in a war with the rulers of the new economy, who, having already downsized that middle class by appropriating an ever larger share of the proceeds from its work for themselves, actually want to strike down the NLRA. In the past few weeks, three pillars of that economy—Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, and the Albrecht family’s Trader Joe’s—have all asked federal courts to declare the core functions of the NLRA unconstitutional, on the grounds that the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) administrative courts, like those of other regulatory agencies, mix judicial functions with executive branch functions. In actual practice, what those bodies do is hear and rule on cases such as those brought by workers on organizing campaigns who’ve been illegally fired. What Elon and Jeff would prefer is that federal courts hear such cases directly, which guarantees that by the time they reach the bench, those organizing campaigns will have become a dim memory. Or maybe, they want no one to hear such cases. Or perhaps, given the deep hatred that Sam Alito holds toward unions, they hope that Alito can persuade enough of his colleagues to toss the NLRA altogether, as he did with Roe v. Wade.

Their arguments are the same that came before the Court in 1937, when the most reactionary corporate overlords of that era sought to destroy the threat of some modestly countervailing worker power, which then had been rising for several years. That same dynamic clearly threatens the Musks and Bezoses today, with unions’ approval rating at its highest levels in 60 years, with young workers particularly bent on winning a say in their work lives, and with Joe Biden’s NLRB working to restore some teeth to the NLRA, which had been largely defanged by decades of decisions from pro-corporate courts.

Mr Meyerson omits an important part of the situation here.  The NLRB has largely defanged itself.

For the past few decades, appointees to the board have been largely hostile to labor and obeisant to law-breaking anti-union businessmen, because recent presidents, who appointed board members including Clinton and Obama, have largely been hostile to labor unions.

That the courts might be poised to roll back labor relations to the Lochner days is largely an artifact of  this history.