“So Long, Dental Plan!” Unions, Labor Relations and Class Struggle…As Seen On TV

And now for something…not entirely, completely different. I’ve signed a contract with SUNY Press to deliver a collection of essays next year for publication in 2026.

Call for Proposals

“So Long, Dental Plan!” Unions, Labor Relations and Class Struggle…As Seen On TV

Edited by Shaun Richman

Lenny toasts the loss of a dental plan in union contract.

Subject Fields

Labor Studies, Film and Film History, American Studies, Humanities, Political Science, Popular Culture Studies, Social Sciences

Synopsis

Stories about unions and class struggle are notoriously under-represented in corporate media. Sometimes, though, storylines make it out of Hollywood writers’ rooms and onto your television screen. The purpose of this collection is to explore how labor unions, union organizing, and strikes and job actions have been portrayed in mainstream, scripted episodic television shows. How do such episodes reflect their times, and how do they shape them?

We have a contract with SUNY Press, and aim to publish in 2026. We’re looking for 10-15 articles, drawing on a number of academic disciplines, to focus on less obvious episodes and programs to critique and, most importantly, to have some fun with the project.

Ideas for chapters/topics (for brainstorming purposes; not required or limited to)

  • The A-Team farmworkers union episode as an anachronism in the Reagan era.
  • Contrasting presentation of top-down vs. bottom up expressions of worker power in 1990’s sci-fi (specifically Star Trek: DS9 and Babylon 5).
  • What the strike episode of Battlestar Galactica (reboot) has to say about GW Bush-era liberals and class struggle vs. class mobility. [Note: This topic has been claimed by a contributor.]
  • Succession on digital newsroom organizing; Are billionaires “serious people?”
  • What NBC’s Superstore had to say about union organizing and retail work in the Obama era.
  • Classic (i.e. 1990’s) Simpsons as an artifact of Clinton-era liberal ambivalence about unions. [Note: This topic has been claimed by a contributor.]
  • The changing attitude of 35 years of The Simpsons towards unions and what it says about public opinion.
  • Tony Soprano, union business manager.

The Deadline for proposals is January 15, 2025. Submissions for accepted proposals will be due July 1, 2025.

Visit solongdentalplan.com for more info.

The Right Believes It Has the Supreme Court Votes to Entirely Overturn Labor Law

The foundational 1935 labor law protecting workers is unconstitutional, according to major corporations and right-wing zealots who believe they have enough votes on the Supreme Court to overturn it. In the latest sign that anti-union forces will doggedly press the matter, a federal judge for the Northern District of Texas enjoined the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from processing any allegations of employer violations of workers’ rights. The National Review hailed the decision as ​A Welcome Blow to the NLRB.”

This is after Elon Musk’s SpaceX won a similar injunction against the NLRB before the Western District of Texas in July. Both cases will work their way up to the Fifth Circuit Court, which has served as an expressway to steer anti-regulatory legal appeals to the Supreme Court ever since Trump packed it with right-wing ideologues.

The arguments that the employers utilize, and even the immediate outcomes of these cases, are almost irrelevant to the ultimate goal: The right wing aims to repeal the 20th Century.

But, in trying to repeal all the rights and protections workers gained during the New Deal, including the limited protections that workers currently enjoy for organizing and engaging in collective bargaining, killing the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act) would also mean the lifting of a host of restrictions on unions’ ability to carry out solidarity activism and effective economic sanctions.

Are unions prepared for a return to ​the law of the jungle?”

Next Year’s Docket

Here’s what the bosses in these cases are arguing: The National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional because its staff — the administrative law judges (ALJ’s) who are tasked with investigating and litigating violations of the Act — were improperly appointed.

Basically, ALJ’s are hired by the National Labor Relations Board itself, a five-member body established by the act. Board members are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and serve staggered terms so that the board’s 32 partisan majority lags behind but eventually lines up with the party in power in the White House. As such, the argument goes, the ALJ’s are too removed from public accountability to be fair judges.

This was the logic that the Supreme Court applied to the Securities and Exchange Commission in last term’s SEC v Jaresky, which hobbled the power of the agency’s administrative law judges to levy fines. So, in some respects, the high court is already inviting a challenge to all similarly structured federal agencies, including the NLRB. But the Court’s first inclination may be to chip away at the labor board’s power, while the activist Right will keep trying to seize the opportunity to nullify the existence of the country’s main enforcer of workers’ rights.

University of Minnesota law professor Charlotte Garden doesn’t see any of the current Texas cases resulting in the total nullification of the NLRB. ​What’s more likely,” she says, if the Supreme Court agrees with the Jarkesy argument, ​is that the Court severs the good-cause provisions of the statute,” allowing ALJ’s and even Board members to be fired for any reason. ​That’s what passes for optimism these days,” she ruefully adds.

Severing one part of the law deemed to be unconstitutional while allowing the rest of the act to remain on the books is exactly how the Supreme Court handled last term’s challenge to the Wagner Act, Starbucks Corp. v. McKinney. In that case, the Court ​merely” diluted the NLRB’s power to seek speedy injunctions in cases of egregious union-busting during union election campaigns. The bosses won that case in an 8-to-1 vote, with Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor going along with the majority — showing that judicial hostility to unions extends to many Democratic appointees, potentially making nullification of the right to organize an easier lift than overturning the right to abortion.

Most employers raising these challenges aren’t out to change the law of the land but are ​motivated by their usual desire for delay tactics,” Garden explains. Win or lose, delays – including the litigation of violations of the act – leave up to 43% of newly certified unions still fighting for a first contract after two years, according to one recent study.

Whatever employers’ immediate goals, these tactics have knock-on effects. Starbucks, which has an evolving labor peace deal with Workers United, the union that’s organizing its employees, stresses on its website that it is not joining SpaceX in challenging the constitutionality of the NLRB. But actions that Starbucks set in motion during its union-busting campaign still threaten the heart of labor law. In a September 18 hearing before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, Republican judges peppered Starbucks attorneys with questions about Jaresky in a case in which the company is fighting NLRB-ordered financial reimbursements for retaliatory terminations against union activists.

And throughout the country, the National Right To Work Foundation is ​challenging the constitutionality of the NLRB with free legal representation” for scab Starbucks workers who were previously encouraged by their employer to fight the union.

Between all of these challenges, it’s likely that one or more circuit courts will rule the NLRB either partially or totally unconstitutional within the next six months, potentially putting an appeal on the Supreme Court docket as soon as October 2025. Regardless of the outcome, it’s clear that the forces of reaction are lining up case after case, and the arguments really don’t matter. They have their 63 majority on the Supreme Court, and they’re insisting that their bought-and-paid-for politicians in black robes vote as they are told.

Are unions preparing to lose both the protections – and the shackles – of the NLRB?

Welcome to the Jungle

Two years into Ronald Reagan’s assault on workers’ rights, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland mused that labor might be ​better off with the law of the jungle” if the NLRB was simply scrapped instead of having its mission twisted by movement conservatives.

We’re the only exception to industry craving deregulation,” he said. ​Let us go mano a mano. I think we could organize very rapidly.”

Kirkland was no radical militant, but his bluff was obliquely referring to a host of union protest tactics – from boycotts and partial or intermittent strikes to sit-down strikes and sabotage – that had been surrendered in exchange for government protections of the right to collective bargaining.

Before 1935, fights for union recognition often were pitched battles. Employers used spies, blacklists and armed Pinkertons. Unions fought back with mass picket lines and boycotts, and often destruction of property. Bosses usually prevailed because they had more guns and deeper pockets.

The National Labor Relations Act domesticated labor relations. It committed the federal government to protecting and encouraging the practice of collective bargaining, legally compelling employers to recognize and bargain ​in good faith” with representative unions. The law protects workers from being fired or blacklisted for joining, organizing or voting for a union. It also prevents bosses from forming company unions or bribing union leaders. Employer violations are known as unfair labor practices, or ULP’s. The federal agency tasked with policing the law, the NLRB, is relatively toothless but can gain enforcement powers by taking recalcitrant employers to court (which is how the SpaceX and Starbucks cases got into court and on the way to the Supreme Court in the first place).

Unions accepted this framework. Many, if not most, employers eventually accepted it as well, especially as soon as the NLRB and the courts used the framework to remove the protections of the law from some of the labor movement’s most effective tactics. Most famously, and early on, the Supreme Court removed protections for workers who engaged in sit-down strikes in 1939’s NLRB v. Fansteel. Unions complied by dropping sit-down strikes from their arsenal, largely because the remaining protections of the law were still advantageous to making huge organizing gains. Union density grew from 11.5% before the Wagner Act was passed to 34.2% by 1945.

But employers, through their favorite politicians and judges, continued to constrict the range of protected union tactics. The 1947 Taft-Hartley amendment to the Act severely restricted unions’ ability to engage in solidarity activism (dryly called ​secondary activity” in the law), such as boycotts of an anti-union company.

Imagine unionized grocery store workers refusing to uncrate boxes of Oreo cookies made at non-union factories, or Teamsters refusing to deliver Budweiser beer to non-union hotels. The power of solidarity can be enormous, which is why they made solidarity boycotts illegal (under the law they’re now trying to overturn).

But, if no union activity is protected because the NLRB ceases to exist, then all union tactics are potentially valid, or at least morally defensible, as long as unions are ready to fight back proportionally.

What Unions Can Do

I don’t think a lot of labor folks are focused on this right now,” says Stephen Lerner, a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, and an architect of Bargaining for the Common Good. ​Unions are more focused on defeating Trump in the election, and on their current organizing and bargaining fights.” Regardless of the outcome of the election, Lerner says, ​This is the culmination of a 50-year anti-union agenda and they’re going for it precisely at the moment that the labor movement is popular and on the move.”

To fight back against the right-wing assault and thrive in this era, Lerner says, ​We should be prepared to revive the tactics that built union power in the first place.” Garden agrees, saying that without the NLRB, unions could ​focus on what is strategically the best call, and not just what is protected.”

Seven years ago, I outlined a number of union activities that are, or should be, protected by the constitutional rights of free speech, due process, equal protection and even the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on ​involuntary servitude,” but were instead traded away by the regulatory approach of the NLRB. At the time, Labor’s Bill of Rights” was an argument to engage in a campaign of judicial activism to reverse bad NLRB decisions. If the Supreme Court nullifies the NLRB, it should be added to the list of actions that unions should undertake in the aftermath.

Unions are most likely to respond to a federal reversal on labor law by trying to pass copycat Wagner Acts in pro-union states like California, Minnesota and New York. That’s not a terrible strategy, but framers of the new laws should take a ​clean slate” approach to their lawmaking, taking the opportunity to strip deference to bad past precedents in case law, restoring any concerted worker protest activity to protection from employer retaliation, and streamlining state agency processes to ensure speed and prioritization of disputes in new union organizing cases.

Although the 1932 Norris-La Guardia Act, which prohibits federal judges from enjoining union picket lines, would remain on the books, making it — on paper, at least — the primary federal policy statement on private sector labor relations, we would see wide divergences between red and blue states in the treatment of union organizing.

However unions respond, Stephen Lerner cautions that time is of the essence. ​Whatever we do that’s effective, if it’s not already illegal, they’ll rush to make it illegal.” Lerner points to UAW President Sean Fain’s proposal to line up 2028 contract expirations and align union bargaining demands with community and political demands in a general strike as the kind of planning that should be taking place now.

Assuming that the Supreme Court sticks to its cowardly practice of dumping its most unpopular decisions in the last week of the term in which it hears arguments, we have 20 months until the NLRB is shut down. In some ways, that is a luxurious amount of lead time for unions, which are capable of a tremendous amount of coordination. But debate and discussion need to begin now, not one year from now when the Supreme Court majority tips its hand during oral arguments. The right wing could not be clearer about their intentions. We must be ready.

[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]

Misjudging Labor

On June 13 the Supreme Court once again sided with a multibillion-dollar corporation over its workers. The case of Starbucks Corp. v. McKinney concerns seven employees, now known as the Memphis Seven, whom Starbucks fired in February 2022 as they tried to unionize their store in Tennessee. (Because federal law prohibits employers from retaliating against organizing, the company naturally claims they were let go for violating workplace policies.) The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency tasked with guaranteeing workers’ rights to join unions and negotiate contracts, was quick to intervene. Directed by the Biden-appointed General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, NLRB staff filed for a preliminary injunction to force Starbucks to reinstate the fired activists while the case was fully litigated.

Such requests are rare. The NLRB only makes them when companies glaringly violate labor law and the agency is confident that courts will decide the case in the workers’ favor. In August 2022 a lower-court judge agreed and granted the injunction.

That six-month wait for a modicum of justice was blazing speed by the standards of United States labor law. It was too fast for the Supreme Court, which, in an 8-1 decision, reversed the injunction. The justices ruled that when courts consider the NLRB’s injunction requests, rather than using a legal standard specific to labor disputes that gives the board relative deference, they must use a more restrictive standard known as “the traditional four-factor test,” as articulated in the 2008 case Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. Among the factors considered are the “balance of equities” (meaning that the ruling is fair to both sides) and that an injunction serves the “public interest.” Both factors are a matter of opinion. Put simply, the Court is placing its own views over the expertise of the NLRB’s professional staff, in the name of a “traditional” test that’s as old as a teenager.

The NLRB still needs to decide the case, which might take a year or more. A majority of its members—the Democrats—will likely agree that Starbucks violated the plain language of the law forbidding “discrimination in regard to hire or tenure of employment or any term or condition of employment to encourage or discourage membership in any labor organization.” When the agency returns to court for an enforcement order, the judges should rule in its favor once more, though Starbucks can appeal that decision as well.

All this delay favors employers. Union representation cases are usually won or lost in the years it takes to finish adjudicating a wrongful termination charge—the fired Starbucks workers included five of the six members of the organizing committee. Many cases are settled for cash payouts and a mutual agreement to call the matter a “resignation.” Sometimes unions trade settlements to get a company to withdraw its own charges or bargain in good faith. Starbucks is apparently negotiating under just such a brokered framework with the union, Workers United.

In one sense the consequences of Starbucks v. McKinney are relatively minor. Many Republican-leaning circuit courts were already using the four-factor test. In her partial dissent, Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed that it was the appropriate rubric but argued that it should be applied in a way that recognizes the NLRB’s authority, and that courts shouldn’t fully relitigate such cases: an “injunction request simply does not present the district court with an opportunity to wade into the midst of an ongoing labor dispute (over which it otherwise has no say) and offer its own take about how the merits should be decided.”

But in another, deeper sense, the Starbucks decision is a dispiriting sign that the courts will only allow labor rights to be revised downwards. The National Labor Relations Act, which Congress passed in 1935 to protect workers’ right to form unions and bargain collectively, may no longer be adequate to that task in a court system that has been historically pro-corporate but is especially conservative today in the aftermath of the Trump administration (though even two of the liberals, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, joined the Starbucks majority). In another blow to unions, on June 28 the Court, in a more nakedly partisan 6-2 vote, eviscerated the forty-year-old Chevron deference, rejecting the subject-matter expertise and statutory interpretation not just of the NLRB but of all federal regulatory agencies. How might union supporters hoping to curb inequality wrest control back from the legal system?

*

Judicial hostility to labor is hardly a new phenomenon. As Jackson noted in her partial dissent, “To put it bluntly, courts exercising their equitable discretion amidst labor disputes today do so against the backdrop of an ignominious history of abuse.” In his classic study, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement, the historian William E. Forbath showed how, in the nineteenth century, “judge made law”—that is, legislating from the bench—forced unions to adopt an essentially conservative political strategy.

In an era-defining decision in the case Lochner v. New York (1905), the Court overturned a New York law limiting working hours in bakeries, arguing that the legislation interfered with the freedom to contract under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

As a result, in its early decades the American Federation of Labor (AFL)—the country’s largest labor organization—focused narrowly on contractual negotiations and largely gave up on state intervention as a solution to working people’s problems, except to try to prevent courts from intervening in labor disputes. When Roosevelt’s 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act tentatively endorsed collective bargaining and the right to organize, the Supreme Court overturned it using the Lochner doctrine. New York senator Robert Wagner then responded with the 1935 NLRA. That law stripped the courts of nearly all jurisdiction on cases pertaining to labor relations—essentially telling judges to keep their opinions on the subject to themselves—and created the NLRB, a parallel system of civil tribunals, which hears cases of alleged violations of workers’ rights to organize unions and go on strike. If the NLRB finds that an employer broke the law and cannot get them to comply or settle, it then and only then turns to the courts for enforcement (including injunctions). The NLRA was intended to supersede common law.

Set beside the original mandate of the NLRB, the Court’s decision in Starbucks v. McKinney couldn’t be more wrong. But the federal agency’s authority has eroded over time. In Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law, the legal scholar James B. Atleson narrated how, after the passage of the NLRA, the class biases of patrician judges led them to push back against pro-worker laws. “The belief in the inherent rights of property and the need for capital mobility, for instance, underlie certain rules,” Atleson writes, “and some decisions turn on the received superior need for continued production or the fear of employee irresponsibility.”

More recently, in his book The Supreme Court on Unions (2016), Julius B. Getman described how, if anything, the highest court’s historical antagonism to labor has only gotten worse in the last four decades. “What has remained constant over the years has been judicial arrogance,” he writes: “the willingness of the Court to establish factual premises for its decisions with little basis in reality.”

Take the right to strike, which is both specifically enumerated under the NLRA and clearly identified as one of its policy goals: “Nothing in this Act shall be construed so as either to interfere with or impede or diminish in any way the right to strike.” But this was undone just three years later in NLRB v. Mackay Radio & Telegraph Co., a 1938 case concerning the firing of striking workers at a regional telecom firm. Justice Owen Roberts upheld strikes as protected activity, but he also made a careless aside in his decision, musing that an employer would be allowed to permanently replace his striking workers if it was necessary “to protect and continue his business.”

In the following decades, employers pressed the outer edges of Mackay: Can we offer replacement workers super-seniority protection from layoffs while strikers are not similarly protected? (No.) How about give them vacation pay that strike participants are denied? (Also no.) By the 1980s, however, their efforts turned Justice Roberts’s offhand comment into stare decisis, a disastrous precedent that held that replacing strikers and only offering them their jobs back when scabs retire is “proper under Mackay.

Judges also watered down the “balance of equities” protections, which were once robust enough to protect even the worst employees from retaliatory firings for union activism. Consider Walter Weigand, the subject of the landmark 1943 case Edward G. Budd Mfg. Co. v. NLRB. “If ever a workman deserved summary discharge it was he,” concluded a bemused circuit court judge. “He was under the influence of liquor while on duty. He came to work when he chose and he left the plant and his shift as he pleased.” If I’m not misinterpreting the court’s demure transcript, Weigand also ran a prostitution operation in the employer’s back alley (on company time) and testified that he had no idea what his actual job entailed. But he was only fired after switching from the boss’ company union to the more militant CIO, and for that reason the NLRB and the courts ordered him back on the job as the law intended.

But since 1980, the NLRB has applied what’s called the “Wright Line” standard for judging “mixed motive” terminations of union activists. It requires that a union prove that a worker was fired while engaged in protected union activity, that the employer knew the worker was a union activist, and that the employer held animus against the union. These demands in turn require more time-consuming litigation, even when an employer’s actions—like Starbucks firing people for talking to reporters about their union activism—wouldn’t pass a common-sense smell test. It’s not surprising, then, that the Wright Line standard has become a go-to union-busting weapon for employers. These days union supporters are fired in the course of nearly one in three certification votes brought before the NLRB.

*

An implicit assumption of the 1935 NLRA was that employers would remain neutral about organizing campaigns, and recognize a union if a clear majority of workers wanted one. But soon the Supreme Court had granted employers a First Amendment right to campaign against unionization and force employees to attend mandatory captive audience presentations. In the 1950s the NLRB fought for unions’ right to respond to these presentations, or at least mandate some access to the workplace, but since 1956 the Supreme Court has consistently supported employer’s property interests over unions’ access and speech.

What do employers say in captive audience meetings? In 1969 Chief Justice Earl Warren allowed them to threaten that a successful union drive would lead to workplace closures or other negative effects, as long as these threats were presented as predictions “carefully phrased on the basis of objective fact to convey an employer’s belief.” In a 2009 report, the labor scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner found that between 1999 and 2003, employers threatened plant closure in 57 percent of NLRB elections, and in 15 percent of the cases they actually followed through.

In all, it took the courts roughly thirty years to take workers out of a legal environment where union organizing was a fully enforceable right—with meaningful job protections and enforcement against threats, reprisals and the refusal to negotiate—to one where certification elections are conducted under manifestly crooked rules.

While corporations aggressively worked the courts, the AFL-CIO and its think-tanks pressed for legislative reform whenever the Democrats briefly controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. But the Democrats only pursued narrow, technical fixes: a push to ban permanent replacements under Clinton; simple proof of majority, or “card check,” certification under Obama. Even these were vigorously resisted by the business lobby and eventually killed by filibusters. Biden’s is the first Democratic administration to meaningfully use the rules in place, and the NLRB’s rule-making authority, to encourage the practice of collective bargaining.

“Of all of the members of Biden’s administration,” the Nation has gushed, it’s Abruzzo “who has brought about the most significant changes for American workers.” Under Abruzzo the NLRB has sped up the timeline for conducting union representation elections. It has also expanded the instances in which employers must accept card check certification, has tried to limit the ability of employers to conduct mandatory captive audience meetings, and stretched for “make whole” financial penalties against employers who violate their workers’ rights. Even its decision to request an injunction in the Starbucks case was part of Abruzzo’s systemwide attempt to modernize operations. (The NLRB has not yet, I’ll note in case Abruzzo is reading, restored the right to strike by revisiting the Mackay standard and forcing employers to prove that they would go out of business if not allowed to hire permanent replacements.)

And yet any of these actions can be overturned if the Supreme Court finds they violate a precedent or employers’ First or Fourteenth Amendment rights. All of them, ultimately, cry out for new lawmaking. Restoring the promise of US labor law requires amending the NLRA to override unfair court precedent and reassert the NLRB’s supremacy over judges on routine enforcement of labor violations.

*

It is axiomatic on the left that lawmakers do not pass such prolabor legislation until a strike wave forces them to. Yet the historical record suggests otherwise. The “right” to organize was shoehorned into the National Industrial Recovery Act—the objectively pro-business “First New Deal” legislation that the Supreme Court overturned—to gain the AFL’s support for a controversial bill. It wasn’t won through workplace action, and lacking enforcement powers, it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. But by offering just enough to raise workers’ expectations—and more to dash their hopes—it inadvertently birthed the very militancy needed to enshrine more meaningful reform.

This argument about the effect of the NIRA is still controversial. The labor activist and scholar Eric Blanc recently cut through decades of mythmaking and crunched the numbers. He found a 129 percent increase in union membership and a 260 percent increase in workers going on strike in the months that followed the act’s enactment. In my forthcoming book, We Always Had a Union: New York’s Hotel Workers Unions, 1912-1953, I show that the National Recovery Administration’s wage and hours code, in addition to failing to compel union recognition and reinstate fired union activists, directly caused a citywide hotel strike that the agency was attempting to mediate in January 1934. Though the unions didn’t “win” that strike, shaken hotel bosses negotiated a neutrality agreement so that the industry wouldn’t be hit with another work stoppage during the 1939 World’s Fair. The agreement resulted in the New York Hotel Trades Council, the union that remains a powerhouse in the city and state.

One lesson from this history is that unions need to be quicker to take advantage of favorable organizing environments. Today there is both a noticeable uptick of worker-led organizing (as evidenced by independent union wins at Amazon and Trader Joe’s, and wildcat job actions during the pandemic) and a pro-worker NLRB. And yet most unions are building up their savings accounts instead of spending down on new campaigns. Unions have collectively reduced their staff and organizers by an estimated 19 percent between 2010 and 2020, which translates to 23,440 fewer people that could potentially be put in the field. With the benefit of new leadership, the Teamsters and UAW are notable exceptions, joining a small handful of organizing champions like SEIU and UNITE HERE in investing significant resources on campaigns aimed at growing the labor movement, at huge employers like VolkswagenMarriott hotels, and FedEx.

The other lesson is that opportunities for legal reform come rarely, briefly, and usually by surprise. There is no shortage of reform proposals like the PRO Act and the Clean Slate program. But too little attention is paid to counteracting judicial bias. If the Roberts Court’s judicial power grab, already a constitutional crisis, is to be met with more political brinkmanship like court-packing and Congressional overrides of politically motivated decisions, then why not center that fight on issues where judges’ historic tendency to favor corporations over workers cast them as perfect villains? Union supporters should be demanding that judges stop imposing their values and assumptions on accredited bodies like the NLRB. As the Transport Workers Union president Michael J. Quill once said of the man who sentenced him to jail for the 1966 New York City transit strike, “The judge can drop dead in his black robes.”

[This article originally appeared at New York Review of Books.]