White Collar Workers Push To Unionize

Workers got a couple of pieces of good news today, courtesy of the Obama administration and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). I've been a fan of Tom Perez over at the Labor Department, even pushing him for Hillary's VP choice. And he has come through for workers once again with a new regulation that prohibits firms who have had recent violations of labor law from receiving federal contracts. Specifically, the rule states that a company would be forced to disclose if it had violated workplace safety, workplace discrimination, labor organizing rights, or minimum wage and overtime laws in the prior three years. The disclosure would be required if there was official finding by a federal agency, a judgment from a court or an arbitration award and only the most egregious violations would result in a firm being ineligible for the contract.

And on Tuesday, the NLRB ruled that grad students who work as research and teaching assistants at private universities have the right to unionize. This ruling overturned a 2004 ruling by the NLRB that deemed the grad students as primarily having an educational as opposed to an economic relationship with their universities and therefore had no federal right to unionize. For years, teaching and research assistants have felt that these private universities were never properly compensating them for the increasing time and responsibilities.

In a strange twist, white collar workers are showing more and more interest in unionizing to combat the abusive corporate environments they work in even as blue collar union jobs continue to decline. Just today, the staff at Law360 voted to unionize, joining digital media workers at Salon, Vice, ThinkProgress, The Guardian, Huffington Post, and the now-defunct Gawker and Al Jazeera America. For many of these workers including the grad students, the issue is not necessarily about money but rather a recognition that, without a union, all the power resides with the company. Hopefully, this trend will continue and expand into other white collar industries as a response to corporate abuse and the outrageous compensation differences between top executives and the people who actually do all the work.