Here is the introduction of our speaker, Labor Law Attorney (and long-time member of the Temple) Matthew Clash-Drexler, followed by the text of his presentation:
It is fitting that the Union for Reform Judaism proclaims the Shabbat before Labor Day as a time to focus on the importance of the American Labor Movement.
From its earliest beginnings in response to the imbalance of power caused by industrialization, Jewish Americans were key to the Labor Movement’s development, beginning with Samuel Gompers. In 1864, at the age of 14, Gompers joined the local Cigar Workers Union in New York, and in 1886, 22 years later, became President of the American Federation of Labor, where he served for almost 40 years.
The great Unions of the 20th Century, such as the International Ladies Garment Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, were filled with active Jewish members, including their presidents, David Dubinsky and Sidney Hillman. Those Unions were instrumental in achieving the advances of the New Deal, which set the stage for the emergence of the greatest, most prosperous working class in the history of the world. So much so, that President Roosevelt was deciding whether to designate Harry Truman as his VP nominee, he told to aides to first “Clear it with Sidney.” Hillman.
Jewish labor leaders were instrumental in fostering the alliances between progressive unions and the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. And as more and more Jews entered the so-called “professional classes” following World War II, Jews continued to be active in the labor movement, notably as lawyers, such as Arthur J. Goldberg (who later ascended to the Supreme Court), and Joseph L. Rauh, who became as well-known as a Civil Rights lawyer as he was as a union-side labor lawyer.
So that is why we are so fortunate to have as our speaker this evening Matt Clash-Drexler, who has in the 21 Century, devoted his career to carrying on the tradition of Arthur Goldberg and Joe Rauh.
Matt, his wife Sara, and their children Noah and Elianna have been members of Temple Emanuel since 2006. He has served as a member of our Board of Trustees. And many of you know him from his important role in the Mizmor L'Shabbat Band, adding Ruach to so many of our Shabbat Services.
Tonight, we have asked him to share with us his perspectives on his many years as a union-side attorney, working for progress in our society – advancing our principles of Tikkun Olam, repairing the world.
Matt's presentation:
I am honored and thrilled to be speaking tonight at Labor on the Bimah, which brings together two important pillars of my life—Judaism and the labor movement. Thank you to Temple Emanuel and to Rabbi Adam, Cantor Lindsay, and David for continuing this tradition and centering workers and unions on this upcoming Labor Day.
In thinking about my remarks for tonight, I wanted to start with the Labor Day holiday itself.
Labor Day was declared a national holiday in 1894; at that point, 30 states had already recognized a labor day. It began as a result of a push by unions for recognition of the sacrifices and battles that workers and unions had fought and won.
In many ways, Labor Day has become a Havdalah of sorts for our country. It serves as the separation between summer and the rest of the year. It is a day of rest to be spent not in the factory or staring at a computer screen but with our families and friends at picnics and parades and protests.
Labor Day is not the first but is one of the many examples of the ways in which organized labor, through its hard, long-fought, and dangerous fight for better working conditions and decent pay has bestowed benefits on the entire country.
And that really is the message for my talk tonight – the way that the fight of organized labor is really the fight for the soul of our nation.
Let’s start with what we all have witnessed over the last few years. As we have all seen, there has been a major resurgence in interest and support for labor unions.
Unions have recently scored big victories in a variety of industries. Following a strike, auto workers obtained massive gains in wages and benefits; Screen writers went out on a 5-month strike that won them a massive new contract providing for wage increases, increases in the size of writing teams, and better residuals for streaming services; and the threat of a strike in Las Vegas by hospitality workers resulted in more than a 30% wage increase over 5 years. We have also seen a massive increase in union organizing activity from baristas at starbucks to factory workers at Amazon.
But it’s not all good news: The percentage of workers who belong to a union plunged to its lowest level on record in 2022. Despite the headline grabbing organized labor strikes and unionization votes, U.S. union membership rates fell to just 10% of the workforce.
What is clear across the country. While workers want unions, a broken legal system undermines those efforts at every turn
With unions at just 10%, I have realized that many in our community – even as progressive as we often believe we are - really have no understanding of what a labor union is.
I can’t tell you the number of times that I’m told in progressive circles that “Labor Unions aren’t needed anymore.” Let me explain just how wrong that is.
Under federal labor law, when workers form a union, what the workers are agreeing to is to deal directly with their employer not on a one-to-one or individual basis but instead exclusively between the employer and the union.
The idea that employees can only address their concerns with the employer through the union rather than directly might sound foreign, but underlying this model is the recognition that there is power in numbers and in collective action.
We have all seen and experienced this in our own lives. Here at Temple Emanuel – we have participated in marches – demanding thru a collective voice that the government respond to the will of the people. We have seen it in our personal experiences – working thru the PTA to raise awareness of concerns in the school system. And I have certainly seen it in my family – where my children have recognized that joining forces together gives them a power to get what they are after.
What is different about those examples is that there is no obligation for the government to sit down and listen; there is no obligation for the school board to engage with the PTA, and – while my kids might not know it – no obligation for parents to bargain with them over their demands.
Federal labor law creates that obligation. And creates this awesome – and I really mean that – moment when workers get to sit at the same table with their supervisors and negotiate as equals. Whether the negotiations are on behalf of hotel workers, casino dealers, teachers, public safety employees, domestic workers, and athletes, it is hard to put into words the impact and power these workers obtain from being at the same table as management.
Just like our own individual experiences about the power of collective action, the data shows that where there are unions and a unionized workforce, those employees see significant improvements with studies showing that unionized workers see a wage premium of around 10-15 percent.
And, just like with the gift of labor day, the positive effects of unions are not limited to union workers. When unions successfully negotiate, nonunion firms in competition with unionized workplaces may choose to raise wages, change hiring practices, or improve their workplace environment to attract workers.
We have seen examples of this in just the past few years
- I mentioned earlier, the UAW strike against the Big 3 automakers
- The contract that resulted from the UAW strikes obtained an immediate 11% raise and subsequent increases of nearly 30% over the remainder of the contract
The benefits though did not stop with the unionized workforce
- As a result of those gains, nonunion automakers in the US announced significant raises for their US factory workers within weeks of the resolution of the strike
Similarly unions seek improvement in working conditions not only at the bargaining table but also through legislation:
- It was not long ago that we heard the chant of fight for $15, a fight for at least a $15 minimum wage. That was a union campaign. And that campaign has in large part been won with many jurisdictions – including Maryland and DC raising their minimum wage not only to $15 but exceeding that (with Maryland at $17/hour for large employers)
- These gains impact the entire workforce
- I should note that one of the major initiatives that is being advanced by labor and pro-labor groups in connection with tonight’s labor on the bimah program is the creation of a more equitable tax code. For instance, here in Maryland, groups like Jews United for Justice are part of a broad coalition to move Maryland away from its regressive tax system to one where those with the resources bear more of the burden. You can read more about it on the Jews United for Justice website.
Given the breadth of unions’ impact, it should come as no surprise that there is a direct link between the rates of union membership and levels of income inequality. When union membership was at its peak in the 1950s with nearly a third of the workforce in unions, overall income inequality was at its lowest and was continuing to fall.
What has happened since then is a sharp decline in union membership and, with that decline, came massive income inequality. While the economy as a whole has prospered, middle- and low-income households have experienced stagnating wages, rising income volatility, and reduced intergenerational mobility.
Because unions improve the well-being of middle-class workers in ways that directly combat these negative trends, there are powerful forces who have skewed the laws to prevent unions from achieving those goals.
While you have all heard about the organizing campaigns at starbucks and Amazon, what you might not have heard are the lengths that those companies have gone to thwart the will of their workers.
Let’s look first at Starbucks. In August of 2021, workers in Buffalo launched an organizing drive, initiated by 49 brave baristas. Since then, workers at 415 other stores have unionized as well. In response, Starbucks has spent what is reported as nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to fight their own workers. They have held what are called captive audience meetings; threatened workers with the loss of benefits; interrogated workers about their support for the union; they have fired workers who are leaders in the organizing campaign; they have shuttered stores, reduced hours, made it harder for workers to get shifts. In the three years that has followed since the baristas won the right to unionize, the baristas have yet to negotiate a single collective bargaining agreement or contract at any of its stores.
This story is repeated over and over again by employer after employer. For example, Amazon workers successfully organized in April of 2022 but they still don’t have a contract. Indeed, it was just yesterday – 2 and a half years after the election – that the National Labor Relations Board rejected Amazon’s challenges to that election.
It is because of stories like these that unions and their supporters are pushing for updates in the labor laws through legislation like the Protecting the Right to Organize or PRO Act to establish mechanisms – such as binding arbitration – to ensure that employers cannot violate labor law with the goal of eroding support through fear and intimidation and instead must conclude a contract with the union. I urge all of you to learn more about the Act and work with unions for its passage.
That was the dark and gloomy part of this talk. I want to end by going back to the amazing work that unions have achieved and talk about one of the highlights of my labor career, which was my work representing the United States Women’s National Soccer Team Players Association – the union representing the incredible athletes on the team both as part of the equal pay lawsuit and at the bargaining table to address their employer’s sexist treatment of its female athletes.
This story shows again not only how workers organizing together can achieve important improvements in their own working conditions but how those gains spread out to others.
From the formation of the US National team in the 1980s, there have been two constants. First, the US Women’s National Team is simply the best, most successful team in the world having won 4 world cups and 5 olympic gold medals (including just recently in Paris). The second constant is that, notwithstanding that success, the US Soccer Federation – the employer of both the men’s and women’s national teams – had consistently provided lower pay, lesser benefits, poor playing conditions, and inferior working conditions to the women’s team. Indeed, the team’s first jerseys were hand-me-downs from the men’s team. Even though the two teams play the same game, on the same field, using the same rules, US Soccer paid the men’s team more when they won and even when they lost. The men were guaranteed to play on grass fields where the women were relegated to unsafe artificial turf fields. If you want to see the danger of those fields, google images from the World Cup played in Canada that took place exclusively on turf fields. The men’s team had more staffing and support – more doctors, more physical therapists, better equipment; the men flew on charter flights, while the women flew commercial.
During negotiations in 2016, US Soccer told the players that “market realities” meant that the players were not entitled to equal treatment. US Soccer made this statement even though there own data showed that because of the popularity of the women’s team, it was Women’s National Team that was generating more revenue for US Soccer than the men. Let me say that again – the Women were generating more revenue for the employer than the men but still the market realities meant that they did not deserve equal pay.
What followed was the courage of the women on the team to stand up to their employer and file a lawsuit to end the discriminatory treatment by US Soccer.
From 2018 until 2022, in the courtroom and at the bargaining team, I had the privilege to represent the union in this struggle. And, just as the women’s national team always does, they won and achieved a contract that truly does provide for equal pay and treatment: the teams receive the same amounts when they win, when they participate in tournaments, and as a share of the marketing revenue that US Soccer makes off of their images. They are guaranteed equal staffing, equal playing conditions, equal travel resources.
Getting to stand on the field, when the union signed the collective bargaining agreement was a career highlight but what was probably the most moving part of this story is when I met Camila Garcia later that night at the party to celebrate the signing of the CBA, which occurred a few months after the settlement of the equal pay lawsuit was announced. Camila is a former soccer player from Chile. She told me that she had been in a long fight with the legislature in Chile to create a truly professional women’s soccer league and that time and time again, their efforts for equality were denied. Camila told me that literally the day after the lawsuit settlement was announced, she received a call from the president of their legislature that the time had come to make it happen. And just a month later, the legislature passed the bill, making Camila’s work a reality.
And that really is the power of organized labor. The power that through collective action massive and enduring change can follow.
Thank you again to Cantor Lindsay and to David for sponsoring this important evening. Shabbat shalom.
Cantor Lindsay Kanter, Temple Community Social Action Council (CSAC) member David Fishback, past General Counsel of the Service Employees International Union (and now federal judge) Nicole Berner, Matt Clash-Drexler, CSAC member Candace Groudine, retired UAW economist Steve Beckman, and Rachel Ritvo
