Summary: Not satisfied with amplifying election disinformation, monopolizing the online shopping industry, and widespread union-busting, billionaires are uniting to destroy the National Labor Relations Board. Jeff Bezos has joined Trader Joe’s CEO Bryan Palbaum and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in attacking a New Deal-era institution meant to protect workers and our democratic right to organize in the workplace.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Jeff Bezos, chairman of Amazon, and Bryan Palbaum, CEO of Trader Joe’s all have been trying to stop workers from unionizing at their companies. Now Musk, Bezos, and Palbaum have something else in common. Their companies are arguing that the agency that enforces our nation’s labor laws can’t protect workers’ rights to organize because it is unconstitutional.
That agency – the National Labor Relations Board – has filed numerous charges against Musk’s, Bezos’, and Palbaum’s companies for violating workers’ rights to organize. Rather than allow their employees to freely organize for better working conditions and wages, they have chosen to threaten these democratic values and practices.
Billionaires attacking political and economic democracy has ramped up over the years. Since the mid-2010s, billionaires have spent hundreds of millions of dollars ensuring right-wing judges are appointed to the Supreme Court and lower federal courts. These same judges took a sledgehammer to democracy, declaring that corporations are people, giving billionaire CEOs a First Amendment right to buy U.S. elections. They also cut the heart out of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, allowing states to pass laws squarely aimed at disenfranchising Black and brown voters. And add insult to injury, they decided that gerrymandering – drawing district lines that allow the right-wing to win a majority in Congress even when people vote against them – was just fine.
Despite their efforts to rig democratic systems from every angle, CEOs haven’t been able to fully realize political domination. In fact, a majority of Americans have repeatedly rejected the unbridled capitalism they are trying to achieve. Even now, they don’t have majority support for such aims, no matter how hard they try to buy votes.
Despite their efforts to rig democratic systems from every angle, CEOs haven’t been able to fully realize political domination. In fact, a majority of Americans have repeatedly rejected the unbridled capitalism they are trying to achieve. Even now, they don’t have majority support for such aims, no matter how hard they try to buy votes.
CEOs direct attempts to diminish political democracy have been simultaneously executed with their attacks on economic democracy. The same allies on the Supreme Court that have been dismantling political democracy have been striking blows against people trying to practice democracy at work, including taking a union away from home healthcare workers, attempting to weaken public sector unions, and letting employers sue striking workers for hurting their profits.
The latest attack is a more frontal assault. The agency that enforces the law protecting workers when they organize has become much more active during the Biden administration, holding more CEOs and big corporations accountable. At the same time, union favorability is at a high point.
Under normal circumstances, we could laugh off such an attempt. Courts have long ruled that such independent agencies are perfectly legal and have decided thousands of appeals of NLRB decisions without considering that the agency itself is not constitutional. However, in the current world in which CEOs routinely bribe right-wing Supreme Court justices and those justices strike down rights that everyone has considered settled for generations, there is every reason to take their attack seriously.
Watch this space as we monitor these outlandish attacks on the NLRB and stay tuned as we cover how working people are fighting back through policy.
