From Matt Bruenig: The ACLU Is Trying to Destroy the Biden NLRB
Earlier this week, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a two-page decision denying the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) request to appeal an administrative law judge’s (ALJ) decision to not defer a dispute with one of its former employees to arbitration. Like most progressive organizations, the ACLU has historically supported access to the courts and opposed forcing workers and consumers into arbitration. Yet this case reveals that the ACLU has arbitration agreements with its employees and is doggedly trying to use those agreements to keep them from accessing the NLRB.
Digging into the case reveals something even more surprising than run-of-the-mill hypocrisy from a progressive employer. In this proceeding, the ACLU is not merely attempting to have the case deferred to arbitration under existing Board law. It is also trying to expand Board law to force workers into arbitration in circumstances where they currently have a right to have their disputes heard by the NLRB.
Ahem. I feel like I always need to start the kind of comment I am about to make with the disclaimer that no one should feel particularly bad for Katherine Oh being pushed into an arbitration agreement. She is an attorney, and in the kind of senior-level sophisticated role where there may in fact be a real quid pro quo for signing them. I think the labor side can go too far in trying to render any and all restrictions of any kind unenforceable, particularly when they apply to these types of people. We aren’t talking about someone making sandwiches here, not by a long shot.
Now that I have that out of the way, all I can say is that anyone with half a brain could see this is the exact direction DEI and attempts to interpret civil rights law through through it would go. It is a power play, representative of the kind of influence jockeying zero accountability, hot house academic environments that birthed it. After all, why have to ever prove anything substantive on the merits, when instead you can just declare someone racist? And then declare that even asking the question of whether that is true, or a sensible way if looking at things, is also racist? Maybe that can fly under the radar in the world of the simple minds that populate the NPO industrial complex and small liberal arts colleges, but out in the real world, it is a weapon that will always be wielded by the most powerful, against regular people just trying to get by.
The good news is that the ACLU taking this kind of crap before an administrative agency, and presumably at some point into the courts, is that it provides an opportunity for it to be killed off as a legitimate way to interpret the law. Hopefully they rise to the occasion.Report
The list of offenses is one that got me to say “wait, what?”
“The beatings will continue until morale improves” is a joke that we were making back in the 90’s. Voltaire made the joke “Il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres”.
I’m sure that there’s a similar joke written in the margins of an illuminated text written during the 2nd Crusade.Report
Hey man it’s a systemically racist society where the racism is baked in to anything you think, say, or do. It’s racist to think that and not to think that all at the same time.Report
Yes on all counts. That it’s getting revealed and reviled so early on is an indicator of how weak DEI/Identarianism fundamentally is. There just isn’t a constituency for it- it’s a debate tactic for trying to snag a scarce tenure track job in the decaying hothouses of academia. It’s not good for a ton more than that.Report
As Erik Loomis would note: management is always going to management.Report