Saint Thomas Aquinas preached the need for living wages and fair treatment of workers. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights agrees, "Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work."
Our City's namesake, Saint Augustine, wrote that "an unjust law is no law at all."
The first labor law was an "unjust law," enacted in 1351, the English Statute of Laborers. In the midst of a global Black Plague pandemic and labor shortage, under King Edward III, it prohibited workers from seeking higher wages, or moving elsewhere in search of better pay and better jobs.
In the current global COVID-19 pandemic, we are all in this together. But ill-advised governors banning mask mandates makes schools, government buildings and business workplaces unsafe. Florida Governor Ronald Dion DeSantis issued fatwas that violate our right to "home rule" and wrongfully penalize school districts financially for protecting our school employees and students and their families.
Three months early, DeSantis ended $300/week pandemic unemployment compensation, treating workers cruelly as objects, responding to a "labor shortage," which is really a refusal by greedy corporations to pay fair wages while wealth gets concentrated in fewer hands.
Governor DeSantis's party has a wretched record on violating worker rights, since long before President William Howard Taft (who started the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as an anti-labor organization).
The New Deal brought reforms.
But during the "reign of error" of Presidents Reagan and Bush, wrorker rights suffered horribly. Environmental and nuclear whistleblower cases and pattern and practice race and sex discrimination cases piled up like cordwood, awaiting final decisions by the Secretary of Labor -- the Inspector General found there were orders from successive Secretaries of Labor not to present proposed final decisions.
Florida has no State Department of Labor -- Governor Jeb Bush abolished it in 2000, and at the same time our legislature abolished Florida's state Occupational Safety and Health agency, making Florida one of some two dozen states without any occupational safety laws protecting state, county, city and other government workers. That's wrong.
Florida is among the states not yet ratifying the 1924 child labor constitutional amendment, which needs only ten (10) more states to reach 38 required. It was somehow thought "moot" after Congress adopted child labor laws in 1937. But who knows how courts might rule without the amendment? Let's support ratification. Madison's 1789 Congressional pay amendment was finally enacted in 1992.
Let's observe "Worker Memorial Day," honoring millions of workers who suffer preventable deaths and injuries worldwide. A proclamation for it was rejected by St. Johns County Commission Chairman, Jeremiah Ray Blocker, who also blocked Equal Pay, School Choice and LGBTQ+ Pride Month proclamations (the Pride case is being litigated).
Do officeholders appreciate that unions changed the world for the better, as the Polish Solidarity labor union did, helping end totalitarian Communism?
We urgently need federal and state labor law reform.
We must remedy wage theft.
We must prohibit today's equivalents of "Yellow Dog" contracts. We must halt unfair abuse of "covenants not to compete," which restrict too many workers' rights to work elsewhere, just like the 1351 Statute of Laborers.
We must eliminate mandatory cramdown arbitration agreements..
We must preserve and protect Seventh Amendment right s to civil jury trial, which Justice William Rehnquist called "a bulwark against oppression."
As Albert Camus said, "If you do not help us do this, then who else in the world will help us do this?" It is up to us.
------
Ed Slavin, B.S. Foreign Service, Georgetown University, J.D. Memphis State University (now U of M), a St. Augustine resident since 1999, has filed to run for District 17 Florida State Representative as a Democrat. Adapted from a talk given at the St. Augustine Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, September 5, 2021
No comments:
Post a Comment