Make Black Lung Great Again.
Lisa Needham at Public Notice:
Trump surrogates have been fanning out to talk about how great it will be when factories return to the United States, which will happen magically and friction-free, all thanks to crushing tariffs. Perhaps the most preposterous example of this talking point (so far) was served up last weekend by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who went on Face the Nation and hyped that “the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones — that kind of thing is going to come to America.” But even if the Trumpian dream of returning assembly lines and the like to America was easily attainable — which it isn’t — those jobs would look nothing like the ones from the heyday of American manufacturing. Instead, thanks to the same administration currently banging on about their return, those jobs would be unsafe and unsustainable. First, the idea that companies can plop a factory any old place in America and just start cranking out cars or jeans or widgets or whatever is untethered from reality. Large-scale factory building takes years and costs a ton. It also takes infrastructure, like roads and access to shipping routes. To see what actually happens when Republicans are in charge of getting domestic manufacturing up and running, cast your eyes back to the Foxconn debacle. Wisconsin’s governor at the time, Scott Walker, promised Foxconn the moon to move to the Village of Mount Pleasant. In 2018, Trump showed up and used a stupid golden shovel to move a couple bits of dirt. But luring Foxconn with promised treats like $4 billion in tax breaks and water from Lake Michigan didn’t result in the promised 13,000 manufacturing jobs. Last time anyone checked, all that had been built was a weird 100-foot sphere that is available for event rental. The losers here were state and local governments, which spent half a billion dollars getting the Foxconn site ready.
There’s also the fact that Trump promised this golden age of manufacturing, mining, and good stateside jobs during his first term. In reality, he sat on his hands while companies offshored and the manufacturing sector shrunk. He was also going to bring back coal, which also didn’t turn out so great, with US coal production in 2019 coming in at its lowest level since 1978. (Trump held a big event at the White House yesterday touting once again to bring back coal, which shows that orange dogs can’t learn new tricks.) [...] Conservatives have made it a decades-long project to undo worker protections. Indeed, that project well predates the always-fetishized 1950s. They’ve been furious since what is known as the Lochner era ended back in 1937, and they’ve been trying to drag us back to a deregulated nightmare ever since. The second Trump administration might just be their chance to pull it off. For a stretch of about forty years, from 1897 to 1937, the United States Supreme Court made the world a veritable paradise not for workers, but for employers. You’ll note that Trump routinely invokes 1870 to 1913 — the Gilded Age — as a time of unmatched American prosperity. That was indeed true for rich people. The Rockefellers of the world got exceedingly wealthy, in no small part because politicians who were in thrall to them helped by doing things like crushing labor movements and allowing corruption to run rampant. Since conservatives love to dress up their brutality and corruption in high-minded ways, they frame the Lochner era as one where economic liberty was greatest, as was the “liberty to contract.” That sure sounds nice. Workers should definitely have the liberty to contract. Except in this instance, it actually meant “liberty for your employer to exploit you.”
The Lochner case involved a New York regulation that prevented bakery workers from working more than 60 hours per week or 10 hours per day. The idea was to provide some protection against grueling and largely unregulated working conditions. Lochner, the bakery owner, sued, saying that the regulation interfered with his liberty to contract with employees. In striking down the regulation, the Supreme Court explained they were really doing it for the workers: “The employee may desire to earn the extra money which would arise from his working more than the prescribed time, but this statute forbids the employer from permitting the employee to earn it. The statute necessarily interferes with the right of contract between the employer and employees.”
While that statement may indeed be true factually, it’s laughable legally. It’s based on the notion that employers and workers have the same bargaining power, and hey, if those workers want to work over 60 grueling hours in a bakery or in dangerous conditions, who are we to say no? But workers don’t have the same power as employers, and everyone knows it. What the Lochner holding really meant was that states couldn’t pass laws to protect workers, wrapped in the fiction that the workers themselves wanted that and would somehow flourish in unregulated industrial jobs. These are the same arguments conservatives still trot out today about the so-called “right to work.” Those laws are spun as pro-worker, freeing them from the tyranny of unions and allowing them the joy of contracting directly with their employer. But what right to work laws are really meant to do is break unions. They prohibit unions from requiring non-members to pay a fair share fee that covers the cost of collective bargaining. Those fees are assessed because non-members benefit from that bargaining, getting the same contract and protections as union members. (The greater dues charged to union members also cover things like political activism.) But if non-members don’t have to pay anything to get the benefit of collective bargaining, why stay in the union at all?
[...] Though the Lochner case gave the era its name, it was just one of many worker protections struck down by the Supreme Court in the early 1900s. The Court also struck down minimum wage laws, child labor laws, and mining regulations. It wasn’t until 1937, when the Court finally upheld a New Deal-era minimum wage law, that the fiction of worker freedom was finally broken. After that, Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed things like the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set wage and hour restrictions, and the very beginnings of workplace safety regulations, though it took until 1970 to pass the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
The 2nd term of the Orange Cheeto, much like the first one, has been about returning to a dark era for workers’ rights: the Lochner era.
