In Hoffman Plastic Compounds, O'Connor joined her four conservative collegues in giving employers a green light to fire undocumented immigrants at will during union organizing drives, declaring that employers could not be fined for such union-busting -- a decision that ironically made undocumented workers all the more attractive to employers since they had been essentially stripped of all legal rights under labor law.

In Kentucky River, nurses and other professionals with minor supervisory responsibilities were declared outside the protections of US labor law-- again, a whole class of workers could now be fired at will for pro-union activity by decision of O'Connor and her conservative brethren.

And when the liberal justices pulled Justice Kennedy over to their side in Holly Farms in defense of the labor rights of "chicken catchers" and forklift operators in Tyson's agribusiness operations, it was Justice O'Connor in dissent who again argued that those workers should be denied all union rights, arguing the racist exclusion of farm laborers from labor law protection -- enacted to pacify Jim Crow Senators in the 1930s -- should be extended to factory farming as well.

And in another crucial anti-labor decision, O'Connor again joined her four conservative collegues in the Lechmere decision, which barred union organizers from talking to workers about their union rights on employer property, even in publicly accessible parking lots where even the Reagan NLRB had said union organizers had the right to be. 

In Eastern Enterprises, she wrote the decision that relieved coal companies of liability for the lifetime health care costs of retired miners which had been promised them during their work years and which Congress had guaranteed in the Coal Act of 1992, which assessed the costs against the remaining coal companies in the industry.  Declaring the law a violation of the takings clause, O'Connor argued the property rights of the mine companies were more sacred than the right of the miners to receive the health care promised them during their working lives.

For individual workers, O'Connor had scarcely more sympathy for their rights.  While she defected from her collegues in preserving Family and Medical Leave rights for state employees -- a function of her well-known sympathy for better-off women who can afford to take unpaid leave -- in Alden v. Maine, O'Connor joined the majority which in the name of "federalism" denied poor state employees any right to sue for protection under the federal minimum wage law.

And in Circuit City, O'Connor joined the conservative majority in stripping workers of their right to a trial by jury and allowed employers to force employees into mandatory arbitration -- essentially employer-dominated courts -- in any legal complaint against a company.

So this is the legacy of Justice O'Connor-- year after year providing the fifth vote to gut labor rights and worsen the lives of working people in America.   This is not a legacy of moderation but of rightwing anti-worker prejudice. 

O'Connor's occasional flips on various social issues does not mitigate that history and it is an outrage that any Democratic leaders are praising her legacy.  Yes, I understand the strategy in that embrace of O'Connor, but it is an unprincipled position that implicitly endorses her thorough anti-labor ideology as acceptable.