For many years (and sometimes now), many people treated my optimism about the long-term strength of the labor movement as somewhat delusional, but having been in and around it now for twenty years -- okay, that number makes me feel old -- what's been clear to me is that watching the overall membership numbers year to year was not representative of the long-term planning that would payoff only over time.

It helped that I spent the 1990s in California where some of that innovation was most dramatic in the labor movement-- and the results have been a massive revival of union strength in that state. 200,000 union members were added in California alone last year. And this is based on a labor vision that had ten-year horizons for organizing, a level of long-term investment that few American institutions have been willing to make. One piece of evidence-- a coming showdown in California between the health care unions and the industry that was literally ten years in the making:

For the first time, nearly 200 contracts are set to expire in the same year, giving [United Healthcare Workers] extraordinary strength at the bargaining table...The plans for this campaign began 10 years ago, with union leaders lining up contract dates to maximize their power as healthcare workers.

Read more »

This is adapted from a piece at Progressive States today--

In one more example of lax federal agencies being empowered to block tougher state protection of consumers, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that states are barred from protecting consumers from faulty medical devices, such as breast implants, if the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has already approved those devices.

These means that a federal agency like the FDA, politicized by a right-wing President and dominated by industry-funded advisors, can unilaterally override laws in all fifty states that hold companies liable for harm to consumers.  This, despite the fact that, as the New York Times described:

The Institute of Medicine, the Government Accountability Office and the FDA's own science board have all issued reports concluding that poor management and scientific inadequacies have made the agency incapable of protecting the country against unsafe drugs, medical devices and food.

Read more »