The Fragmentation of Labor Law

Today’s Wall Street Journal editorial laments Seattle’s effort to ignore the National Labor Relations Act by creating a collective bargaining law for Uber drivers. Yes, WSJ is right; this is a bad idea. The national labor law excludes “independent contractors.” Seattle would say, Uber drivers are not really independent contractors. ProfLERoy has agreed with Seattle’s view.

Seattle’s mistake is to localize a law that Congress clearly intended to be national in scope.

Bruce Rauner makes the same conceptual mistake in Illinois. His “turnaround” agenda includes several ideas that ignore the national labor law. One allows local laws to supesede the NLRA. For example, he would a right-to-work law that would allow a city or county to ignore the federal law that allows unions to negotiate mandatory dues clauses.

If Seattle and Illinois can localize labor law, so can everyone else—and then, we’ll return to chaos and street violence of the early 1900s (pictured above in a context that parallels labor demonstrations 80 years ago). The NLRA-- for all its faults-- is stable, predictable, and uniform in character, whether you are in DuPage County in Illinois or Seattle.