Sharon Block: “I hope that corporate leaders are rethinking the reflex to try to minimize labor costs at the expense of their relationship with their workforce. This summer’s strikes are demonstrating that workers are willing and able to say “enough.” Companies can avoid a lot of public ill will and strife if they think about whether their workers are getting a fair share of the companies’ success before increasing CEO pay or embarking on yet another round of stock buybacks.”

“This is certainly the biggest moment for labor, and the most active period that I’ve seen in my career,” says Sharon Block, executive director at Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy. “There was a shift among US workers about what’s acceptable in terms of conditions to accept, about their own worth in the workplace, and about standing up for themselves when those two things don’t match up,” says Block.

SEP 4, 2023

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Sharon Block, professor of practice and the executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School, said: “It addresses … the two biggest problems with union elections right now … that they take too long and that employers actually have incentive to violate the law during the campaign.”

Block added: “This is an important decision in trying to make what I would believe is sort of a flawed law work as well as possible. Addressing twin problems of the way and the incentive to unlawfully union-bust is incredibly meaningful. I think unions will be able to devote more resources to getting to elections quickly.”

Sharon Block, a labor law professor at Harvard Law School, who led the Obama administration’s efforts to increase overtime benefits, said in a statement that the Biden administration’s proposed rule demonstrates “the fact that elections have consequences.”

“The consequence of the Trump administration was that millions of workers lost the right to a fair wage and the consequence of the Biden administration is that millions of workers will regain that right,” Block said.

“If you look at the reasons why domestic workers and agricultural workers were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, it is absolutely shameful that those exclusions still exist,” said Sharon Block, a professor and the executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. “They were based on racist reasons — not even subtly, almost explicitly.”

We have a very different economy, a different mix of manufacturing and service, urban and rural — almost every way you’d imagine — since the 1930s,” Block said. “They had big factories where everybody passed through the same door, spent eight hours together. They could talk; they could organize themselves. Now you have workers who never see their co-workers. It’s just completely different, and we’ve made no forward progress in thinking about ways to better empower workers since then.”