A federal Democratic trifecta, with a Sineanchin-less Senate majority, will be prepared to end the Jim Crow filibuster and pass the structural change needed to end our political crisis, and expand the safety net that Frances Perkins (witness of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and eventual US Secretary of Labor) started. We have under 70 days to find every vote we can to enact our agenda:
- Checking the corruption of the Supreme Court, addressing their lawless decisions in recent decisions like Dobbs, Shelby County, Rucho, Loper Bright Enterprises, and Trump v. United States.
- Climate action
- Federal protections for reproductive rights and the Equality Act
- A global deal to tax billionaires
- Gun control
- DC statehood
- Federal voting rights, clean-elections laws, an end to partisan gerrymandering
- The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which restores the right of workers to form a union and bargain together for workplace changes
- Family policy that will cut child poverty with a refundable expanded child tax credit of up to $3,600 (with $6,000 for newborns), paid leave
- Millions of new units of affordable housing, including $40 billion to jumpstart community land trusts and revolving loan programs for social housing
- Attacks on corporate price-gouging
Keep Workers Safe
The conditions of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory are not a relic of the past. A strikingly similar incident devastated Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2012. For too long, western corporations have abused trade law and subcontractors to exploit workers while avoiding accountability.
The worker-centered trade policy being implemented by the Biden-Harris Administration and US Trade Representative Katherine Tai is already making a difference for workers around the world. One highlight is the effective implementation of the rapid response mechanism, which Democrats (led by then-House staffer Katherine Tai) secured in the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, helping tens of thousands of workers access their right to collective bargaining via an independent trade union. Consumers too are put ahead of corporations. The Biden-Harris Administration reversed Trump’s opposition to a WTO intellectual property waiver to vaccinate the world, and Big Tech is furious that they can no longer abuse trade law to shield themselves from legal liability.
With the Republican Party curbing heat protection for workers and aggressively pushing dangerous night-shift work for children, we need to keep the Biden-Harris progressive labor appointees in place to continue plugging some holes in the New Deal (through, e.g., the Farmworker Protection Rule), making it significantly easier to form a union, fighting dangerous conditions, and we also need a Democratic trifecta to refund and retool the regulatory state and support unionization.
Secretary Deb Haaland, on her way to mark a new milestone for Tribal and federal co-stewardship of the Katahdin Woods National Monument (see June’s blog), visited the Frances Perkins Homestead, ahead of a likely designation of a new national monument. Unlike Maine’s previous governor, the Democratic trifecta in Maine is committed to honoring the legacy of Frances Perkins, both in words and deeds. (Though, Mainers, always hold ‘em accountable.)
Perkins witnessed the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The factory doors had been locked to prevent garment workers from taking breaks and trapped the workers–mostly immigrant women and girls–inside, killing 146. This tragedy drove her to pursue a career advocating for workers: She later called the fire “the day the New Deal was born.”
Before becoming the US Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins was appointed Industrial Commissioner of the State of New York by Governor Franklin Roosevelt, capping off two decades of advocacy and service in the state government. She successfully reduced the work week for women to 48 hours (after playing a key role in securing the 54-hour week for women in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire) and, in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, outlined the New Deal’s labor protections. This experience in the state helped her succeed alongside the labor movement in winning the weekend, the federal minimum wage, child-labor laws, Social Security, and unemployment insurance.
Our agenda of protecting all of us has long and deep roots, and we won’t go back.