We recently ran Lynn’s excellent piece on sectoral bargaining, and in that piece, she raises some important concerns about reforming (or ending) labor preemption. I agree with almost everything Lynn says. She is right that “[c]hanging the rules on preemption might open the door to pro-worker reforms in Blue states, but it would also open the door to anti-union actions in Red states.” It’s also true, as she says, that “we need to be careful not to overestimate the likelihood and scale of success in more union-friendly states” if preemption rules were relaxed or eliminated.
In a recent law review article, John Fry and I lay out some thoughts on whether eliminating NLRA preemption would be good or bad for labor. The article, like Lynn’s post, stresses that there is much we cannot know about how things would play out in the absence of federal labor preemption. Among the things we can’t predict with certainty is “which states and cities would adopt which policies.” But, as we also write, “there are certain things we can know about a post-NLRA preemption world.”
What follows is a heavily excerpted and lightly edited synopsis of our argument, which begins with the observation that the potential impact of pro-union labor law reforms dwarfs the potential impact of anti-union reforms.
Why? There are almost 50 million workers in Democratic trifecta states not currently covered by a union contract. So, if blue states and cities enact labor policies with even relatively modest...
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