LATEST TOOLKIT UPDATES (11/05/2024)
- Section V: Benefits Administration
NEW RESOURCE: Community Navigators Can Increase Access to Unemployment Benefits and New Jobs While Building Worker Power| Michele Evermore, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, and David Madland | Center for American Progress
Our system of federal labor laws has long failed to adequately protect workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively.
Moreover, decades of court decisions have further compounded this issue with preemption doctrines that inhibit states from legislating on labor issues to address deficiencies in federal law. But despite the limitations that federal preemption poses, creative policy approaches continue to emerge at the sub-federal level.
In our 2020 “Clean Slate for Worker Power” report, we proposed setting federal labor law as a floor and enabling policy experimentation at the state and local levels, provided that such experimentation strengthens labor standards and the right to engage in collective activity. Achieving this goal would take federal legislation, which appears unlikely in the near term.1 Nevertheless, even within the constraints of existing preemption doctrine, states and localities have been testing the bounds, passing laws, and trying new models that build worker power.
As a resource designed for policymakers, organizers, strategists, researchers, communicators, and lawyers, this toolkit surveys the landscape of worker power-building policies that have been — or might be — attempted at the state and local levels. In doing so, CLJE:Lab aims to chart possible paths forward for new policy avenues that expand organizing and foster empowerment for workers.
Using this Toolkit
Sections
This toolkit contains 11 sections featuring policies that have or may be enacted at the state and local levels to build worker power.
Structure
Each section provides background information, objectives for action, analyses of preemption risk, and options for state or local action.
Resources & Reading
Check out relevant policy trackers, publications, media, footnotes, and additional resources throughout the toolkit.
This resource is and will remain a work in progress. We plan to continue to refine and update it as often as needed, and we encourage you to check back frequently for new additions and to share your suggestions.
We’d love to hear your questions, comments, and suggestions – please reach out to CLJE:Lab Project Manager Yoorie Chang at ychang@law.harvard.edu.
Contents
About CLJE:Lab
CLJE:Lab is the policy and legal innovation lab at Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy (CLJE). Here, our ideas for building worker power and strengthening democracy hit the ground. Our mission is to foster creativity and develop innovative approaches to empowering working people. Despite political gridlock and the challenges to passing comprehensive labor law reform, we believe there is tremendous potential for creativity and experimentation at the local, state, and federal levels to move the needle toward greater economic and political equality.
- See Clean Slate for Worker Power, Overcoming Federal Preemption: How to Spur Innovation at the State and Local Level, Lab. & Worklife Program, Harv. L. Sch. (May 2021), ↩︎
