IN THREAT TO UNIONS, UTAH BANS COLLECTIVE BARGAINING FOR PUBLIC WORKERS
In an opening shot of the new round of Republican attacks on workers and their unions, the Utah governor has signed into law a measure banning the state from engaging in collective bargaining with unions representing the state’s public workers.
The law, which goes into effect July 1, is a harbinger of the broader attack on workers’ rights and union organizing in the wake of Donald Trump’s access to the presidency this year. It follows Trump’s firings at the National Labor Relations Board, an agency designed to protect workers and union rights, making it incapable of functioning.
The law was denounced by teachers unions as well as other public workers’ unions. Renee Pinkney, president of the Utah Education Association, blasted it as an intention to “silence educators and their collective voice” not only on their ability to negotiate salaries and working conditions, but also to matters affecting students and classrooms. The association called it a “blatant attack on public employees and our right to advocate for the success of our profession and students.”
Orly Lobel, the director of the Center for Employment and Labor Policy at the University of San Diego, said the Utah law was “a strong antilabor signal and is compounded with national pressures to reduce public spending on education and other public services.”
Coming along with Trump’s firing of officials at the NLRB that enforces workers rights in private industry, declared Sharon Block, the executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School, “states taking away the rights of the public sector workers to engage in collective bargaining, you get to a point where that’s an incredibly serious threat to the labor movement.”
