The US Supreme Court. (Photo: Davis Staedtler / Flickr)

LAUREN JACOBS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Corporations and the rich have been attacking the rights of working people for decades, and today's Supreme Court decision is one of the heaviest blows in that attack to date. Today, the Court overturned more than four decades of precedent by making fair share fees for public-sector workers unconstitutional, and created new obstacles to working people trying to build full and healthy lives.

The Janus v. AFSCME decision is the culmination of hundreds of millions of dollars spent by corporate billionaires to take away working people's freedom to stand together in a union. The Court's siding with Janus follows another disastrous decision for working people in the case of Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, which ruled that employers can take away workers' right to engage in collective action by having workers sign arbitration agreements. This means that if an employer steals our wages or subjects us to sexual harassment or discrimination and we want to fight back, we can be forced into a rigged system that our employer controls.

Just like the Harris v. Quinn decision that attacked home care unions, a movement built by women -- specifically Black women workers -- this Supreme Court ruling is also an attack on Black workers, and Black women in particular. Black women make up nearly 18 percent of public-sector workers. Good union jobs in the public sector have been a critical source of decent jobs for women and people of color and a bulwark against the galling disparities we experience in the private sector.

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These legal assaults are part of an agenda which serves those who run Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Their blueprint has harmed workers, from professors to hotel housekeepers, and it has built an economy filled with disparity, precarity and austerity.

Disparity is the massive gap in income, wealth and power between the well-off and the rest of us. Wealth gaps between upper-income families and lower- and middle-income families are at the highest levels recorded, and have been expanding: In 2016, the median wealth of lower-income families was 42 percent less than in 2007, while the median wealth of upper-income families was up 10 percent compared to 2007. This economic structure maintains the centuries-old exploitation of women and people of color, who are still paid dramatically less than their white male peers for the same work.

Precarity is an outcome of the erosion of stable, salaried jobs. Subcontracting, temp agencies and app-based independent contractors have been strategies deployed to deny workers stable schedules, living wages and the power to make demands of those with power in their workplaces. Warehouses, universities and colleges, and the high-tech industry are all powered by temp workers. This is particularly true for Black and Latinx workers, who are overrepresented among temp workers.

Austerity comes in the form of a starved public sector that doesn't have the resources to educate our kids or protect our drinking water from pollution, manipulating us into putting our money instead in the hands of profiteers.

The collective action of workers has been the most effective tool for reshaping the economy in the past, and it remains the only antidote to an economy of disparity, precarity and austerity. It's time to imagine a new regime for working people.

During the Great Depression, before there was any model of living wages or safe factories, workers organized massive strikes and shut down whole cities, leading to sweeping policy changes that gave most workers more power over their employers (with the exception of agricultural workers and domestic employees, who were excluded from labor protections).

At a time when workers are still forced to endure sweatshop conditions in many industries, when more people are coming forward with incidents of being sexually harassed or assaulted on the job, the best remedy is for workers to have a say in how a company runs. Workers covered by union contracts earn on average 13 percent more than their peers in a non-union workplace. Ninety-four percent receive access to employer-sponsored health benefits, compared with just 67 percent of non-union workers, and unionized workers get more paid sick days and paid holidays. Further, unions have proven their ability to close wage gaps for women and people of color.

Fortunately for all of us, working people have not been standing still during these concerted attacks on our right to organize. While the corporate right has focused its assault on traditional unions, workers have been exploring new ways to organize for power -- and winning.

This year, teachers joined large-scale strikes in five states, despite the fact that striking is not a protected right in four of them. These teachers aren't just asking for long-overdue pay increases, they are asking for funds for schools to be restored. They are giving us the leadership we need today.

Between 2012 and 2016, workers won $61.5 billion in annual raises by organizing, speaking out, and striking to pass a combination of state and local minimum wage increases, and to get their employers to raise wages.

Truck drivers in Los Angeles have won massive gains in a multi-year campaign to throw off their industry's effort to saddle them with all of the cost and risk that comes with operating a truck by misclassifying them as independent contractors. A wave of union organizing victories is sweeping the media industry, with workers at The New Yorker, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times -- companies with a strong anti-union history -- winning union recognition in the last six months, among many other news outlets. Lastly, hundreds of laid off Toys "R" Us employees have been rallying for the severance pay that was promised and then denied to the company's 30,000 workers after the chain closed.

The Janus decision and erosion of the National Labor Relations Board may cut off some legal pathways to strong worker organizations, but working people will always organize together for better conditions. Workers are rising to reject an economy that demands we leave our right to freedom of speech and assembly at the door when we go to work, and requires our communities suffer the consequences of low wages and unstable and dangerous work. The Janus decision is a call to action for working people to join together to remake the economy, to imagine and create a better, more just world.

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Lauren Jacobs is deputy director of the Partnership for Working Families. She began organizing factories with UNITE in the South and later joined SEIU. During her 17 years at SEIU, she served in a number of roles, from organizer to first vice president. She also served as national organizing director at the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United.