But that should no longer be con­sid­ered good enough. Giv­en that Con­gres­sion­al Democ­rats’ offi­cial pro­pos­al right now, the Pro­tect­ing the Right to Orga­nize (PRO) Act , essen­tial­ly over­turns the anti-union Taft-Hart­ley Act , adds card check under some cir­cum­stances and impos­es mean­ing­ful finan­cial penal­ties for employ­ers who vio­late their employ­ees’ rights, woe to the can­di­date who doesn’t pro­pose to out­do it. Only one may­or, de Bla­sio, breaks new ground with his pro­pos­al; the oth­er, Buttigieg, offers a sur­vey course of think tank white papers and mod­er­ate reforms.

It was a tale of two cities’ may­ors (with pres­i­den­tial ambi­tions) this week. South Bend, Indiana’s Pete Buttigieg and New York’s Bill de Bla­sio — the two active-duty may­ors among the 20 Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates still on the debate stage — released their labor and work­ers’ rights platforms.

I’m actu­al­ly unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly opti­mistic that we may get the PRO Act — or some­thing close to it — if the Democ­rats win big in 2020. How­ev­er, we won’t end our country’s cri­sis of eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty and creep­ing fas­cism with­out a legal frame­work that puts work­ers’ rights and union pow­er into every work­place on day one.

This may be hard for union lead­ers and activists who have been in the polit­i­cal wilder­ness for four decades to under­stand. Most of us have expe­ri­enced beg­ging for scraps like card check and ban­ning per­ma­nent replace­ment scabs as the best we could expect Democ­rats to meek­ly fight for (and then fail to deliv­er). Now the stakes are high­er, the essen­tial­i­ty of unions to work­ing-class polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion and vot­er turnout is obvi­ous, and over­turn­ing Taft-Hart­ley is the con­sen­sus posi­tion of Demo­c­ra­t­ic lead­er­ship across the polit­i­cal spec­trum. Which means that putting the labor movement’s fore­most polit­i­cal demand of the last 70 years in your plat­form is sud­den­ly Not. Good. Enough.

Fine. This is Fine.

Buttigieg’s plat­form attempts soar­ing rhetoric with a pre­am­ble about ​“the verge of a new Amer­i­can era” call­ing for ​“a fun­da­men­tal­ly new and dif­fer­ent approach to fix our bro­ken polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic system.”

Good, fine so far. The solu­tion, Buttigieg says, requires going ​“above and beyond exist­ing leg­isla­tive pro­pos­als like the ​‘Pro­tect­ing the Right to Orga­nize (PRO) Act.’” But instead of doing that, Buttigieg’s labor plat­form goes side­ways with extra footnotes.

He wants to plug holes in the law that allow employ­ers to mis­char­ac­ter­ize work­ers as inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors and fix the weak ​“joint employ­er” stan­dard that allows large cor­po­ra­tions like McDon­alds to avoid bar­gain­ing with hun­dreds of thou­sands of their employ­ees. He pro­pos­es to cor­rect one of the orig­i­nal sins of the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Act by final­ly expand­ing its pro­tec­tions to farm and domes­tic work­ers (whose exclu­sion was a racist con­ces­sion to Dix­iecrats), and to improve upon the Act by impos­ing mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar penal­ties ​“that scale with com­pa­ny size” for vio­lat­ing work­ers’ orga­niz­ing rights, giv­ing unions a right to ​“equal time” on dur­ing elec­tion cam­paigns and cre­at­ing a cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process for indus­try-wide bargaining.

He endors­es the Pay­check Fair­ness Act and a host of oth­er anti-harass­ment and gen­der dis­crim­i­na­tion bills that were already on the shelf, wait­ing for a gov­ern­ment that will final­ly pass them.

He also has a pret­ty detailed pro­pos­al for paid sick and fam­i­ly leave. Actu­al­ly, it’s vir­tu­al­ly iden­ti­cal to Bill de Blasio’s pro­pos­al (which I’ll get to below), except that he must feel some super­nat­ur­al neolib­er­al impulse to refer to it as ​“access” to those things. That’s a red flag for me. And if those of us who wave the red flag were to engage in a drink­ing game that called for doing shots every time a politi­cian pro­posed ​“access” to a vital­ly impor­tant thing that should be a ​“right,” we’ll all be ham­mered for the dura­tion of the pri­maries if we don’t die of alco­hol poi­son­ing first.

But, in gen­er­al, Pete Buttigieg’s ​“New Ris­ing Tide” labor plat­form is … fine. It’s clear that he got a lot of real­ly good advice from a lot of the smartest peo­ple try­ing to tack­le the prob­lem of the legal restric­tions on work­ers’ rights and the eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty that results from it. But it’s equal­ly clear that he glommed on to the nar­row­est, most tech­ni­cal tweaks to a bro­ken sys­tem and stu­dious­ly avoid­ed a more rad­i­cal rethink of our labor rela­tions system.

Buttigieg’s pres­ence in the race as a media dar­ling is slight­ly annoy­ing. It’s as if the D.C. estab­lish­ment con­vinced them­selves of their own non­sense that the rea­son so many vot­ers sup­port­ed Bernie Sanders in the 2016 pri­maries was because he’s a white guy, and if only they could find a younger, charis­mat­ic white guy (with just a twist of diver­si­ty) that they can gar­ner enough votes for the sta­tus quo ante.

It’s nice that he reads books (in self-taught Nor­we­gian, no less!) and speaks ​“in lucid para­graphs.” But most of his actu­al con­tri­bu­tions to the dis­course – like every can­di­date who’s in the race to thwart pop­u­lar demands to expand gov­ern­ment ser­vices – wind up ques­tion­ing the val­ue of liv­ing in a soci­ety at all. Take his oppo­si­tion to free col­lege. ​“As a pro­gres­sive,” he explained to an audi­ence of under­grad­u­ates in Mass­a­chu­setts, ​“I have a hard time get­ting my head around the idea of a major­i­ty who earn less because they didn’t go to col­lege sub­si­diz­ing a minor­i­ty who earn more because they did.” There’s noth­ing remote­ly pro­gres­sive about a ​“hOw d0 Y0u PaY fOR iT?” argu­ment that could just as eas­i­ly con­clude, ​“Why have any pub­lic edu­ca­tion at all?”

Bill de Blasio’s pres­ence in the race is also annoy­ing. He has no short­age of crit­ics at home who point to our crises of mass tran­sit, afford­able hous­ing and police account­abil­i­ty as cam­paigns the may­or should be run­ning to the state capi­tol to fix. But he also has an impres­sive track record of deliv­er­ing wins for New York’s work­ing fam­i­lies and, we learned this week, an impres­sive­ly bold work­ers’ rights agen­da for the nation.

The right to have work­place rights

De Bla­sio begins his 21st Cen­tu­ry Work­ers Bill of Rights with an issue that’s near and dear to a lot of us here at In These Times: The Right to Due Process at Work. Sim­ply defined, due process at work, or ​“just cause,” is the prin­ci­ple that an employ­ee can be fired only for a legit­i­mate, seri­ous, work-per­for­mance reason.

In last August’s spe­cial issue, ​“Rebuild­ing Labor After Janus,” Bill Fletch­er pro­posed a labor move­ment for just cause laws as a way to ​“end the tyran­ny of the non-union work­place,” one that ​“active­ly dis­rupts the strat­e­gy of cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca and its right-wing pop­ulist allies.”

And in a recent piece mark­ing ten years of the magazine’s Work­ing blog, Jes­si­ca Stites not­ed that I’ve been using this plat­form to wage a lone­ly cru­sade on this issue for four years now.

Fel­low ITT con­trib­u­tor Moshe Mar­vit and I car­ried that cru­sade into an op-ed in the New York Times in Decem­ber of 2017. We were build­ing sup­port for an amend­ment to the Fair Labor Stan­dards Act that then-Rep. Kei­th Elli­son was draft­ing. (If any pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates who are cur­rent­ly serv­ing in Con­gress want to see a copy of that bill, slide into my DM’s…)

Although Ellison’s move to the Min­neso­ta Attor­ney General’s office has momen­tar­i­ly orphaned a fed­er­al bill for a ​“right to your job,” the cru­sade was revived by a New York City Coun­cil push for fast food work­ers that pro­gres­sive city coun­cil mem­ber Brad Lan­der is dogged­ly shep­herd­ing to May­or de Blasio’s desk. (The bill’s true cham­pi­on was SEIU local 32BJ’s recent­ly depart­ed and dear­ly missed pres­i­dent, Hec­tor Figueroa.)

To be sure, de Bla­sio hap­pened to pro­pose my hob­by­horse. But the rea­son I’ve been argu­ing for Right to Your Job law is that it is a reform on anoth­er scale. It would increase the bar­gain­ing pow­er and legal rights of every work­er in Amer­i­ca. It has the poten­tial to put union rep­re­sen­ta­tion in every work­place and gives unions new and cre­ative ways to organize.

The rest of de Blasio’s plat­form is sim­i­lar to Buttigieg’s except for one key dis­tinc­tion: A num­ber of pro­pos­als high­light con­crete improve­ments that the city of New York has made in the lives of low wage work­ers dur­ing de Blasio’s two terms as mayor.

Like Buttigieg’s, De Blasio’s labor plat­form includes a right to paid time off, includ­ing paid sick days, paid fam­i­ly and med­ical leave and the right to at least two weeks of paid vaca­tion per year. Buttigieg pro­pos­es some­thing sim­i­lar, but de Bla­sio actu­al­ly imple­ment­ed a paid sick leave law that enti­tles work­ers to up to 40 hours a year of sick time, paid through an insur­ance fund.

De Bla­sio also pro­pos­es a fair sched­ul­ing law — mod­eled on one that fast food and retail work­ers won in New York — and a $15 min­i­mum wage and new pro­tec­tions for gig workers.

Labor wants more!

Unlike many on the left who are in the ​“Bernie or Bust” crowd, I don’t have a horse in this race — yet. We’re months away from the Iowa cau­cus­es and I won’t even have a vote in New York’s April 2020 pri­ma­ry (I’m reg­is­tered in the Work­ing Fam­i­lies Party).

But I’m enjoy­ing the race to the left on pol­i­cy, and watch­ing can­di­dates like Buttigieg reveal the empti­ness at the heart of busi­ness-friend­ly centrism.

No one can doubt Bernie Sanders’ labor bona fides. He has been on the front lines of work­ers’ strug­gles for half a cen­tu­ry, and the way that he has used his 2020 cam­paign infra­struc­ture to lift up spe­cif­ic orga­niz­ing cam­paigns and strikes and to use his bul­ly pul­pit to pres­sure mas­sive cor­po­ra­tions like Ama­zon and Wal­mart to raise their work­ers’ pay should be a mod­el for all the can­di­dates. But he is a blunt force instru­ment, and his indif­fer­ence to pol­i­cy details is frus­trat­ing on issues as com­pli­cat­ed as how to restore the legal rights and col­lec­tive pow­er of workers.

Eliz­a­beth Warren’s whole stock in trade is that ​“she has a plan for that.” As a Sen­a­tor, she bucked the ​“think tank indus­tri­al com­plex” by devel­op­ing a team of experts on her staff who reached out far and wide to pro­gres­sive thinkers for pol­i­cy ideas. Her staff have been pick­ing the brains of In These Times writ­ers on poli­cies to tip the scales in favor of work­ers for years. She would enter office with a slew of poli­cies to empow­er unions and work­er cen­ters to car­ry out the Robin Hood role the econ­o­my needs.

Any oth­er can­di­date who wants to appeal to vot­ers on labor issues has to pro­pose bold solu­tions to even be noticed, stand­ing next to Bernie and War­ren. Pete Buttigieg has fall­en short of that mark. Bill de Bla­sio has intro­duced a bold new work­ers’ right that no can­di­date was talk­ing about. He’s earned your $3 dona­tion to keep him on the debate stage, if only to ask the ques­tion: Why should your boss be able to fire you for no rea­son at all?

Update: Lat­er in the day on July 26, Gov. Jay Inslee (D‑Wash.) released the third labor plan of the race. Like de Bla­sio’s, it includes just cause protections.