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OCTOBER 2005
CEOs aren't sweating Bush's Supreme Court nominations
by Rick S. Bender, President of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO

The right and left are wringing their collective hands over whether President Bush’s latest Supreme Court nominee sufficiently conforms to their respective social ideologies. 

But there is one group that can rest assured: America’s CEOs.

Harriet Miers lacks judicial experience so very little is known about where she stands on touchstone social issues like abortion, privacy, assisted suicide and the like.  However, she has plenty of experience defending Microsoft, Walt Disney Corp. and other large corporations. 

In fact, Miers headed a law firm, Locke Liddell & Sapp, that’s part of the multi-billion-dollar “union avoidance” industry, counseling employers on how to keep their workers from organizing unions.  Her firm also touts on the Internet: “We defend OSHA (occupational safety) claims of any type, including multiple death cases.”

As is the case with Chief Justice John Roberts, Miers spent a much of her professional life arguing that disputed legal statutes -- whether they involve labor, environmental, consumer or other regulations -- should be resolved in her corporate clients’ favor.

Legal policy analyst Nathan Newman, director of the non-profit Agenda for Justice, says we should be paying more attention to this issue: “That likely business bias is far more relevant to 95% of their work as Supreme Court Justices than whatever views they have on broader constitutional or social issues.”

For example, the first case Roberts heard involved workers’ wages at a Tyson Foods plant here in Pasco, Wash.  Alvarez v. IBP was filed by plant employees denied pay for the time it took to don mandatory safety gear and walk to the production line.

The workers claim Tyson violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by not paying them; the company says a different law requires only that they start paying workers when they arrive at their work stations. (I suppose each worker is expected to punch the clock the moment they start swinging the razor-sharp knives.) The U.S. Court of Appeals sided with the workers, but Tyson appealed the Appeals ruling.

These are the types of decisions that don’t generate a lot of media attention, but they are the meat and potatoes of Supreme Court work.

Workers, property owners, local governments, consumers and other “little guys” often end up butting heads with deep-pocketed corporate interests in court over legal ambiguities. Often those “ambiguities” have been manufactured by a profit-minded corporation cutting costs by skirting the law, and then parsing and reinterpreting statutes to defend their actions.

The Bush administration has assisted in this endeavor, and not simply by nominating corporate attorneys to the nation’s highest court. 

Rather than pursue politically tenuous legislative battles to advance the big business regulatory agenda, federal agencies have literally changed the rules by which they implement laws on everything from overtime pay to clean air standards.  Incidentally, next on the agenda of these “activist corporations” is the Family Medical Leave Act.  They want the Bush administration to redefine what is considered a “serious illness” so the FMLA applies to fewer people in fewer cases.

Whatever the regulation du jour, Supreme Court decisions involving alleged corporate wrongdoing may seem to be narrow in scope and to have little effect on you and me.  After all, how many of us could -- or would -- work in a dangerous and low-paid industry like meat processing.

But the truth is, these little-noticed decisions establish precedents that spread far beyond the unfriendly confines of the Tyson plant in Pasco.  They can have enormous consequences for all of us, and the conditions under which we -- and our children and grandchildren -- live and work.

We should pay attention.

Rick Bender is President of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO,
the largest labor organization in the state.

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Copyright © 2005  Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO