In the Atlantic, Matt Bruening and Elizabeth Stoker look ahead to two Supreme Court cases that could devastate organized labor:

The first case concerns the president’s ability to appoint members to the National Labor Relations Board. Vacancies on the NLRB must be filled promptly because the board shuts down without a 3-member quorum. When Senate Republicans blocked Obama’s NLRB appointees, the president started filling the board with recess appointments. So, the Senate Republicans used procedural tricks to keep the Senate in perpetual “session” and thereby prevent recess appointments. The White House argues that the president should be allowed to make recess appointments anyway because the senate isn’t really in session if no business is being conducted. If the White House loses this case, the Senate Republicans will be able to paralyze the body that enforces the nation’s labor laws indefinitely. 

The second case could doom one of the most effective new organizing strategies to come along in years:

[M]ulhall v. UNITE HERE Local 355, calls into question what is probably the most successful union organizing strategy of last decade. Because our labor laws are so unfriendly to workers, major unions – including SEIU, UNITE HERE, and CWA, among others – often seek to enter into so-called “organizing agreements” with employers. These deals establish the rules that the unions and employers must follow in subsequent organizing battles. The most common provisions require employers to remain neutral about the union and to recognize it as soon as the majority of their employees sign cards authorizing it to represent them.

In Mulhall, these agreements are being challenged under anti-corruption laws that prevent employers from providing “things of value” to unions. If the Supreme Court decides that organizing agreements are unlawful, the only promising unionization strategy in recent years will die. 

It’s unclear to me how an organizing agreement counts as a “thing of value” for the purposes of an anti-corruption statute that is intended to prevent the improper exchange of tangible things of actual value–like suitcases stuffed with $100 bills. But to further muddy the waters, the Mulhall case involves an employer that agreed to a neutrality agreement in exchange for $100,000 worth of political support from the union for a casino gambling vote and a promise not to strike. A federal judge found that the agreement was legal, but the 11th Circuit disagreed. Unite Here said in a statement that it was pleased the Supreme Court decided to review the case. 

[Photo credit: Sad Panda, Jason Scott Jones, Creative Commons.]

Doctors under contract with the California prison system sterilized 148 female inmates without required state authorization between 2006 and 2010, according to a bombshell story by the Sacramento Bee and the Center for Investigative Reporting. As many as 100 others were sterilized in procedures that date back to the late 1990s. Forced sterilizations of prisoners and the mentally ill used to be common in California, until state lawmakers banned the practice in 1979. Today, in order to ensure that all sterilizations are truly voluntary, doctors must get regulatory approval before performing the surgery. Records obtained by the CIR show that the rule was ignored for years. 

The prisoners were sterilized when they came to prison infirmaries in Corona or Chowchilla to give birth. Prison officials insist that the women consented to tubal ligations, but some inmates say they felt pressured to have the surgery. 

Yet Kimberly Jeffrey says she was pressured by a doctor while sedated and strapped to a surgical table for a C-section in 2010, during a stint at Valley State. She had failed a drug test while out on parole for a previous series of thefts.

Jeffrey, 43, was horrified, she said, and resisted.

“He said, ‘So we’re going to be doing this tubal ligation, right?’ ” Jeffrey said. “I’m like, ‘Tubal ligation? What are you talking about? I don’t want any procedure. I just want to have my baby.’ I went into a straight panic.” [SacBee]

An inmate who worked in the prison infirmary said she often heard staff urging women who had served multiple prison terms to get sterilized. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s not right,’ ” she told a reporter. “Do they think they’re animals, and they don’t want them to breed anymore?”

[Photo credit: Derekskey, Creative Commons.]

• How huge American companies like Amazon and Frito-Lay exploit armies of temporary workers as a permanent business model. 

• With immigration reform hanging in the balance, Hillman judge Harold Meyerson pens a scathing op/ed urging the Northern U.S. states to build a fence to protect their people from the low-wage, anti-worker climate of Southern U.S. 

• Michael Sullivan, a longtime producer for the Hillman-Prize-winning PBS show Frontline, died this week at the age of 67. He leaves a legacy of outstanding journalism for the common good.

• ”Dark-skinned and Plus-sized,” how the media use dehumanizing stereotypes about race, class, and body size to discredit 19-year-old Rachel Jeantel, the last person to speak to Trayvon Martin before he was shot to death by George Zimmerman. 

• In the wake of the demise of the Defense of Marriage Act, E.J. Graff reflects on her personal and political journey from radical lesbian activist to happily married woman.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons]

Tonight, PBS Frontline airs “Rape in the Fields,” a documentary about sexual violence against female farm workers. In the United States, an estimated one half to three quarters of all farm workers are undocumented. Undocumented workers are especially vulnerable to sexual harrassment on the job because they are reluctant to complain, for fear of being  deported. 

[Photo credit: leadenhall, Creative Commons.]