Brett Kavanaugh's History as a Judge Has Organized Labor Very Worried
As a member of a DC-based appeals court, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee assailed pro-worker rulings.
TONYA RILEY AUG. 30, 2018 6:00 AM
With confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh scheduled for next week, labor groups have been arguing that he would bring dangerously anti-worker attitudes to the court and bolster already growing pro-employer sentiment on the bench.
“Everything we know about Justice Kavanaugh’s record leads us to believe he would operate under a pro-corporation agenda over workers’ rights, over civil rights, and more,” said Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), on an August press call. Advocates from AFL-CIO, American Federation of Teachers, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and AFSCME have echoed calls by the Alliance for Justice and other liberal interest groups for the release of Kavanaugh’s records from his time as a lawyer for the George W. Bush administration.
While only around half of those documents have been made public, Kavanaugh’s decisions from his time as a Bush-appointed judge on the powerful US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia reflect a long history of anti-union and anti-labor sentiment. The court regularly reviews suits challenging the decisions of Washington-based agencies, which has put Kavanaugh in a position to regularly author opinions and dissents assailing the authority of the National Labor Review Board.
In the 2008 case Agri Processor Co., Inc. v. NLRB, the court’s majority held that undocumented workers’ “fear of detection and termination does not prevent them from sharing a community of interest with their coworkers,” granting them the same bargaining rights as their documented colleagues. But Kavanaugh dissented, arguing that undocumented workers didn’t count as employees under the National Labor Relations Act. While the ruling said the Supreme Court has “never explained how it would resolve” the conflict at the heart of the case, Kavanaugh disagreed, citing a 2002 high court ruling that he said was at odds with the majority’s decision. If confirmed, he could get a chance to weigh in on the Supreme Court’s meaning once again—this time as one of its members.
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/08/brett-kavanaugh-workers-rights-labor-unions/
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