CONTRIBUTOR: Lessons From Labor Strife

I practice law. 

These days I represent whistleblowers; those who challenge the status quo.

As John Lewis, a leader of the Civil Rights movement who died in 2020, might have said, my clients are the agitators in the old washing machines that stir the dirt to the top. They are the people who are known to the corporate world as snitches. 

They expose big drug companies that market drugs for medically unnecessary purposes just to make an extra nickel and please shareholders. 

They expose publicly traded corporate giants that lie to investors — including worker pension funds — to gin the flow of investment dollars and drive up the stock price so that some executive with stock options can cash in and upgrade his home in the Hamptons. 

They rat out big military contractors that overcharge the Defense Department and sell products that don’t protect our men and women in the armed forces.

They are in sum a symbol of possibility. And it is this thing — this possibility thing — that is quintessentially American. 

We are a nation of possibility and a nation of struggle. 

This I also know from my days as a labor lawyer, but not just any labor lawyer; a union-side labor lawyer. 

You know this kind of lawyer. They are usually part of the wrinkled-suit crowd, motivated by passion and the fear of failure, and used to hearing from their corporate counterparts that “this is not the way we do things around here.” These union lawyers are kindred spirits with their clients — it is personal, it is emotional and they too are challengers of the status quo. 

As a kid, two nanoseconds out of law school, I worked on janitor strikes in the bitter cold of a Pittsburgh winter. I met with my clients as they walked picket lines in that city’s so-called golden triangle. 

I traveled to Beaumont, Texas, in the scorching heat of a Southern summer and represented 300 women — mostly black — who were fighting a nursing home that wanted to cut their wages by 20 cents from the royal sum of $4.10 an hour to $3.90 an hour.

That was almost 40 years ago. 

And today I could also reminisce about the workers I represented who toiled in the nation’s nuclear weapons plants. They carried out President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural pledge of nuclear strength by making bombs for Cold War leverage. 

I could write about my clients in the oil refineries, paper mills or meat packing plants.

Sadly, too many are dead — succumbed to radiogenic disease, workplace injury or the strain of constant physical labor.

As I think about those I have met on my life’s journey, I also think about the words from that Pete Seeger song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” You know the line: “When will they ever learn?” Yeah that one — it rings in my ears.

These days I litigate, I teach and I write. 

For the last year I have written an Expert Analysis guest column for Law360. I write about trials and litigation. At least that’s what I am tasked to write about. But that’s not the whole story.

Like those I represent, my column romanticizes about the court system — this thing we call “process” as a vehicle for change.

Process is possibility. And possibility is a legal system that allows one person to file a complaint in court and accomplish things that a divided Congress couldn’t do in a lifetime. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it is a memory that gets taught and sold as the American experience.

I love writing for Law360. I love the editors who make my words talk better than I could on my own. I love their passion for the law and their passion for working with attorneys who write about it. 

I love the fact that they print my column, which usually carries civil rights messages, and deliver it via email to lawyers at big corporate firms. 

But I can’t write for Law360 this week, and I don’t know if I will be able to write for Law360 next week, or in the near future.

I will not cross a picket line or allow my prose to do so.

I have perhaps come full circle — returned to my past four decades. Maybe this labor thing is just in my blood. It won’t escape.

I struggle with what to tell my kindred spirits at Law360. 

Grappling with uncertainty and mouths to feed, kind words of encouragement are not enough. 

Indeed, what do you tell people who love their job so much that, rather than find another one, they are willing to walk off their job to make the one they have that much better?

How do you explain to them how it is even possible that the legal system they write about and promote isn’t there for them when they need it?

But maybe I don’t need to. 

The thing is that my Law360 kindred spirits are not like my labor clients of yesteryear. They don’t depend on having a building to clean, an oil refinery to work or a meat packing assembly line to man. 

Word factories — the kind that produce products like this one — require virtually no overhead, save for a laptop and a comfortable  corner in a coffee shop. Maybe, just maybe, that’s what Law360 needs to worry about in an era when technology has allowed labor to come full circle. 

And on this day, amidst the strife, it’s labor that finally has the upper hand. 

—Editing by Katie McNally and Emily Kokoll.