Peril and Possibility: Strikes, Rights, and Legal Change in the Age of Trump

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2019

Abstract

This essay, originally presented as the 2018 David E. Feller Memorial Labor Law Lecture at Berkeley Law School, argues that we are living through what is simultaneously a moment of extraordinary peril and extraordinary possibility for workers and for labor law. In particular, it uses the recent teachers’ strike in West Virginia to illustrate the intensity of attack against workers’ rights and public services; to examine the problems with the law that governs strikes in the United States; and, more optimistically, to explore how social movements are challenging that law and offering a fundamentally different vision of the constitutional rights to which all workers and all people should be entitled. Given just days after the death of Judge Stephen Reinhardt, the lecture closes by honoring the Judge’s commitment both to workers’ rights and to a “Constitution dedicated to promoting the general welfare, ensuring the equality of all individuals, and guaranteeing liberty and justice to all . . . .”

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