Hobby Lobby Decision

[Skarekrow]

A depressing recent article….

By Ned Resnikoff

A little-known religious exemption to United States labor law may have just become extremely important, thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hobby Lobby.
By declaring that “closely held” corporations may hold religious beliefs, the court may have provided businesses with a new tool for crushing workplace unionization drives. In addition to declaring themselves exempt from contraception mandates and non-discrimination laws, religious employers may soon be able to argue for an exemption from collective bargaining laws.

“All you need is one employer saying, ‘My religious beliefs tell me I shouldn’t collectively bargain,’” said Alex Luchenitser, associate legal director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. If an employer takes the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to court and uses that argument, it could set the table for a major court battle over the future of union rights in nominally religious workplaces.

Religious primary and secondary schools are already exempt from collective bargaining rules, thanks to the 1979 Supreme Court case NLRB v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago. In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that the NLRB does not have jurisdiction over schools “operated by a church to teach both religious and secular subjects.” As a result, schools operated by the Catholic Bishop of Chicago were under no obligation to recognize employee unions, no matter the circumstances. Putting religious schools under the jurisdiction of the NLRB, the court reasoned, would present “a significant risk of infringement of Religion Clauses of the First Amendment.”

Other religious schools have seized on the decision over the years. Most recently, Perelman Jewish Day School in Philadelphia decided to stop recognizing its teachers’ union, citing NLRB v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago as legal justification. A March 28 article from the labor-friendly magazine In These Times suggested that the school’s actions may have earned it the title “the Hobby Lobby of Union-Busting.”

But the Perelman case may wind up being less important than another legal fight brewing elsewhere in Pennsylvania. In 2012, adjunct professors at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University requested the right to hold a union election, only to have the school claim a religious exemption. The crucial difference in this case is that Duquesne is a university, not a religious day school like Perelman or the Chicago Catholic schools.

“Once you get above the high school level, the organizations tend to have more secular functions as well, or seek to educate people beyond the sort of educating that gets done at the high school level,” said Marcia McCormick, director of St. Louis University Law School’s Center for Employment Law. If a court decides that the NLRB has no authority of Duquesne University, it could expand the NLRB v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago ruling to encompass America’s many religiously-affiliated private universities. The university’s appeal is now pending review by the NLRB’s main office in Washington, D.C.

A similar case is also brewing at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., where the union SEIU Local 925 is trying to win recognition as the sole bargaining agent for adjunct faculty. The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which recently defeated organized labor in the Supreme Court case Harris v. Quinn, filed an amicus brief supporting the university’s “efforts to resist union encroachment on its religious prerogatives.”

“If the NLRB recognizes Local 925 as the adjuncts’ exclusive bargaining agent, union officials will be empowered to negotiate over terms and conditions of employment with Pacific Lutheran University,” said the Legal Defense Foundation in a statement. “Those negotiations could force university administrators to make concessions that contradict the school’s religious mission, such as expanding access to abortion under the university’s health care plan.”

If the cases involving Duquesne University and Pacific Lutheran University have the potential to widen the scope of NLRB v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago, a broad reading of the Hobby Lobby decision could stretch it even further. If private corporations can be religious institutions, then private corporations may soon argue in court that they have a First Amendment right to object to collective bargaining on religious grounds.

“Hobby Lobby basically expanded what a potential pool of religious institutions in that sense might be,” said McCormick. She described it as “highly likely” that the Court’s ruling in that case “set the sage for future decisions that will work larger revolutions in the law as we know it.”

 

[Lark]

Corporations are people... thank you blood-sucking lawyers and an incompetent 19th century supreme court for that. Thanks to that, corporations are granted all the same rights as people, including freedom of religion.

It's fucked up.

Change that amendment and corporations go back to being controlled by government charters and the individuals in charge, held accountable. No more corporate person hood, no more hiding behind the Bill of Rights. They'll revert to the same status they had in much of the pre-19th century, where they were formed for a specific purpose and once that was served, they would/could be dissolved. Or if they violated the terms of their charter, endangered people or broke the law, they could also be dissolved.

Think of how many businesses today would simply cease to exist if they no longer had "person" status!

I seriously doubt its that simple, if it where the change would've been made a long time ago and there'd be no risk of them finding a plan B if the change were made now.

The reality is that there's a one sided class struggle taking place and the masses arent interested and organised in the way the classes are and its unlikely they ever will be. So you can make as many institutional changes as you like, it'll all prove insufficient, necessary as some particular changes may be by themselves at any time and place.

People read Chomsky or some other source and wonder why simple changes like this arent made and then attribute it all to conspiracy or intrigue or great battles but the reality is its mainly a combination of low level self-interest and widespread apathy, it works, works for everyone in some way or it wouldnt have endured exactly how it has, perhaps its marginally superior (for both the classes and the masses) to central planning, command economies, state capitalism and eminent domain corporatism.