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Clean Slate for Worker Power is continuing to make an impact across the country. Read about Clean Slate in the news.

April 12, 2021

The Case for Virtual Picket Lines

People who haven’t intentionally sought out news on the recent union election by Amazon warehouse workers, might have no idea about what’s going on at Amazon—information that might influence their buying decisions. Since people can’t protest at an e-commerce site, some labor reform advocates have floated the idea of a virtual picket line. This comes up in the Clean Slate Agenda, a report from Harvard Law School.

Whitney Kimball, Gizmodo
February 9, 2021

11 Things State and Local Governments Can Do to Build Worker Power

American workers do not have the rights and protections they need and deserve in the workplace or in the U.S. democratic system. Despite public support for policies that promote good jobs, the COVID-19 pandemic has repeatedly underscored how decent pay, health insurance, paid family and medical leave, and safety on the job are still far from guaranteed—even for workers deemed essential to their communities and the nation’s economy. Moreover, pandemic-induced economic trends have only served to deepen existing inequalities, including long-standing racial disparities.1 Confronting these challenges will take more than simply raising minimum standards. Policymakers must also work to reestablish worker power in the economy, including by strengthening unions.

Malkie Wall and David Madland
September 30, 2020

What Rights Do Workers Have As The Economy Reopens?

Sharon Block is executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and co-author of the Clean Slate report which provides pandemic recommendations for employers and employees. She joins host Robin Young to discuss the issue.

WBUR
September 22, 2020

Worker Organizations Must Enable Worker Power

We agree that our current labor law fails by, as we put it in the Clean Slate report, “limit[ing] workers to a stark, binary choice about collective representation: They can choose to be represented by an exclusive collective bargaining union, or they can have nothing.” Given the inadequacy of choice in current labor law, we recommend providing workers with “a menu of representational choices—workplace monitors, works councils, members-only unions, and exclusive representative collective bargaining unions— . . . and making it far easier for them to embrace all of these choices.”

Sharon Block & Benjamin Sachs, American Compass
September 8, 2020

How COVID-19 has changed the workplace in 2020

All employees have a right to a safe and healthful workplace and a right to insist that those conditions be provided to them without fear of retaliation. They also have a right to form and join unions to collectively make demands about safety and health. Shamefully, these rights, like so many workplace rights, have gone largely unenforced in recent years. Because the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has only issued voluntary guidance, there is effectively no federal government enforcement of protections from workplace COVID exposure.

Kim Wright, Harvard Law Today
August 28, 2020

Jacob Blake, Chris Paul, and the Hidden Power of the NBA

Many worker advocates believe that rather than try to shore up the old model of collective bargaining, it would be smarter to start fresh. Some of the most compelling ideas being touted are to place worker representatives on corporate boards and to mandate that agreements be negotiated with entire industry sectors, as is the practice in Europe, rather than on a firm-by-firm basis. This kind of bold agenda makes terrific sense to me. Indeed, at this point, it seems to be the only way to restore a better balance between corporate power and worker power in America.

Rick Wartzman, Fast Company
August 19, 2020

The Pandemic Hurts Countries That Don’t Value Workers: Weak Labor Protections Make the United States More Vulnerable to COVID-19

Reforming labor laws to make it easier for workers to organize and join unions is a crucial step to not only increasing wages or reducing inequality but building a society more resilient to crises. Recent decades have shown that societies become more unequal when workers have less power. The travails of this year suggest that empowering workers will also strengthen a country’s ability to weather the ravages of a pandemic.

Jacob Leibenluft, Foreign Affairs
August 18, 2020

Why empowering frontline workers is a key element to a safe reopening

Workers have a key role to play in designing and implementing new, on-the-job health practices—and even more so in the absence of enforceable federal standards. If they aren’t able to speak up when they spot a problem, we risk prolonging this crisis, deepening the economic pain, and ultimately losing more lives.

Sharon Block and Rachel Korberg, Fortune
August 7, 2020

A True New Deal for the COVID-19 Era

A True New Deal: Building an Inclusive Economy in the COVID-19 Era makes the compelling case for an actualized New Deal—a structural policy agenda that, by leading with inclusion, will not only tide us through the ongoing COVID-19 crisis but build a more resilient, equitable, and moral 21st century economy.

Roosevelt Institute
July 2, 2020

How the American Worker Got Fleeced

In January, Harvard Law School’s Labor & Worklife Program, following a year of discussions among ­working groups of activists and scholars, released a sweeping proposal to reboot labor law from a “clean slate,” including by ending at-will employment, installing elected “workplace monitors” in every U.S. workplace, and establishing a “sectoral bargaining” process à la Europe.

By Josh Eidelson, Bloomberg
June 24, 2020

The Workplace Powers That Employees Need

Economic issues are life-and-death issues,” says Sharon Block, the executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “What COVID has done is illustrate the life-or-death nature of those economic issues in a very accelerated time frame.

By Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic
June 23, 2020

How COVID turned a spotlight on weak worker rights

Block and Sachs point to flaws in the social safety net, an indifferent OSHA, and a system that favors employers over employees

By Liz Mineo, The Harvard Gazette
May 21, 2020

Why the Pandemic Paves the Way for Labor Reform

Our nation can and should do better by its workers. They are at the heart of the pandemic’s disastrous impact; they must be at the heart of how we successfully address it.

By Sharon Block and Ben Sachs, Public Seminar
May 4, 2020

Frances Perkins: The Leader Today’s American Workers Need

COVID-19 exposes injustice in the workforce. Frances Perkins offers a model to fix it.

By Lucy Moore, Harvard School Review
May 1, 2020

Essential Workers Unite for a May Day Strike. Is It Enough?

As a leader on Clean Slate for Worker Power, a project at Harvard Law School, [Benjamin Sachs] recently called for a change in labor law that would allow people who do similar types of work to band together and demand industrywide changes, either as a union or an official collective of workers. “You don’t fix cross-sectoral health and safety problems with just a group of workers at Whole Foods,” he says.

By Arielle Pardes, Wired
April 24, 2020

New proposal to steer nation through COVID-19 crisis would give a voice to frontline workers

Scholars from Harvard Law School’s Clean Slate for Worker Power project and the Roosevelt Institute have unveiled a plan that channels the indignation—and expertise—of those who are underpaid while taking on the risks during this perilous time.

By Rick Wartzman, Fast Company
April 24, 2020

How and Why to Empower Workers in the COVID-19 Response

In “How and Why to Empower Workers in the COVID-19 Response,” Sharon Block, Suzanne Kahn, Brishen Rogers, and Benjamin I. Sachs propose structural reforms to give workers a formal role in the shaping of workplace safety and health protocols, ensuring that the workforce can remain healthy and secure both in the immediate crisis and in the economic recession that will almost certainly outlast it.

By Sharon Block, Suzanne Kahn, Brishen Rogers, and Ben Sachs, The Roosevelt Institute
April 17, 2020

THE NEW NLRA: America’s labor laws are fundamentally broken. Here’s one plan to fix them.

Income inequality in America is as stark now as during the Gilded Age.Simply, something’s gotta give. Perhaps the Clean Slate proposal—and, at very least, its ideals—is the big fight worth having.

By Grace Pezzella, Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy
April 7, 2020

In Coronavirus Response, Republicans and Democrats Like Big Government

In the scramble to contain the coronavirus financial fallout, U.S. policy makers have embraced an ambitious big-government agenda—from new worker protections to a guaranteed minimum income—that could redefine Washington’s role in the economy.

By Jacob M. Schlesinger, Wall Street Journal
April 4, 2020

Foundations and Donors Step Up Grants to Help Workers Hurt by the Pandemic

On Tuesday, a group of eight grant makers and individual donors committed $7.1 million to the Families and Workers Fund, which will make grants for emergencies and for advocacy efforts to push for long-term policy efforts to reshape labor regulation.

By Alex Daniels, The Chronicle of Philanthropy
March 30, 2020

Why American Workers Have Been Left Out of Our Life-and-Death Decision-Making

In much of the world, collective bargaining happens at the sectoral level, instead of on a workplace-by-workplace basis, which is what we have in the United States. Under sectoral bargaining, companies can come together and negotiate basic terms with workers across their whole industry.

By Sharon Block, The American Prospect
March 30, 2020

Benjamin Sachs and Sharon Block: When Did Labor Law Stop Working?

The established “solutions” for restoring balance to economic and political power in the United States have been tax increases on the rich, on the one hand, and campaign-finance reform on the other. But in this episode, we’ll explore the idea that retooling labor laws for the modern economy may be the most effective way to address both these issues.

By Jonathan Shaw, Harvard Magazine
February 19, 2020

Why Are Workers Struggling? Because Labor Law Is Broken

In January, Clean Slate for Worker Power, a coalition of more than 70 participants from labor, academia and nonprofit organizations brought together by Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, released proposed reforms that would extend the N.L.R.A.’s protections to agricultural and domestic workers as well as independent contractors and also give all workers a say in how companies are run.

By Emily Bazelon, New York Times Magazine
February 19, 2020

Workers Play Against a Stacked Deck at Trump’s NLRB

No wonder that workers and their unions avoid bringing cases to an agency stacked against them. And no wonder that proposals to dramatically reform American labor law are gaining currency.

By Wilma Liebman, Morning Consult
February 6, 2020

House to vote on legislation to protect workers' rights to form and join unions

“There is a crisis in our country regarding income inequality and workers’ ability to exercise their countervailing power,” said Sharon Block, the co-director of Clean Slate for Worker Power, an initiative of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program.

By Michael Sainato, The Guardian
February 5, 2020

House Democrats Poised To Pass Major Labor Reforms Boosting Unions

The legislation shares a lot in common with a new labor reform plan being passed around progressive circles called Clean Slate for Worker Power, spearheaded by Harvard University law professors Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs.

By Dave Jamieson, Huffington Post
February 3, 2020

Are Democratic 2020 hopefuls talking enough about labor issues?

Are Democratic 2020 hopefuls talking enough about labor issues? Harvard Law School's Sharon Block discusses with Reuters in Des Moines ahead of the Iowa caucuses.

By Ben Kellerman, Reuters
February 3, 2020

The state of the unions

There has never been a more critical time to support our workers and demand stronger protections.

By Sarita Gupta, TechCruch
January 29, 2020

What’s Old for US Labor Is New Again

We’re in the midst of a twenty-first-century Gilded Age. To end it, we can turn to some of the radical policies designed to democratize the world of work, empower a multiracial working class, and reel in the worst excesses of robber barons nearly a century ago.

By Nelson Lichenstein, Jacobin
January 29, 2020

Labor law? Burn the whole thing down and start over, says report

The success of the Culinary Union in Nevada is well documented and gushingly praised. It’s also difficult to replicate.

By April Corbin Girnus, Nevada Current
January 29, 2020

Labor law makes it too hard to start unions. Workers deserve a bigger voice

Labor law makes it too hard to start unions. Workers deserve a bigger voice

By Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, CNN Business Perspectives
January 29, 2020

Clean slate for worker power’ promotes a fair and inclusive U.S. economy

Harvard University’s Labor and Worklife Program, led by Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs of Harvard Law School, recently launched its “clean slate for worker power” agenda addressing the dual crises of economic and political inequality in the United States.

By Kate Bahn, Washington Center for Equitable Growth
January 27, 2020

Technology Has Made Labor Laws Obsolete, Experts Say

More than 70 scholars, activists, and leaders urge lawmakers to expand workers’ digital rights to rebuild the union movement.

By Lauren Kaori Gurley, Vice
January 27, 2020

Workers need a bold vision to bring about a more equitable society

A race and gender conscious economic bill of rights is the answer to reverse extreme inequality

By Darrick Hamilton and Kyle Strickland, The Guardian
January 24, 2020

Harvard Law School Initiative Calls for Clean Slate in America’s Labor Laws

An initiative of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program — called Clean Slate for Worker Power — released its final report Thursday calling to overhaul American labor laws and increase workers’ collective bargaining power.

By Kelsey J. Griffin, Harvard Crimson
January 24, 2020

New report offers blueprint for a ‘clean slate’ for workers to fight economic inequality and strengthen labor unions

To effectively combat economic inequality and even the playing field between corporations and the people they employ, a new report argues, the U.S. must entirely overhaul labor laws to provide a “clean slate” for all workers.

By Julia Conley, Nation of Change
January 23, 2020

A Gut Renovation for U.S. Labor Law

American Labor Law is broken, argues a report released today by Clean Slate for Worker Power, a project of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program

By Marina Boltinikova, Harvard Magazine
January 23, 2020

Why U.S. labor laws need to be revamped

Report says corporate America wields too much power over the economy and politics at the expense of workers

By Liz Mineo, The Harvard Gazette
January 23, 2020

Uber and Lyft drivers deserve much better

Right now, too many rideshare drivers are teetering on the edge of the road. Nearly 80% of American workers report living paycheck to paycheck, but we live ride to ride.

By Aziz Bah, New York Daily News
January 23, 2020

How To Make Every Job A Good Union Job

If you’re a lawmaker who wants to dramatically improve the lives of US workers, there's one reform that should be at the top of your to-do list.

By Kate Andrias, Buzzfeed
January 23, 2020

New Report Offers Blueprint for a 'Clean Slate' for Workers to Fight Economic Inequality and Strengthen Labor Unions

To effectively combat economic inequality and even the playing field between corporations and the people they employ, a new report argues, the U.S. must entirely overhaul labor laws to provide a "clean slate" for all workers.

By Julia Conley, Common Dreams
January 23, 2020

Weakened Labor Movement Leads to Rising Economic Inequality

The basic facts about inequality in the United States — that for most of the last 40 years, pay has stagnated for all but the highest-paid workers and inequality has risen dramatically — are widely understood.

By Heidi Sheirholz, Morning Consult
January 23, 2020

A Surprising Solution to Save American Democracy

Running throughout the Democratic presidential debates has been a consistent theme: We are living in an era of deep economic and political inequality, and these dual crises now threaten to undermine our democracy.

By Sharon Block and Ben Sachs, Newsweek
January 23, 2020

Overhaul US labor laws to boost workers’ power, new report urges

More than 70 scholars, union leaders, economists and activists says unions are key to tackling the crisis of economic inequality

By Steven Greenhouse, The Guardian
January 23, 2020

Harvard professors offer sweeping plan to overhaul US labor laws

Two Harvard Law School faculty members unveiled a sweeping proposal to rewrite US labor law, aimed not at updating what’s on the books but at starting over.

By Katie Johnston, The Boston Globe
January 23, 2020

An SOS Call for America’s Workers

The new Clean Slate report alerts the public and policymakers about the dismal state of worker power and worker voice.

By Steven Greenhouse, American Prospect
October 11, 2019

Candidates Grow Bolder on Labor, and Not Just Bernie Sanders

Senator Bernie Sanders and others seeking the Democratic presidential nomination are embracing labor proposals that go far beyond what the party establishment backed four years ago.

By Noam Scheiber, The New York Times
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