Shaun Scott’s Radical Agenda Arrives in Olympia

In the early days of Trump’s second term in office, he’s made one thing clear: workers are in trouble. He’s already begun dismantling the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency designed to protect workers from employer abuses. Luckily, Shaun Scott has a bold new plan to protect us here in Washington state.

Your boss might be skimming from your paychecks, forcing you to work overtime, or even firing you for trying to unionize with your co-workers to get a better contract. Ordinarily, your best chance at justice would be to take your complaint to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal agency composed of labor lawyers tasked with protecting workers from employer abuses.

However, the effectiveness of the NLRB depends on who is in office. President Biden appointed pro-worker lawyer Jennifer Abruzzo as General Counsel, and under her leadership the NLRB made serious strides to balance the scales in our country, knocking down non-compete clauses among other key decisions that bolstered worker rights.

But now, as he did in his first term, Trump is moving to dismantle worker protections and shift power back to corporations and the wealthy. By firing Jennifer Abruzzo and board member Gwynne Wilcox, he signals a clear agenda: either try to eliminate the NLRB altogether or load it with so many anti-worker members that it won’t serve any purpose to the working class. This would allow union-busting companies to operate unchecked, making it extremely dangerous to organize a union or deliver complaints about working conditions without retaliation.

With the NLRB under threat, states like Washington may need to step in where the federal government retreats. Newly elected State representative Shaun Scott has a new plan to do just that —piggybacking on an old idea.

Just a month after Seattle’s General Strike in 1919, Washington passed a law legalizing workers’ right to establish and join unions without fear of reprisal by their employers. Then, in 1935, the National Labor Relations Act was passed in Congress and signed into law by FDR. It enshrined these rights on a federal level and established the NLRB to hear labor cases and enforce the Act.

But as any worker knows, those laws often fall short in practice.

“Saying that it’s legal to join a union is very, very different from saying it’s safe to join one,” Scott says. “Right now, we have people who are retaliated against for starting unions, participating in union meetings, organizing their co-workers, so that when you have a void like the one that is probably going to be created very shortly by rollbacks of the NLRB’s protections, it’s going to be up to state legislatures to step in and find creative ways to fill them.”

Scott, backed by labor unions and House Labor and Workplace Standards Committee Chair Liz Berry, is proposing to establish a “Washington State Labor Review Board.” As presently imagined, the board would comprise six members: two appointed by the State House of Representatives, two by the State Senate, one by the Governor, and one by the State Attorney General. Board members would be appointed from around the state to ensure every worker is equitably represented. Once a year, the Board would publicly present their findings on the previous year’s cases and make recommendations to reinstate workers, return lost wages, and otherwise make workers whole.

“People are trying to exercise their legally protected rights to start unions,” Scott says. “Our leadership in the House of Representatives has been thinking about what we can be doing at the state level to protect those rights.”

Labor leaders say this bill’s impact could be huge. “The right to organize without retaliation is like the mother of all rights. Without it, we don’t have the right to fight for better conditions or maintain the protections we do have,” says James Oliveros of the Washington State Labor Education and Research Center. “This bill would be an essential safeguard under an administration that is actively hostile towards federal labor protections.”

The committee is exploring the idea of including civil penalties against companies that stifle unionization attempts, as well, which raises some key questions: 

But would something like this be legal? Would it not violate federal preemption for a state to decide on these matters? That was a concern with states passing laws in the past couple of years banning captive audience meetings, mandatory meetings where employers pressure employees to not join a union. But those laws stood and even led to the NLRB delivering a landmark ruling against Starbucks making captive audience meetings illegal.

These state-level victories signal that Washington may have the legal footing to push back against federal rollbacks. Seizing the moment, Scott and his allies are advancing new protections for workers beyond union membership, particularly those historically left out of federal labor laws.

This includes independent contractors and other folks like farm laborers who aren’t protected by the National Labor Relations Act. He supports another bill in Olympia (SB 5041) that would provide unemployment insurance to workers on strike. And, Scott is also working on a bill (HB 1313) that would require companies to provide workers 60 days’ notice ahead of any mass layoffs.

“The state legislature is an important battleground for workers to be paying attention to,” says Oliveros.

Scott agrees, with emphasis on the battle. ”I can tell you from two weeks on the job here in Olympia, the powerful are very used to having their viewpoint heard and adopted,” he says. “The measures that we’ve talked about are only going to begin to tilt the balance of power in the direction of everyday people in our state.”