Is SCOTUS's Harris v. Quinn Ruling on a New Version of the Infamous Dred Scott Decision?

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http://www.alternet.org/scotus-reactionary-decision-harris-v-quinn-new-version-infamous-dred-scott-decision



It’d be more than alarming and resoundingly condemned if any institution in the U.S. tried to take our country back to the days before Dred Scott, when people of color in this country fell under the racist and dehumanizing “three fifths rule.” But the Supreme Court’s decision in Harris v Quinn smacks of a new three fifths rule by declaring the fastest growing occupation in the nation, an occupation dominated by people of color and women, as “partial” or “quasi” public employees.

The court’s rationale in Harris, that the workers that provide essential services to the frail and elderly, a population set to explode as the Baby Boom ages, aren’t “full” public employees is best understood in the context of two other seminal moments when U.S. law makers stacked the deck for employers and against people of color and women trying to improve their lot in life by forming strong unions.

In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act, NLRA, the law which created the architecture for workers to form unions, passed the U.S. Congress. But in order to win enough votes for passage, Roosevelt and the laws proponents compromised with racist southern elements who demanded that domestic and agricultural workers, the two occupations dominated by Blacks and women, would be excluded from the provisions of the NLRA, thus condemning people of color and women to a second class status under our nation’s first national labor law. Essentially, white men in factories were given the right to form strong unions while people of color and women were formally held back.

Between 1935 and 1947, industrial sector workers built powerful union, transforming bad jobs into middle-class work. The end of World War II brought the largest strike waves in U.S. history, as large numbers of returning veterans demanded dignity and basic rights in their workplaces after fighting for freedom abroad. From D Day to 1947, 5 million American workers went on strike, demanding and winning much of what we now wistfully remember as the American Dream.