By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

This Independence Day, I took a moment to reflect on words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

How ironic then to the see in the July 3 edition of the New York Times that Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing talk show host, is soon going to earn $38 million per year, for a total of $400 million.

This country seems to have endless millions for the lucky few who become ultra rich, while we walk past homeless people who line the sidewalks of our big cities, and allow working men and women to lose their jobs at an astounding pace during yet another economic downturn. Without a hint of irony, the New York Times reported on Limbaugh’s bloated salary on the same page as it described the painful layoffs among Detroit autoworkers. Detroit has lost more than 100,000 jobs since 2006 and will lose another 25,000 this summer and fall. And these workers are among the lucky ones. Through union contracts, even though they will not be working, they will earn their salary for some period of time.

The Limbaugh article also noted the salaries other celebrities are earning: Ryan Seacrest, $12 million a year; Oprah Winfrey, $18 million a year for her three-year satellite radio contract alone; Katie Couric, $15 million a year; Jay Leno, $24 million a year.

What is wrong with our culture that we heap these financial windfalls upon a very select few, while gas prices, at an all-time high, force some people to choose between eating and getting to their jobs. Forty-six million Americans go without health care, millions of children attend crumbling schools and get a substandard education, and many working parents are paid less than $10 an hour in wages and are forced to take two, even three jobs to make ends meet.

What does one do with $38 million each year? Why does any one individual need that kind of money? I fear we’ve lost all our sense of outrage about the terrible wage discrepancies that exist. It turns out the founders were wrong – all men are apparently not created equal; some are entitled to make $38 million a year, while others, despite a lifetime of hard work at a factory job, just get laid off.

By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

Last month, at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC, the National Consumers League (NCL) hosted a historic gathering of labor leaders, labor historians and gender discrimination lawyers to debate the 100th Anniversary of a landmark Supreme Court Case, Muller v. Oregon, which set a 10 hour workday for women in the state of Oregon. Decided by the Court in 1908, the great Louis Brandeis, 8 years before he ascended to the Supreme Court himself, argued Muller at the urging of Florence Kelley, general secretary of the League, and her right hand, Josephine Goldmark, who also happened to be Brandeis’ sister-in-law. They say his argument was so brilliant that the Justices didn’t interrupt him once – very unusual for the Supreme Court – and decided the case unanimously.

The case involves Portland laundry owner Curt Muller, who in violation of Oregon law required one of his female laundry employees to stay at work beyond 10 hours. She objected. The Oregon courts supported her, upholding the state’s 10 hour workday, and Muller appealed to the Supreme Court. Which raises the question, why did the NCL support hours regulations for women only? Because three years earlier the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down a New York law regulating the hours men could work. Kelley and Goldmark determined that the choice was either getting the Court to uphold a law regulating hours for women only or getting no law at all. They considered Muller to be an “entering wedge” – if laws regulating hours for women were adopted, soon those rules would apply to all workers. They were right, the entering wedge strategy worked, and in the next decade hours regulations for men were upheld by the court.

The Muller case contributed something else invaluable to social reformers. The brief that Kelley and Goldmark wrote with Brandeis didn’t use law to persuade the Court – instead, it contained reams of social evidence gathered from England and other industrial countries about the evils of 15, 16, or 17 hour work days on women, on their children, their families, their health, and their communities. This style of brief – long on social documentation but short on law – is called a “Brandeis Brief.” And when Thurgood Marshall argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court, he and his team of lawyers submitted a Brandeis Brief.

At the conference NCL hosted, labor leaders talked about Muller’s place in history and the problem today of Americans working long hours, often two jobs, to make ends meet. Gender discrimination lawyers talked about Muller’s appeal to sexist stereotypes about women in the workplace and the specific cases in which subsequent court decisions relied on Muller to discrimination against women. A board member of the NLRB cited the need for overhauling our labor laws, which haven’t been updated or upgraded in decades. Other panelists talked about the need for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which will restore the rights of workers join unions free from intimidation by employers. According to workplace surveys conducted by professors Richard Freeman of Harvard University and Joel Rogers of the University of Wisconsin, 42 million employees who are not represented by a union would like to have representation at work, but under the National Labor Relations Board election process, management has almost unlimited and mandatory access to employees, while union supporters have almost none. According to a survey of 400 NLRB election campaigns in 1998 and 1999, 36 percent of workers who vote against union representation explain their vote as a response to employer pressure. The problem of “wage theft” workers toiling long hours without getting their due compensation continues today.

Though Muller remains controversial today, we come down on the side of the historians, who argued at the conference that Muller did far more good than harm. It was all the women of the NCL had – get hours regulated for women or get nothing for any workers. And they picked a brilliant lawyer whose record of winning cases before the Court was impeccable. Finally, in their work on behalf of workers, Kelley, Goldmark, and other NCL leaders fought not just for white women and men– they fought for the lowest paid workers as well, black women and black men, whom the unions were not interested in representing at the time. That should be a source of pride for all who support the NCL today. The legacy of Muller lives on today in the struggles that working families face as they try to earn a living wage.