The ACLU Wants to Shrink Workers’ Speech ProtectionsBack in 2024, I wrote about a curious case at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was pursuing exotic legal theories that would, if adopted by the NLRB or courts, curtail the rights of workers across the country. This included the theory that the then–general counsel of the NLRB, Jennifer Abruzzo, was illegally appointed and the theory that the NLRB must defer to private arbitration proceedings even in the absence of a collective-bargaining agreement. The former theory would have invalidated a large amount of precedent established by General Counsel Abruzzo, while the latter theory would have allowed employers to limit the rights of workers to pursue unfair labor practice charges at the NLRB. The ACLU was pursuing these theories as part of a scorched-earth effort to not provide back pay and reinstatement to one of its former employees, Katherine Oh. Oh, along with her coworkers, had criticized the way certain managers treated employees and the ACLU fired her in response to those criticisms. In firing her, the ACLU claimed that Oh, who is herself nonwhite, was being racist by criticizing her likewise nonwhite bosses even though her statements contained no racial content at all. Both a private arbitrator and an NLRB administrative law judge (ALJ) have since ruled in favor of Oh and against the ACLU. The arbitrator ruled that, in firing Oh, the ACLU had violated its own just-cause termination policy, while the ALJ ruled that, in firing Oh, the ACLU had violated Section 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act. Despite losing in both forums, the ACLU still has not reinstated or compensated Oh. Instead, they have opted to keep litigating against their former employee by appealing decisions and contesting remedy calculations.
https://jacobin.com/2026/01/aclu-speech-protections-labor-nlrb Anti-Communism in Iran: From the Pahlavi Dynasty to the Islamic Republic In modern Iranian history, anti-communism has never been an accident or a mere ideological reflex. It has been a permanent weapon of bourgeois state power. Across regimes that appeared to stand at opposite ideological poles — the pro-Western, secular monarchy of the Pahlavi dynasty and the theocratic ord
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