The fight for more 'just cause' for more workers

Even if you don’t know what “just cause” means, if you are in a union, you likely benefit from it every day you are on the job. It’s a shield against all sorts of management abuse and even the sort of routinized harassment that so many supervisors think is their divine right.

If you are not in a union, you sorely miss it. Whether you know it or not, you are an “at will” employee, which means you can be fired for any reason at all – or for no reason at all.

In most union contracts, “just cause” means that for any disciplinary action that will go into your personnel file – from a warning to a termination – the employer must be able to show a valid reason for that discipline, and justify the extent of the penalty they propose – that the punishment fits the (alleged) crime.

And “just cause” gives you a formalized process to challenge both their claim and their penalty, often (depending on your union and the extent of the penalty) in front of a neutral third-party arbitrator. Moreover, many union contracts specify that except for the grossest misdeeds, you must climb a progressive ladder of discipline; you must be cautioned about lateness, say, before you can be suspended or fired for it.

I used to work at the New York City Transit Authority, where its labor relations department still urges supervisors to distribute disciplines like candy, and for even the most minor or stupid supposed infractions. That keeps its lawyers busy and justifies its budget.

But in more rational workplaces, the just cause process disincentivizes formal discipline in favor of finger-wagging or, even better, remedial measures.

Most important, from the standpoint of union power or union organizing, just cause prevents management from firing a person it perceives as a leader – a troublemaker, in its view. That’s what happened just this week to Nathan DuCongé after he led a successful fight to unionize his AutoZone store.

(You can contribute to his GoFundMe here.)

Those workers now have a union, but not yet a contract guaranteeing just cause. That’s what routinely happens at Amazon, Walmart, Target or at any workplace where workers push back against a boss’s unreasonable demands.

Extending just cause to millions of non-union workers

When workers are unable to secure just cause rights through a union contract, what recourse do they have? In New York City, just cause rights have been extended to non-unionized workers through legislation.

Remarkably, since 2021, workers at fast-food chains in New York City who have passed a 30-day probationary period have just cause rights, the result of legislation passed when Bill de Blasio was mayor. There, discipline is exclusively limited to situations of, “failure to satisfactorily perform job duties or misconduct that is demonstrably and materially harmful to the employer’s legitimate business interests.”

And it is the “employer [who] shall bear the burden of proving just cause” – innocent until proven guilty. An employer who has been found to have unreasonably fired a worker must reinstate them, provide all lost back wages, pay the worker’s legal costs, and (sometimes) pay a fine as well.

As you can imagine, although some employers are still caught breaking the law, these penalties naturally deter much unwarranted mistreatment of workers.

Since the start of the year, a just cause law now protects app-based delivery workers (deliveristas) – technically, not “employees” – from being thrown off their platforms without just cause. If the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection “determines the deactivation was wrongful, the delivery worker would be entitled to remedies including reinstatement and payment of lost earnings.”

A similar law protecting Uber and Lyft drivers is hung up in court.

Waiting in the wings is an even more ambitious piece of legislation. Councilmember Tiffany Cabán’s Secure Jobs Act would extend just cause rights to every private sector worker in the city. That would be an amazing advance for all workers here – and a gigantic signal to the rest of the nation that a socialist administration here is not just about working-class affordability but provides sweeping protections for workers on the job.

But why are CUNY workers denied just cause rights?

I wrote up top that if you are in a union, you “likely” have just cause rights. “Likely” because in my own workplace, and my own union contract, most workers don’t have real just cause protections.

The 15,000 Adjunct faculty teaching at CUNY can’t be fired in the middle of a semester without management showing just cause, but most can be “non-reappointed” – the oh-so-polite term for being fired – at the end of any semester, and the rest at the end of a year, or after every two years, without any recourse to challenge that firing. The 5,000 administrative staff represented by Professional Staff Congress also never truly get off probation.

For their first eight years on the job, they can be fired without cause at the end of the academic year. Thereafter, a sequence of “unsatisfactory” ratings from a supervisor can also trigger a firing, challengeable only if the supervisor did not follow the proper procedural steps.

That’s far less just cause than McDonald’s workers receive.

Last week, I went to a PSC rally fighting for the re-hiring of the last of CUNY’s “Fired Four,” terminated for their outside-of-class Palestinian activism. Three of them were technically “non-reappointed,” but the union rightly says that’s the same as being fired.

Because they had no contractual just cause right to challenge their firings, the union had to apply political pressure to demand their re-employment. Thankfully, that pressure, along with (I would guess) the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, led to their reinstatement, but no back pay for the semester of work they lost.

The fourth still remains barred from work on any CUNY campus for – this is CUNY’s incredible claim – selling a pamphlet for $5 to a fellow faculty member in a building lobby! That’s exactly the reason why just cause mandates that any punishment must be proportionate to the supposed misdeed.

Now, DSA-endorsed state legislators Diana Moreno and Julia Salazar have introduced the Academic Freedom Protection Act which will provide some protections for academic workers fired, disciplined or non-reappointed for political speech. That’s good, of course, but CUNY workers will still need the stronger and more inclusive shield that just cause rights confer.

That could be accomplished either contractually or state legislative action conferring the same rights as those rightly now accorded to deliveristas.