Business
Column: A Trump judge eviscerates a pro-worker regulation at the request of big employers
The Biden administration’s support of worker rights and union organizing has become a byword.
President Biden has restored the National Labor Relations Board to its traditional role as protector of collective bargaining rights. He walked the United Auto Workers picket line during its ultimately successful contract negotiations with the Big Three automakers.
He has nominated and renominated the outstanding worker advocate Julie Su as secretary of Labor. And he swept a gaggle of Trump-appointed union-busters and anti-union ideologues out of a key federal agency responsible for ruling on disputes involving government union contracts.
As major companies have consciously invested in building brands…as the cornerstone of their business strategy, they have also shed their role as the direct employer of the people responsible for providing their products and services.
— David Weil, “The Fissured Workplace”
But now he has run up against a brick wall of hard-right anti-union ideology put in place by his predecessor: another Trump-appointed ultra-partisan federal judge using his perch in an obscure courthouse to make policy for the entire nation.
We’re talking about J. Campbell Barker of the U.S. District Court of Tyler, Texas. Last week Barker, ruling in a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 12 other business lobbies, invalidated an NLRB rule aimed at broadening the standard by which big corporations could be held jointly responsible for the welfare and unionization rights of workers employed by their franchisees.
Barker was appointed by Trump in 2019 after a career as a Texas state lawyer writing briefs to restrict voting rights and LGBTQ+ rights, supporting Trump’s travel ban on Muslim-majority nations and attacking access to contraceptives and abortion.
On March 8, he ruled that the NLRB’s joint-employer regulation, issued in October, was so broad that it would “treat virtually every entity that contracts for labor as a joint employer.”
Many workers whose wages or workplace conditions were effectively dictated by big companies that fobbed their responsibilities onto franchise owners would consider that anything but a drawback.
The NLRB is certain to appeal Barker’s decision, probably to the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has set its own standard for far-right judicial overreach. The board had earlier argued that Barker shouldn’t have taken the lawsuit in the first place, because by law NLRB final rules can be appealed only to the federal appeals court in the District of Columbia. Barker rejected that argument.
Big business has been fighting efforts to broaden legal interpretations of joint-employer status for decades. The plaintiffs in this lawsuit included lobbies for builders, restaurants, hotels and convenience stores.
Many of them base their business models on their ability to control workplace conditions from afar while pushing legal liability for labor violations onto franchise owners, whom they often describe (inaccurately) as small mom-and-pop operations just scraping by.
Among the plaintiffs is the Chamber of Commerce of Longview, Texas. Longview is a small city in the east Texas oil patch; presumably its chamber was recruited because the plaintiffs figured that its presence would give them standing to sue in the federal district court in Tyler, which has two judges, both appointed by Donald Trump, including Barker. They got their wish.
Another plaintiff is the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace. You might suppose that an organization bearing that name represents the whole panoply of business stakeholders, from fast-food workers to corporate employers, but no.
“Democratic” here means much the same thing as it did when “German Democratic Republic” signified a Communist dictatorship in East Germany, which was anything but a democratic workers’ paradise. The coalition comprises 600 employer groups “joined by their mutual concern over regulatory overreach by the National Labor Relations Board.”
Now let’s turn to the lawsuit itself. If you surmise that its opening brief, filed on Nov. 9, bristled with disinformation, you would be right.
The brief stated that the NLRB “rammed” the rule changes through on the claim that “the 90-year-old National Labor Relations Act has been misinterpreted for most of its existence.” (Actually, the board is only 88 years old.)
A couple of points here. First, it’s a little unclear what the plaintiffs meant by “ramming through” the new rule. The NLRB first proposed the rule in September 2022, and didn’t promulgate it until 13 months later. In the interim it put the proposal out for public comments, of which it received 13,000.
The plaintiffs implied that the NLRB’s joint-employer rules have been static since the board’s founding in 1935. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The standard came before the Supreme Court more than once, starting in 1964. The board amended it, sometimes narrowing and sometimes expanding its definition of joint employer, in 1982, 2002, 2007, 2018 and 2020, before the latest version was issued in October.
The plaintiffs wring their hands over the fact that the board reversed a rule that it “promulgated just three years ago.” You might ask yourself: Hmm, what changed in Washington between 2020 and 2023?
If you guessed that the Trump administration was turned out of office and replaced by the Biden administration, well done.
The latter gave the NLRB a Democratic majority, just as the former had given it a Republican majority. Presidents have the power to do that and most have done so when they were succeeding a president of the other party. So when the plaintiffs depict the board as an unchanging entity that reversed itself, they’re lying, possibly in the hope that a judge will be too stupid to notice their sleight of hand. Or too partisan to care.
But they can’t avoid explicitly stating their true concern with the joint-employer rule: The rule threatens employers with “billions of dollars in liability and costs.”
Defining joint-employer responsibilities has become more important in recent decades as more businesses turn to the franchise model, which gives fast-food, hotel and retailing behemoths plausible deniability over how their front-line workers are treated and paid.
“As major companies have consciously invested in building brands … as the cornerstone of their business strategy,” labor expert David Weil wrote in his 2014 book “The Fissured Workplace,” “they have also shed their role as the direct employer of the people responsible for providing their products and services.” The trend, Weil wrote, encompasses hotel maids, cable installers, commercial janitors and merchandise pickers in Amazon warehouses — all are actually on the payroll of third-party employment firms.
(By the way, Biden nominated Weil in 2021 to a high-level position at the Department of Labor, but the nomination was killed by opposition from Republicans and Big Business.)
In recent years, the principal target of joint-employer cases at the NLRB has been McDonald’s. That’s unsurprising, since with more than $119 billion in overall international sales it’s the largest franchisor in the world.
The Obama-era NLRB brought a massive case against the company and 29 franchisees in 2014, which turned into what was regarded as the biggest case the board ever instituted, and the longest. The main issue was whether the company had participated in — in fact, helped to run — a nationwide attack on the Fight for $15 union campaign for a higher minimum wage at its restaurants.
Then-NLRB general counsel Richard Griffin alleged at the outset that the franchisees fired, suspended, cut work hours, threatened, spied on and interrogated employees involved in the union campaign, all of which he interpreted as illegal responses to union organizing.
Administrative Law Judge Lauren Esposito cited evidence that the anti-union response was “formulated and implemented” from McDonald’s headquarters in Chicago and that the company provided franchisees with “suggested policies” and legal training in labor relations — so much so that the company was properly regarded as the franchise workers’ joint employer.
By the time Esposito prepared to rule, Trump was president. He replaced Griffin with Peter Robb, whose record as an anti-labor lawyer was well nigh unassailable and whose hostility to the joint-employer rule was manifest. Before Esposito could rule, Robb settled the cases against the franchisees by ordering back pay for the workers who were fired or had their hours cut. But the settlements didn’t involve McDonald’s Corp., which therefore skated on the joint-employer issue.
Esposito rejected the settlements, but she was overruled by the NLRB’s new, Republican majority. The sole dissent came from Lauren McFerran, an Obama appointee who was the only Democrat then on the board.
“A finding of joint-employer status,” she wrote, “would have important collateral consequences for McDonald’s, in both unfair labor practice proceedings involving its franchisees and … if workers employed at McDonald’s franchisees sought to organize (that is, unionize).”
In other words, the Trump NLRB moved heaven and earth to keep McDonald’s from being declared a joint employer.
McFerran is now chair of the NLRB, presiding over a 3-1 Democratic majority. (One seat on the five-member board is vacant.)
The NLRB’s joint-employer rule would bring millions of workers — typically low-wage workers without health or retirement benefits and virtually no job security — under the umbrella of their well-heeled ultimate employers. It’s possible, if not certain, that they would see an improvement in their working lives, through better wages and more opportunity to unionize.
Even big franchisees or labor brokers don’t have to care about their public image — most customers don’t even know they exist. But McDonald’s, Marriott, Walmart and Amazon have a lot to lose in public esteem by getting tagged as an abuser of workers.
If the NLRB had its way, they would no longer be getting away with shedding their responsibilities. Let’s hope that Judge Barker’s ruling is a temporary obstacle to making the world work better.
As a child, Clara Spars, who grew up in Charles M. Schulz’s adoptive hometown of Santa Rosa, assumed that every city had life-size “Peanuts” statues dotting its streets.
After all, Spars saw the sculptures everywhere she went — in the Santa Rosa Plaza, at Montgomery Village, outside downtown’s Empire Cleaners. When she and her family inevitably left town and didn’t stumble upon Charlie Brown and his motley crew, she was perplexed.
Whatever void she felt then is long gone, since the beagle has become a pop culture darling, adorning all manner of merchandise — from pimple patches to luxury handbags. Spars herself is the proud owner of a Baggu x Peanuts earbuds case and is regularly gifted Snoopy apparel and accessories.
“It’s so funny to see him everywhere because I’m like, ‘Oh, finally!’” Spars said.
The spike in Snoopy products has been especially pronounced this year with the 75th anniversary of “Peanuts,” a.k.a. Snoopy’s 75th birthday. But the grip Snoopy currently has on pop culture and the retail industry runs deeper than anniversary buzz. According to Sony, which last week acquired majority ownership of the “Peanuts” franchise, the IP is worth half a billion dollars.
To be clear, Snoopy has always been popular. Despite his owner being the “Peanuts” strip’s main character and the namesake for most of the franchise’s adaptations, Snoopy was inarguably its breakout star. He was the winner of a 2001 New York Times poll about readers’ favorite “Peanuts” characters, with 35% of the vote.
This year, the Charles M. Schulz Museum celebrated the 75th anniversary of the “Peanuts” comic strip’s debut.
(Brennan Spark / Charles M. Schulz Museum)
But the veritable Snoopymania possessing today’s consumers really exploded with the social media boom of the early 2010s, said Melissa Menta, senior vice president of global brand and communications for Peanuts Worldwide.
That’s also when the company saw the first signs of uncharacteristically high brand engagement, Menta said. She largely attributed the success of “Peanuts” on social media to the comic strip’s suitability to visual platforms like Instagram.
“No one reads the comic strips in newspapers anymore,” Menta said, “but if you think about it, a four-panel comic strip, it’s actually an Instagram carousel.”
Then, in 2023, Peanuts Worldwide launched the campaign that made Snoopy truly viral.
That year, the brand partnered with the American Red Cross to create a graphic tee as a gift for blood donors. The shirt, which featured Snoopy’s alter ego Joe Cool and the message “Be Cool. Give Blood,” unexpectedly became internet-famous. In the first week of the collaboration, the Red Cross saw a 40% increase in donation appointments, with 75% of donors under the age of 34.
“People went crazy over it,” Menta said, and journalists started asking her, “Why?”
Her answer? “Snoopy is cute and cool. He’s everything you want to be.”
“Charles Schulz said the only goal he had in all that he created was to make people laugh, and I think he’s still doing that 75 years later,” Schulz Museum director Gina Huntsinger said.
(Brennan Spark / Charles M. Schulz Museum)
The Red Cross collaboration was so popular that Peanuts Worldwide brought it back this year, releasing four new shirt designs. Again, the Snoopy fandom — plus some Woodstock enthusiasts — responded, with 250,000 blood donation appointments made nationwide in the month after the collection’s launch.
In addition to the Red Cross partnership, Peanuts Worldwide this year has rolled out collaborations with all kinds of retailers, from luxury brands like Coach and Kith to mass-market powerhouses like Krispy Kreme and Starbucks. Menta said licensed product volume is greater than ever, estimating that the brand currently has more than 1,200 licensees in “almost every territory around the world,” which is approximately four times the number it had 40 years ago.
Then again, at that time, Schulz enjoyed and regularly executed veto power when it came to product proposals, and licensing rules were laid out in what former Times staff writer Carla Lazzareschi called the “Bible.”
“The five-pound, 12-inch-by-18-inch binder given every new licensee establishes accepted poses for each character and painstakingly details their personalities,” Lazzareschi wrote in a 1987 Times story. “Snoopy, for example, is said to be an ‘extrovert beagle with a Walter Mitty complex.’ The guidelines cover even such matters as Snoopy’s grip on a tennis racquet.”
Although licensing has expanded greatly since then, Menta said she and her retail development associates “try hard not to just slap a character onto a T-shirt.” Their goal is to honor Schulz’s storytelling, she added, and with 18,000 “Peanuts” strips in the archive, licensees have plenty of material to pull from.
Rick Vargas, the senior vice president of merchandising and marketing at specialty retailer BoxLunch, said his team regularly returns to the Schulz archives to mine material that could resonate with customers.
“As long as you have a fresh look at what that IP has to offer, there’s always something to find. There’s always a new product to build,” Vargas said.
Indeed, this has been one of BoxLunch’s strongest years in terms of sales of “Peanuts” products, and Snoopy merchandise specifically, the executive said.
BaubleBar co-founder Daniella Yacobovsky said the brand’s “Peanuts” collaboration was one of its most beloved yet.
(BaubleBar)
Daniella Yacobovsky, co-founder of the celebrity-favorite accessory retailer BaubleBar, reported similar high sales for the brand’s recent “Peanuts” collection.
“Especially for people who are consistent BaubleBar fans, every time we introduce new character IP, there is this huge excitement from that fandom that we are bringing their favorite characters to life,” Yacobovsky said.
The bestselling item in the collection, the Peanuts Friends Forever Charm Bracelet, sold out in one day. Plus, customers have reached out with new ideas for products linked to specific “Peanuts” storylines.
More recently, Peanuts Worldwide has focused on marketing to younger costumers in response to unprecedented brand engagement from Gen Z. In November, it launched a collaboration with Starface, whose cult-favorite pimple patches are a staple for teens and young adults. The Snoopy stickers have already sold out on Ulta.com, Starface founder Julie Schott said in an emailed statement, adding that the brand is fielding requests for restocks.
“We know it’s a certified hit when resale on Depop and EBay starts to spike,” Schott said.
The same thing happened in 2023, when a CVS plush of Snoopy in a puffer jacket (possibly the dog’s most internet-famous iteration to date) sold out in-store and started cropping up on EBay — for more than triple the original price.
The culprits were Gen-Zers fawning over how cute cozy Snoopy was, often on social media.
“People who love Snoopy adore Snoopy, whether you grew up with ‘Peanuts’ or connect with Snoopy as a meme and cultural icon today,” said Starface founder Julie Schott.
(Starface World Inc.)
Hannah Guy Casey, senior director of brand and marketing at Peanuts Worldwide, said in 2024, the official Snoopy TikTok account gained 1.1 million followers, and attracted 85.4 million video views and 17.6 million engagements. This year, the account has gained another 1.2 million followers, and racked up 106.5 million video views and 23.2 million engagements.
Guy Casey noted that TikTok is where the brand experiences much of its engagement among Gen Z fans.
Indeed, the platform is a hot spot for fan-created Snoopy content, from memes featuring the puffer jacket to compilations of his most relatable moments. Several Snoopy fan accounts, including one dedicated to a music-loving Snoopy plushie, boast well over half a million followers.
Caryn Iwakiri, a speech and language pathologist at Sunnyvale’s Lakewood Tech EQ Elementary School whose classroom is Snoopy-themed, recently took an impromptu trip to the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa after seeing its welcome center decked out with Snoopy decor on TikTok. Once she arrived, she realized the museum was celebrating the “Peanuts” 75th anniversary.
Last year, the Schulz Museum saw its highest-ever attendance, driven in large part by its increased visibility on social media.
(Brennan Spark / Charles M. Schulz Museum)
It’s a familiar story for Schulz Museum director Gina Huntsinger.
“Last December, we were packed, and I was at the front talking to people, and I just randomly asked this group, ‘Why are you here?’”
It turned out that the friends had traveled from Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas to meet in Santa Rosa and visit the museum after seeing it on TikTok.
According to Stephanie King, marketing director at the Schulz Museum, the establishment is experiencing its highest-ever admissions since opening in 2002. In the 2024–2025 season, the museum increased its attendance by nearly 45% from the previous year.
Huntsinger said she’s enjoyed watching young visitors experience the museum in new ways.
In the museum’s education room, where visitors typically trace characters from the original Schulz comics or fill out “Peanuts” coloring pages, Gen Z museumgoers are sketching pop culture renditions of Snoopy — Snoopy as rock band Pierce the Veil, Snoopy as pop star Charli XCX.
“When our social media team puts them up [online], there’s these comments among this generation that gets this, and they’re having conversations about it,” Huntsinger said. “It’s dynamic, it’s fun, it’s creative. It makes me feel like there’s hope in the world.”
The Schulz Museum’s “Passport to Peanuts” exhibition emphasizes the comic’s global reach.
(Brennan Spark / Charles M. Schulz Museum)
Laurel Roxas felt similarly when they first discovered “Peanuts” as a kid while playing the “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” video game on their PlayStation Portable. For Roxas, who is Filipino, it was Snoopy and not the “Peanuts” children who resonated most.
“Nobody was Asian. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not even in the story,’” they said.
Because Snoopy was so simply drawn, Roxas added, he was easy to project onto. They felt similarly about Hello Kitty; with little identifying features or dialogue of their own, the characters were blank canvases for their own personification.
Roxas visited Snoopy Museum Tokyo with their brother last year. They purchased so much Snoopy merchandise — “everything I could get my hands on” — that they had to buy additional luggage to bring it home.
For some Snoopy enthusiasts, the high volume of Snoopy products borders on oversaturation, threatening to cheapen the spirit of the character.
Growing up, Bella Shingledecker loved the holiday season because it meant that the “Peanuts” animated specials would be back on the air. It was that sense of impermanence, she believes, that made the films special.
Now, when she sees stacks of Snoopy cookie jars or other trend-driven products at big-box stores like T.J. Maxx, it strikes her as a bit sad.
“It just feels very unwanted,” she said. For those who buy such objects, she said she can’t help but wonder, “Will this pass your aesthetic test next year?”
Lina Jeong, for one, isn’t worried that Snoopy’s star will fade.
“[Snoopy is] always able to show what he feels, but it’s never through words, and I think there’s something really poetic in that,” said Lina Jeong.
(Brennan Spark / Charles M. Schulz Museum)
Jeong’s affinity for the whimsical beagle was passed down to her from her parents, who furnished their home with commemorative “Peanuts” coffee table books. But she fell in love with Snoopy the first time she saw “Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown,” which she rewatches every Valentine’s Day.
This past year, she was fresh out of a relationship when the holiday rolled around and she found herself tearing up during scenes of Snoopy making Valentine’s crafts for his friends.
“Maybe I was hyper-emotional from everything that had happened, but I remember being so struck,” that the special celebrated platonic love over romantic love, Jeong said.
It was a great comfort to her at the time, she said, and she knows many others have felt that same solace from “Peanuts” media — especially from its dear dog.
“Snoopy is such a cultural pillar that I feel like fads can’t just wash it off,” she said.
Soon, she added, she plans to move those “Peanuts” coffee table books into her own apartment in L.A.
Waymo is taking the city of Santa Monica to court after the city ordered the company to cease charging its autonomous vehicles at two facilities overnight, claiming the lights and beeping at the lots were a nuisance to residents.
The two charging stations at the intersection of Euclid Street and Broadway have been a sour point for neighbors since they began operating roughly a year ago. Some residents have told The Times they’ve been unable to sleep because of the incessant beeping from Waymos maneuvering in and out of charging spots on the lot 24 hours a day.
Last month, the city ordered Waymo and the company that operates the charging stations, Voltera, to stop overnight operations at the sites, arguing that the light, noise and activity there constitute a public nuisance. Instead of complying, Waymo has turned around and filed a suit against the city, asking the court to intervene.
“Waymo’s activities at the Broadway Facilities do not constitute a public nuisance,” the company argued in its complaint, filed Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. “Waymo faces imminent and irreparable harm to its operations, employees, and customers.”
A spokesperson for the city did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to the suit, the city was aware that the Voltera charging facilities were to operate and maintain a commercial electric vehicle fleet 24 hours a day, and the city approved its use when it approved the permits for the stations.
The rift between the company and some Santa Monica residents began as soon as the vehicles began utilizing the 24-hour charging stations, which have overnight staffing, lights and cars beeping as they reverse in and out of parking spots. Tensions got so bad that some residents took to blocking the path of the driverless vehicles, blocking the driveways into the charging stations, and placing orange cones in the area to hinder their routes and create backups, a practice several have called “stacking the Waymos.”
Meanwhile, employees at the charging stations have called police several times as a result, although no arrests have been made. Waymo also unsuccessfully attempted to obtain a temporary restraining order against one resident who had allegedly repeatedly blocked the vehicles.
On Nov. 19, the city ordered Waymo to stop charging its autonomous cars at the two lots overnight or face the possibility of legal action. Waymo declined and instead sued the city last week after negotiations with the city on mitigation measures to the lots fell apart.
According to the lawsuit, Waymo and Voltera representatives reached out to the city after the Nov. 19 order, looking for ways to mitigate the noise and lights from the lots, including initiating a software update that would change the vehicles’ path to the charging stations. But after a meeting on Dec. 15 with the city, no agreement was reached, the company said in its complaint.
“We are disappointed that the City has chosen an adversarial path over a collaborative one,” a spokesperson for Waymo said in a statement.
“The City’s position has been to insist that no actions taken or proposed by Waymo would satisfy the complaining neighbors and therefore must be deemed insufficient.”
The company also blasted the city’s handling of the dispute, arguing that despite facing a budget crisis, city officials have adopted a contentious strategy against business.
“The City of Santa Monica’s recent actions are inconsistent with its stated goal of attracting investment,” the company said in a statement. “At a time when the City faces a serious fiscal crisis, officials are choosing to obstruct properly permitted investment rather than fostering a ‘ready for business’ environment.”
The lawsuit is just the latest legal battle for the Alphabet-owned company, which has been rapidly expanding across California, making the white, driverless vehicles more commonplace.
Two years ago, the company was sued by the city of San Francisco, which argued that the California Public Utilities Commission shouldn’t have handed Waymo permits to expand and operate in the city, and that the regulatory agency had abdicated its responsibilities.
The California 1st District Court of Appeal disagreed, and ruled against the city.
This past June, Waymo announced it would expand its service area to 120 square miles in Los Angeles County, with Waymos operating in Playa del Rey, Ladera Heights, Echo Park, Silver Lake and Hollywood.
In November the company launched its ride-hailing service to now operate across Los Angeles County freeways, as well as in the San Francisco Bay and Phoenix.
Since it launched in Santa Monica, the company argues it has done more than a million trips in the city and in November alone, recorded more than 50,000 rides starting or ending there.
“The [charging] site has enabled Waymo to provide a safe, sustainable and accessible transportation option to city residents,” Waymo said in the statement.
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