Is Supreme Court Nominee Kagan Good for Unions?

The first question my grandparents always had on any public policy issue was always "is it good for the Jews?"  I have the same question for Obama's policies and nominees, replacing the word "Jews" with "union."  Obama's pick to replace Justice Stevens on the Supreme Court, Elana Kagan, is definitely good for the Jews, bringing the Court's complement of Jewish judges to three.  But is she good for unions?

So far it's hard to tell.  Kagan has never been a judge, so there are no written opinions to go by.  And, she does not have other writings  outlining her philosophy on labor, or any other issues for that matter.  She is, as some have noted, a bit of a cipher.  Labor leaders are cautiously supporting Kagan, probably hoping for the best.

One hopeful sign comes from the Village Voice, http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2010/05/elena_kagan_and.php,which points out that Kagan's brother, Marc Kagan, was a labor leader and reformer in the Transit Workers Union in New York.  Kagan's brother, who is now a teacher, recently wrote a letter in the Civil Service weekly Chief Leader extolling the virtues of unions in fiery, passionate language:

"Here's a heretical thought: the actual purpose of unions is to improve workers' lives by challenging the free market: to win a higher than "market" wage, to make it hard for the employer to change working conditions or fire the higher-paid worker. We shouldn't hide these ideas under a rock like we're ashamed of them; just the opposite. When unions won the 8-hour day, or the weekend, or pension plans, unions defended the idea that working people's lives and rights were socially more important than employers' profits and rights. And we said that those victories would tend to spread, even into nonunionized sectors, and generally make people's lives better. And that was true, for decades.

"Today we are playing this movie backwards. As people in the nonunion sector have faced big roll-backs in wages and benefits, we hear them complain that unionized workers should also "give back." It's an indication that we have, at least temporarily, lost the battle of ideas in this country, that we can't successfully explain to our fellow workers that it is in their interests too if we are able to hold the line somewhere, rather than engage in a frantic race to the bottom."

This type of rhetoric is rarely aired in public these days.  While we certainly can't expect Kagan to publicly embrace such sentiment, at least we know that she has family members who understand unions, embrace unions, and are passionate advocates of the labor movement.