But look, if the problem is that "the only way to have freedom of the press is to own one" (A.J. Leiblling), don't blame the 1A or even the Constitution. The problem is private ownership of productive assets.
======= Following R. Hale and M. Cohen isn't private property itself a grant of privilege by the state? So, if the right of speech is independent of the issue of ownership of property, then, again, where does the right of property grant a right to curtail speech if the government has no power to delegate the right to a curtailment of speech? I'm thinking here of Hale's notion of "private government" and the emergence of the doctrine of countervailing power.
>From a simple class perspective, when workers are being censored, abused,
whathaveyou by firms, they're feeling the direct effect of government by
it's very absence of defense of their rights. Those who are conscious of it
think that the firm is simply an authoritarian government by another name
and I think Hale for one would agree with them. So the Govt. is UNlimited
in it's capacity for self-abnegation [the ability to withhold countervailing
power]. Nothing in the Commerce Clause constrains it; only the 5th A serves
as a boundary constraint, and it's hard to see how protecting speech in the
workplace is a takings.
********* Well, the parchment isn't supposed to do much in the law of labor relations. Leaving aside govt. employees, that's a private matter between private parties, workers, unions, and private employers. It's regulated by the NLRA, passed under the Commerce Clause. You wouldn't expect the Constitution to do much work here. It does impinge here and there, but not a lot. Public employees have more in the way of constitutional rights of course, because their employer is the govt., which is restricted by the Constitution. GM can decide to fire all the socialist workers (both of them), and they can't do a thing at law. If the state of Michigan does likewise, they can hale it into court. ============
It seems obvious to this naif that the above is a violation of the equal protection clause. Why should govt. serfs have more rights on the job than corp. serfs? Also, by what you state, the CC serves as the constitutional "basement" for the NLRA just as the CC [& 14thA-implied] serves as the "basement" of title VII, so why can't 1A serve as the "basement" for speech rights on the job, just as the freedom of assembly clause indirectly serves as the basis for collective bargaining? I know it's ideology that's the reason it's fucked up for "private" employees in the US, but still the sophomoric itch scratches for the why behind the ideology.
*******
Btw, getting the Constitution out of labor relations was a great victory of left and Progressive activism of the 1920s and 1930s. From the 1890s to 1937, the courts used the due process clause of the Constitution to attack any laws that regulated labor relations.
Were they getting the C out of it or just using different parts of C to roll back the abuse of due process in the C by corporate lawyers and laissez-faire judges [again, Hale, Cohen, Hohfeld and Horowitz' take on LR]?
Thanks for the help,
Ian
btw you and some other folks might like this http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/special/alta/alta95/robertson.html