YOUR RIGHTS NEED
CLAWS.
Since 1935, two coworkers talking about pay have been a legal union. Since about 1975, using that right has been a firing offense with no real penalty.
The CLAWS Act doesn’t create new rights. It creates consequences — real penalties, protection in days not years, and anonymous documentation — so the oldest right in American labor law is finally safe to use.
Read the Act Join Your District Get the BookA right you can be safely fired for using isn’t a right. It’s bait.
Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act protects every covered worker who acts together with coworkers to improve pay and conditions — no union card required. Then comes the fine print history wrote:
Zero penalties
The NLRA carries no civil penalties. An employer who illegally fires you for organizing owes, at worst, your back pay — minus whatever you earned surviving. Violation is cheaper than compliance, and priced accordingly.
Justice on their clock
Cases grind for months and years while rent comes every month. Delay isn’t a flaw in the employer’s strategy — it is the strategy. Most workers sign away their claim long before any ruling.
You can’t sue
Labor rights are the rare rights with no courtroom: one overwhelmed federal agency holds exclusive jurisdiction. If it can’t protect you — and it can’t — nobody does.
Two parties don’t independently forget the same idea for fifty years. The direct solution is missing from both catalogs because worker leverage is the one reform that neither party’s donors can live with. Everything else is negotiable. That, and only that, is off the table.
— The Break Room Union, Prologue
“Two coworkers comparing paychecks are already a legal union.
They’ve just never been told — because under today’s enforcement, telling them is teaching them how to get fired.“
That’s the break room union: the smallest, most common, most American union there is — 150 million strong, pre-organized in every workplace in the country, waiting on one missing ingredient. Safety.
Price. Speed. Quiet. Choice.
Every provision converges on one moment: two workers deciding whether it’s safe to lean in. CLAWS removes every “no” in the room.
Penalties that reach the boardroom
Up to $50,000 per violation — $100,000 for repeat offenders who fire workers — up to $1,000,000 extra for systematic campaigns. Executives and managers who direct violations face personal liability. Willful, systematic retaliation becomes criminal.
Protection that outruns the rent
Fired for speaking up? Expedited hearing in 7 days, temporary reinstatement in 14. Emergency income, health coverage, and housing help within 7 days — funded by violators’ own penalties. Agency misses its deadline? Take it straight to federal court.
REPS: document without a target on your back
The Rapid Employee Protection System: register anonymously, log violations with government-verified timestamps, reveal your identity only when you choose. Retaliation within 90 days of protected activity is presumed illegal — the employer must prove otherwise.
The courtroom door, unlocked
For the first time since 1935, workers can sue in federal court — back pay without offsets, double liquidated damages, punitive damages for willful violators, attorney’s fees paid. Starving the agency stops being a strategy.
No coercion. From anyone.
No worker can be forced to join anything — and no worker can be punished for joining together. Employer pressure and union pressure are banned alike. Both halves of freedom, finally enforced.
Punish the tollbooth, not the traveler
Employers and agents who commit visa fraud face real prison exposure and debarment. Defrauded visa workers become protected witnesses instead of hostages. Displaced American workers get their own federal lawsuit — with doubled damages.
The Congress we have won’t pass it.
So we’re building the one that will.
No more petitioning the people who built the problem. The sequence has an order, and it can’t be shuffled.
The Congress
People Primaries — district by district, both parties’ primaries, one filter: no corporate money, no exceptions. Delivery date: the 121st Congress, January 2029.
The Law
The CLAWS Act — the mandate every People Primaries candidate signs for. Not a vibe. A bill, with a text your district read before the candidate did.
The Rights
Then — finally — we teach 150 million workers how to use the rights they’ve had since 1935. Safely. That’s the book we get to write next.
The Break Room Union
Both parties built catalogs of answers for everything except the question: why don’t wages go up? This book names the silence, walks you through the right you were never told you have, and lays out the exact sequence — People Primaries → CLAWS → your raise — that makes it safe to use.
Companion to UNINCORPORĀTUS. Readable in a weekend. Written to be handed to a coworker.
Get it on Amazon Read the Web EditionAdd CLAWS to the law.
170 million of us. 435 districts. One bill. The knowledge was the danger — now it’s the plan. Building petition power that Congress can’t ignore.
Join Your District Read the Act