had pressured it not to until a dispute was resolved. Most recently in Chamber of Commerce v Brown seven judges on the Supreme Court held that California was preempted from passing a law prohibiting any recipient of state funds either from using money to promote or deter union organizing efforts. Breyer J and Ginsburg J dissented because the law was simply neutral to the bargaining process. State governments may, however, use their funds to procure corporations to do work that are union or labor friendly. Collective action The right of labor to take collective action, including the right to strike, has been fundamental to common law, federal law, and international law for over a century. As New York teacher unions argued in the 1960s, "If you can't call a strike you don't have real collective bargaining, you have 'collective begging.'" During the 19th century, many courts upheld the right to strike, but others issued injunctions to frustrate strikes, and when the Sherman Act of 1890 was passed to prohibit business combinations in restraint of trade, it was first used against labor unions. This resulted in Eugene Debs, American Railway Union leader and future Socialist Presidential candidate, being imprisoned for taking part in the Pullman Strike. The Supreme Court persisted in Loewe v Lawlor in imposing damages for strikes under antitrust law, until Congress passed the Clayton Act of 1914. Seen as "the Magna Carta of America's workers", this proclaimed that all collective action by workers was outside antitrust law under the commerce clause, because "labor is not a commodity or article of commerce". It became fundamental that no antitrust sanctions could be imposed, if "a union acts in its self-interest and does not combine with non-labor groups." The same principles entered the founding documents of the International Labour Organization in 1919. Finally at the end of the Lochner era the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 §157 enshrined the right "to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection" and in §163, the "right to strike". Although federal law guarantees the right to strike, American labor unions face the most severe constraints in the developed world in taking collective action. First, the law constrains the purposes for which strikes are allowed. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 only covers "employees" in the private sector, and a variety of state laws