* Dreier supports the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would make it easier for union organizers to intimidate workers into forming new unions. According to Dreier, the EFCA “would give workers a fair and direct path to form unions through a majority sign up,… help them secure a contract within a reasonable period of time, and toughen penalties against employers who violate workers’ rights.”
* An advocate of living-wage laws, Dreier in 2007 cited, as a model worthy of emulating, the example of Los Angeles, where the minimum wage for city employees was $9.39 per hour with health benefits, or $10.64 per hour without benefits—both figures considerably higher than the national minimum wage. Many economists have noted that minimum-wage and living-wage increases invariably lead to higher unemployment rates, particularly among those at the lower end of the pay scale. As of February 2015, the unemployment rate in Los Angeles County was 44% higher than the national average.
* Dreier co-authored the books Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century (2005), and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City(2006). He authored The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (2012).
* Dreier has written many pieces for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and The American Prospect.
* In September 2009, Dreier wrote an op-ed in the Huffington Post titled “First They Came for ACORN,” a piece lamenting that “Democrats did not speak out” in ACORN’s defense when “Big Business,” “the Religious Right,” and various conservative broadcasters and politicians attacked the group. As journalist Matthew Vadum put it, the op-ed’s title was “Dreier’s cute little way of calling all of ACORN’s critics Nazis.”
* In a September 2009 appearance on the Rachel Maddow television show, Dreier portrayed ACORN as the victim of a massive conspiracy orchestrated by big business and the GOP. He also claimed, falsely, that the group had done everything in its power to prevent the devastating subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. In reality, ACORN had worked tirelessly to force banks to lend money to uncreditworthy borrowers—precisely the practice that laid the groundwork for financial calamity.