Another labor note

Tim also had a link to an article in Counterpunch noting that

some labor supporters of the president-elect fear he may be backing away from a key campaign promise to workers threatened by recession.

While running for office, Obama said he strongly backed the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a long overdue labor law reform measure that should be part of his promised economic stimulus plan. However, when Obama introduced his top economic advisors on Nov. 25 and talked about steps to “jolt” the economy in January, EFCA was not part of the package. More disturbingly, his new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, declined to say whether the White House would support EFCA when he was questioned about it at a Wall Street Journal-sponsored “CEO Forum” earlier in November.

The EFCA, as I expect you know, would amend the National Labor Relations Act to allow for certification of a union when a majority of employees in a bargaining unit sign union authorization cards. Under current law, when 30% of eligible employees sign, there is an election.

There has always been a flaw, a type of uneven playing field, in that original setup in that it gives employers the ability to manipulate elections and break the law without effective penalty. If a union wins an election and is later determined to have done so unfairly (and even cheap and frivolous claims of impropriety can be successful), the result is overturned. In that case, the union has lost ground: The union had been recognized as the bargaining agent, now it's not. If management wins and is later determined to have done so unfairly (and in those cases the standards for what is "unfair" seem to be considerably higher), the result is again overturned - but management hasn't lost anything: Before the election, there was no union. After the election, there was no union. After the results were overturned, there is still no union. There is sometimes a small fine, but usually the only penalty to management for cheating is a new election. Management wins a heavy majority of such new elections because workers get discouraged, tired, ground down, and intimidated by management threats to "close up shop" or "move elsewhere" if the union wins; and sometimes they just get snowed by the lies.

Business interests, of course, respond to this grievous threat of a level field by spinning On the Waterfront fantasies of violence and physical intimidation by union goons as being a routine part of unionization campaigns and declaring EFCA would strip workers of the precious right to a "secret ballot," an argument that might have some chance of being persuasive if these same corporations didn't struggle so hard to avoid getting to the point of having such an election in their facilities at all. But clearly what they're really afraid of is workers having a real voice in the conditions under which they labor.

"The louder they squeal, the better a grip you know you have" is turning out to be a useful phrase.

Oh, and my assertion that even "cheap and frivolous claims of impropriety" made by management against unions can be successful is based on personal experience: I was involved in a campaign to unionize some nurses at a hospital. After they won the election, management sued to have the result tossed out, charging the union violated labor law. (Another management advantage is that the costs of such suits are tax deductible as a business expense.)

The basis for their claim was this: Union supporters had been handing out NLRB brochures about the right to organize. One of them was asked when the election was going to be. So she handwrote the date on some of the brochures with the note "Vote yes." No one knows just how many such brochures there were; management produced precisely six. Nonetheless, management claimed the written notes created the appearance that the NLRB favored the union and so tainted the election. In what I still find a jaw-dropping decision, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, threw out the results, and ordered a new election - which, as typically happens, the union lost.

As a footnote to that, shortly thereafter that same hospital cut some benefits. To the astonished cries of some nurses that "They can't do that!" others replied "Of course they can - because we don't have a union."

A few years later, the hospital fired every RN on staff on a Friday and invited them to apply for a sharply reduced number of jobs on Monday. Interestingly, not a single nurse who was within about a year of being vested in the pension plan was among those rehired.

Footnote: I'll take this opening to say there's something about The Big O's "economic team" which I noticed (and I think a few others, though I didn't see it much discussed): neither the Secretary of Commerce nor the Secretary of Labor made the cut. Which I suspect tells us a lot about what priorities that "team" has.