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Mike Elk

By Mike Elk
Union Organizer

Imagine if Republicans in Congress threatened to defund the Supreme Court because they didn’t like one of its decisions. Well, that’s almost what’s happening right now, as Republicans in Congress threaten to defund the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a quasi-judicial independent body tasked with prosecuting and enforcing labor law.

The whole controversy started when Boeing decided to not open a planned production line at a union facility in Puget Sound after workers went on strike in 2008. In 2007, Boeing announced it would create a second production line to produce three 787 Dreamliner planes a month in the Puget Sound, in addition to the production that was already occurring in Puget Sound. Then in October 2009, it was announced the company would move the second production line to a nonunion plant in South Carolina. Later, a Boeing official told the Seattle Times that Boeing moved the plant because of the strike and the union presence in Puget Sound.

Last month, NLRB General Counsel Lafe Solomon ruled that the decision to move production to a nonunion facility after a strike violates the ability to strike and collectively bargain enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act. This ruling stands in precedent with a long history of legal cases showing that threatening to move facilities if workers strike is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act (for more information on this precedent, see this factsheet released by the Board). (more…)

Mark Gruenberg

By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer

The Steelworkers’ drive for decent wages, working conditions and back pay for 18,000 exploited workers in Los Angeles-area car washes — a drive that produced a federal ruling precisely a year ago — yielded a big victory in court on Aug. 13: The two owners of the most-notorious car wash were sentenced to a year in jail, four years’ probation, ordered to open their records to government probes and will pay tens of thousands of dollars for environmental and safety violations.

The workers celebrated their win with a mass rally on Aug. 17 in front of the facility, the Vermont Hand Wash, reported Chloe Osmer of Steelworkers District 12.  The Steelworkers backed the car wash workers’ 2-1/2-year campaign for union recognition, dignity and respect on the job, and safe working conditions.

In late August 2009, that campaign had produced a sweeping National Labor Relations Board ruling for the workers, which Vermont Wash owners Benny and Nissan Pirian agreed to.  The owners also had to allot more than $52,000 in back pay to four workers they illegally fired for their union activities, and another $8,925 for work time the entire labor force lost when Vermont unplugged its time clock during union picketing

The job safety and health violations were turned over to city and state officials.

After settlement on those charges against the Pirians, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Maria Elena Durazo declared: “Today, carwash owners are on notice this is a new day in Los Angeles.  Abuse of workers will no longer go unchecked.”

The fine for those violations could be up to $1.25 million, radio news reports said.

“The Pirian brothers were held accountable because workers at the Pirian carwashes collectively stood up for their rights and for better conditions on the job. Their efforts to organize for a voice are finally bringing accountability to the carwash industry,” said Henry Huerta, director of the CLEAN Carwash Campaign.

In early 2009, the city attorney charged the Pirian brothers with 172 counts of violating job safety, environmental and state wage and hour laws at their four car wash businesses.  Each brother pleaded no contest to six counts, including conspiracy, grand theft and labor code violations, the city attorney’s office said.

Besides the year in jail, each Pirian received on four years’ probation, and they were ordered to keep detailed payroll and job health and safety records open for inspection by city, state and federal agencies.  The court also banned them from attempting to intimidate worker victims or witnesses.

Most of the car wash workers had to arrive 15 minutes before their shift started,  were forced to stay half an hour after the car wash closed — and weren’t paid for either hunk of time.  They were also discouraged or denied rest breaks, even in extreme heat. Most were paid a flat $35-$40 daily and four were paid only by their tips.

In the NLRB case, the agency issued a broad “cease and desist order,” which it uses “only against the most egregious labor law violators,” USW said.  It called the order “a dramatic victory for workers in an industry afflicted with sweatshop conditions.”

“Justice has been served.  We are proud to join car wash workers and others in the community in standing up to employers who intimidated, harassed and fired their employees for pursuing their legal right to safe working conditions and a voice on the job.  Their struggle for justice is our struggle,” USW President Leo Gerard said then.

The car wash workers and the Steelworkers mobilized an area-wide campaign, the Community-Labor Environmental Action Network (CLEAN) to demand justice for the car wash workers.

Luz Elena Oseguera, a union supporter fired from Vermont Hand Wash, told the crowd at the Aug. 17 rally, “I want to say to all carwasheros that what happened to the owners of this carwash means there is justice for us workers.  We are going to keep fighting until we have a union, because that’s the only way that we are going to have real justice on the job.”

“Carwash workers reported the violations that led to the criminal complaint, and to this conviction.  Owners should take notice that workers can — and will — continue to expose illegal workplace conditions in their fight for a voice at work,” added Huerta.

Press Associates, Inc. (PAI)

Mike Hall

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer 

In a 5-4 decision this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) cannot decide cases when it consists of just two board members. For more than two years the NLRB operated as a two-person board with three seats unfilled.  The two-member board-made up of one Democrat and one Republican-issued nearly 600 decisions. Before today, five federal appeals courts ruled that cases decided by the two-member board were valid. 

In March, President Ohama used recess appointments to fill two seats after Republican senators blocked President Obama’s nominees for months. 

Several employers objected to the two-person decisions and the Supreme Court agreed to review the issue in a case brought by New Process Steel. Says AFL-CIO General Counsel Lynn Rhinehart: 

As has become the norm, workers are once again penalized by corporate stall tactics. By the barest of majorities, five justices rewarded New Process Steel and other corporations who challenged the two-member NLRB decisions as a delay method to avoid respecting workers’ rights. 

Workers in these cases now face further delay as the NLRB is forced to sort out and deal with the impact of the court’s decision.  The AFL-CIO supported the NLRB’s position in this case and believes the NLRB had the far better argument.  We regret that as a result of the court’s decision, workers in these cases will have to wait longer still for justice. 

According to BNA’s Daily Labor Report, in March 2003, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum finding that “if the Board delegated all of its powers to a group of three members, that group could continue to issue decisions and orders as long as a quorum of two members remained.” 

In December 2007, when the NLRB had four sitting members and the terms of two of them were set to expire, it delegated its authority to a group of three or more members. As the AFL-CIO brief supporting the NLRB points out: 

The long and the short of the matter is that Congress has provided that once the full Board has delegated Board decision making powers to a designated groups of three or more members [which the Board did in December of 2007], two members of that groups may exercise the delegated powers…. 

In his dissenting opinion Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote: 

the objectives of the statute, which  must be to ensure orderly operations when the Board is not at full strength as well as efficient operations when it is, are better respected by a statutory interpretation that dictates a result opposite to the one reached by the Court. 

Kimberly Freeman Brown, Executive Director of American Rights at Work, says the ruling, “after fierce corporate pressure,” 

adds insult to injury for thousands of workers across America.. . . Decisions in cases already decided by the NLRB will have to be re-opened, needlessly delaying finality for workers who were led to believe they already had it. 

Notwithstanding these developments, the NLRB must still address serious issues faced by workers in this economy by enacting tougher remedies on lawbreaking employers, demanding swift justice for illegally fired workers, and protecting workers’ rights to a first contract to the fullest extent of the law. 

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the court’s opinion, and was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined with Kennedy’s dissent 

*** 

Re-Posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Corporate CEOs, union-busting lawyers, and conservative politicians who pander to the rich condemned a National Mediation Board (NMB) Ruling this week.

They complained that the NMB gave railway and airline workers the ability to obtain collective bargaining rights through majority-rule elections. That’s the type of balloting that occurs under universal democratic rules. Everyone qualified to vote is invited to participate, and the outcome is determined by the majority of those who cast ballots.

The anti-worker-rights groups wanted the NMB to retain a different kind of election – one that requires the winner to receive votes from the majority of all of those qualified to participate — essentially, a supermajority.

This is an exciting new development. Up until now CEOs, union-busters, and particularly conservative Republicans, have actively opposed the Employee Free Choice Act, mainly because of a provision they call “card check.” But card check provides exactly what they now say that they want – a determination made by the majority of all of those qualified to participate. So, clearly, since they’re so upset by the end of supermajority rule for airline and railroad workers, they’d be happy if Congress intervened and instituted it for all workers by passing the Employee Free Choice Act.  

For a little over 70 years, the NMB, which governs collective bargaining by airline and railroad workers, mandated supermajorities. When a group of workers, let’s say Delta Airline Flight Attendants, sought the right to collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions, the NMB conducted an election in which it counted those who voted yes as supporting the proposal; those who voted no as opposing, and all those who didn’t vote as opposing.

The NMB arbitrarily placed the non-voters in the “no” ballot box. To win an election, the NMB required collective bargaining supporters to receive votes from a majority of all those eligible – those who voted combined with those whose ballots the NMB inexplicably stuffed in the “no” box after they did not vote.  

Compounding that supermajority obstacle was the NMB practice of permitting employers to determine who was eligible to vote, then excusing them from providing that list to workers seeking collective bargaining. This created an incentive for employers to “accidently” include the names of workers who’d quit or retired — ineligible voters whose inability to cast ballots created automatic “no” votes. Writing about losing an election in 2008, Delta flight attendant Linda Sorenson said airline officials released its list after the balloting. Among other problems, it included the name of a deceased worker. Sorenson wrote:

“The company acknowledged her death, but the NMB – whose . . . chair had been a Northwest (airline) lobbyist – refused to remove her. She became a vote against representation.”

Airline and railroad workers found the supermajority rule confounding in what is supposed to be a democratic system. Writing the NMB to request the rule change, Jamin B. Raskin, a law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, noted that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1937 that a supermajority is not required, partly because established democratic practice is:

“Those who do not participate ‘are presumed to assent to the expressed will of the majority of those voting.’”

The NMB ignored the Supreme Court and continued requiring a supermajority – until Monday. Then it joined the National Labor Relations Board, which complied with the Supreme Court decision and allowed majority-rule elections for the vast majority of U.S. workers whose collective bargaining rights it governs.  

The minute the NMB proposed the change to majority-rule elections last fall, anti-worker-rights groups started pitching a fit. Union-busting law firm Winston & Strawn wrote, for example, that the NMB should not change a rule that had been in effect for nearly 75 years. It contended that elections for workers should be different from elections for political candidates and referendums:

“The change would enable unions to obtain representation simply by winning a majority of votes cast, as opposed to a majority of all employees eligible to vote on the issue . . . Under the proposed new rule, a minority of workers could effectively select a union representative on behalf of a much larger potential bargaining unit.”

Conservative Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia agreed, protesting in a news release that Monday’s decision gave workers the same rights as all others in a democratic system:

“The final rule change, which was issued today, would affect companies under the jurisdiction of the Railway Labor Act by allowing union elections to be decided by only a majority of workers who cast ballots, reducing the number of votes it takes for a union to win.”

The solution to Isakson’s complaint is passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. That legislation would require consent of a majority of eligible workers for the awarding of collective bargaining rights.

Under the Employee Free Choice Act, workers seeking collective bargaining rights would collect signatures among their co-workers. If more than half of all eligible workers signed cards in support, the NLRB or NMB would recognize the workers as having the right to collectively bargain with the employer for the benefit of all of the workers.

This process would guarantee that a majority of all eligible workers supported collective bargaining before it could occur. It is a process that was routinely used to secure collective bargaining rights in the early days of union organizing in this country. It gives anti-worker-rights groups such as Winston & Strawn exactly what they’re demanding – a supermajority.

The process is not an election. But with secret balloting, requiring a supermajority is undemocratic. No one can be compelled to vote in a democratic system. And counting those who don’t vote as supporters of collective bargaining is just as logical as tallying them as unanimously opposed.

The solution provided in the Employee Free Choice Act is elegant and historically valid. It’s great that Isakson and his fellow conservative Republicans in the U.S. Senate now back the supermajority concept that the Employee Free Choice Act achieves through “card check.”

Richard Trumka

By Richard Trumka
President, AFL-CIO

Senate Republican obstructionists are working overtime to block the interests of working people. Today we hear the White House and Senate have cut a deal with Republicans that will keep President Obama’s nominees off the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for even longer.

The NLRB’s job is to protect workers’ rights — but for more than two years it has been functioning with only two members instead of the five it should have. Working people need an NLRB that can enforce the National Labor Relations Act — not one hobbled by vacancies.

President Obama’s nominees — Craig Becker and Mark Pearce — are highly qualified, well-respected labor lawyers who were nominated seven months ago, in July.

But Senate Republicans have ignored the working people they represent and blocked the appointments.

Yesterday, in a deal with the Republican minority, the Senate confirmed 27 non-controversial Obama appointees. The White House apparently has agreed not to make Presidents Day recess appointments — a process that allows the president to temporarily appoint his own nominee while Congress is out of session. That means NLRB nominees — and working people — are out in the cold.

A big win for the Republicans. A big win for corporations that want to file down the teeth of the NLRB. A big loss for working people.

We’re used to the Republicans playing the role of Lucy and yanking the football away each time Charlie Brown tries to kick it. We’ve seen it on health care, jobs legislation, you name it.

President Obama has to end this farce.

Becker already received majority approval from the Senate, but apparently majority rule isn’t good enough any more. A Republican filibuster — joined by Democrats Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) — blocked his nomination from going forward. By contrast, when President Bush made his initial appointments to the NLRB, a package of nominees including three management lawyers was approved unanimously.

So today and every day through the congressional recess, union members and other activists from working America will be calling the White House and demanding a recess appointment now for Craig Becker and Mark Pearce.

These next few weeks will be crucial in building support for a fully functional NLRB. Progressives should take every opportunity to let their congressional representatives and the White House know that protection of workers’ rights is one of the first and most important changes working people expected to see when they voted in 2008. It’s been 13 months since the inauguration — it’s time.

Give recess appointments to Craig Becker and Mark Pearce during the Presidents Day recess so the NLRB can do its job.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Randel K. Johnson, vice president of that esteemed group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, recently revealed a corporate-squelched truth in a slip of the tongue.

During a debate on May 15 with Stewart Acuff of the AFL-CIO about the Employee Free Choice Act, Johnson admitted – finally – that the act preserves secret ballot elections for unions. The act would allow workers – rather than employers – to decide whether to form a union by conducting a secret ballot election or by collecting signed membership cards from a majority of workers.

Incredibly, for as much as unearned-bonus-grubbing-CEOs have lied about secret ballots in their relentless campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act, that was not Johnson’s revelation.

No, here’s what he disclosed: If the act passes, he said, “It would be a rare union that would decide to risk a normal secret ballot election.” 

Risk. Interesting word, Mr. Johnson.

The Chamber of Commerce knows there’s a huge risk to secret ballot elections. And the Chamber likes it that way. Employers stack the deck against workers in secret ballot elections. They don’t publicly admit it though. That’s why Johnson’s use of the word “risk” was so surprising.

The Chamber and big corporations like Wal-Mart are intent on defeating the act because it would remove from employers the power to force workers to conduct secret ballot elections.  It would strip from employers that ability to generate risk, to defeat unions, and thus to further shrink wages and the American middle class.

A Cornell University professor, Kate Bronfenbrenner, who has researched labor issues for a quarter century, issued a new study last week that clearly illustrates the risk of secret ballot elections and how employers have labored long and hard to increase that risk in recent years. It’s called, “No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organization.”

Among the tactics she documents employers using in the weeks before the “secret ballot” election to thwart unionization are firing of union organizers, threats to close the plant or cut wages and benefits, and forcing workers to meet one-on-one with supervisors who intimidate and interrogate them to determine whether they support the union.

Bronfenbrenner concluded, “This combination of threats, interrogation, surveillance, and harassment has ensured that there is no such thing as a democratic ‘secret ballot’ in the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) certification election process. The progression of actions the employer has taken can ensure that the employer knows exactly which way every worker plans to vote long before the election takes place.”

Her study showed employers implementing these tactics more frequently than in the past. When she compared organizing campaigns in this five-year period to those in the studies over the previous 20 years, she discovered two disconcerting facts: the cases in which employers used 10 of these threatening techniques in the run-up to elections more than doubled. And employers focused much more on coercive and punitive methods rather than positive procedures such as unscheduled raises and promotions.

Not surprisingly, she also found that as employers exploited harsher tactics and intensified their attacks in the weeks before “secret balloting,” the union was more likely to lose. And, conversely, she found that in campaigns where public sector workers tried organizing and government agencies refrained from coercive and illegal tactics, the union was significantly more likely to win.

If it weren’t so easy for employers to create risk for workers, millions more could get the union protection they want. Surveys show an increasing number of American workers desire a union. In the mid 1990s, it was 40 percent. Now it’s 53 percent. Yet only 12.4 percent of American workers have that protection – and the better wages and benefits that go with it.

Bronfenbrenner addressed this issue in her report: “Our findings suggest that the aspirations for representation are being thwarted by a coercive and punitive climate for organizing that goes unrestrained due to a fundamentally flawed regulatory regime that neither protects their rights nor provides any disincentive for employers to continue disregarding the law.”

She continues: “Unless serious labor law reform with real penalties is enacted, only a fraction of the workers who seek representation under the National Labor Relations Act will be successful.”

That reform is the Employee Free Choice Act, and there’s the point of Johnson’s use of the word risk. The Chamber of Commerce intends to kill the act and leave risk fully on the shoulders of workers. As Bronfenbrenner showed, that would mean fewer will be unionized. Middle class wages and benefits would continue to decline.

It is time for American workers to stop bearing all of the risk. They’re working for less and bailing out the very people who are obstructing their ability to fairly bargain for more.

In October, Bank of America, which has received more than $45 billion in taxpayer bailout money, hosted a conference call with conservatives and business officials, including a representative of AIG, which has received more than $100 billion in taxpayer bailout money, to organize opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act. Then in March, just days after the act was introduced, Citigroup Inc., which got $50 billion in bailout money, hosted a similar conference call, this one led by Glenn Spencer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

During the October call, Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, said he should be on a 350-foot boat in the Mediterranean, but he thought fighting the Employee Free Choice Act was more important because, “This is the demise of a civilization. . . This is how a civilization disappears.”

Yes, the Employee Free Choice Act could contribute ever so slightly to dissipation of a decadent class. Unionization is how the middle class re-emerges. America could do without a few filthy-rich boys lolling on yachts in the Mediterranean. At the heart of America, however, must be a strong and broad middle class.

Sally Kalson

They are manufacturing lies to keep workers from joining unions

By Sally Kalson
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Columnist

In the annals of big lies, it’s hard to top the tobacco companies’ insistence that smoking (a) did not cause lung cancer and (b) was inexorably linked to America’s rugged individualism.

Then along came the campaign to kill the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that would make it easier for workers to form unions and harder for companies to intimidate and fire them if they try. The law would reverse decades of impotence on the part of the National Labor Relations Board, which has been reduced to a toothless body that employers barely bother to acknowledge anymore.

The assault against the free choice act rivals the tobacco campaign for sheer chutzpah by insisting that union busting (a) does not erode the middle class and (b) is inexorably linked to business’s deep regard for the sacred “freedom” of American workers. Which might be true if you’re talking about the freedom to be paid less for working more with no health insurance, pension or job security, but otherwise is a real laugh riot. MORE

Sally Kalson is a columnist for the Post-Gazette and a 25-year member and longtime officer of The Newspaper Guild/CWA Local 38061 (skalson@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1610). More articles by this author

Jon Geenen

By Jon Geenen
International vice president

The American business community is pulling together to ensure that workers’ democratic rights in the workplace are preserved. In fact, they are spending millions and millions of dollars on behalf of the workers whose rights they seek to protect. What?

The absurdity of this is obvious. These are the same people who have fought every initiative to increase minimum wage. These are the people who provided unwavering support of NAFTA and other offshoring efforts that have decimated our manufacturing base. These are the people who worked tirelessly to defeat new health and safety regulations and environmental efforts related to cleaner water and air and safer chemicals, not to mention their vehement opposition to health care reform.

The American business community claims there is a travesty associated with the Employee Free Choice Act, and they are right. But the travesty has nothing to do with secret ballots. Like the master illusionist creating an act of prestidigitation, corporate America is undermining democracy, while at the same time pretending to be its biggest defender in the workplace.

The media efforts and the unlimited money provide a glimpse to the general public about how far corporations will go and how much they will spend to prevent workers from organizing a union. To be sure, their “democracy campaign” is a textbook strategy straight out of the union-busters handbook, complete with intensive misinformation campaigns, threats of plant closures, doom and gloom and the ostracizing and isolation of pro-union workers as un-American or out of sync with their peers. This time, rather than doing it to a worker in a plant, they are doing it to the general public.

The corporate-funded campaign attacks EFCA as undemocratic and warns that if passed into law, workers would lose access to a secret ballot election as a way to determine majority status for union representation. There is one problem with that. Workers absolutely would be entitled to a secret ballot election under EFCA.

EFCA would not prohibit or otherwise limit the use of the secret ballot. What it would do is say that the decision for workers about how and whether to form a union is a decision that is left workers – not to their bosses.

These opponents also would have you believe that somehow signing your name on a card to indicate your interest in a union is somehow a new or novel approach to organizing. There is a problem with this, too. That is how it works today and, for the most part, how it has worked since the 1930s. In order for workers to gain collective bargaining rights, workers always have had to demonstrate majority support. Signing cards or providing signatures is the first step in forming a union.

So what really would change with EFCA? Employees alone would decide how to show majority status in a unionization campaign. Why does corporate America really care? Because their ability to “intervene” becomes limited. You see, even though many progressive employers recognize unions by the card check method today, those that don’t know that by demanding a National Labor Relations Board election, they gain 42 precious days to run an anti-union campaign where they can fire, demote, coerce, threaten and intimidate workers with little consequence and effectively block workers’ attempts to (ironically) democratize the workplace. Under EFCA, employees would be more likely to have made that decision before the boss finds out, making the matter a decision for workers and workers alone as the Wagner Act originally envisioned.

Unfortunately, business knows what we all know: that except for the small minority of people who are simply philosophically opposed to unions, the rest of us believe, whether we belong to a union or not, that the right to unionize is a critical component of a democratic society. Democracy does not and cannot exist where strong and independent trade unions do not exist. In our country, the rise and fall of personal rights and liberty have paralleled the rise and fall of the labor movement. Why? Because the labor movement is a unique social movement that lends its voice to all working families, uniting the masses. This is what corporate America fears but doesn’t dare say – because that truly would be undemocratic.

The so-called democracy card is simply a red herring.

This piece was first published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on March 13, 2009

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Kosher abuse
In May, when immigration officials raided the kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa and hauled out 389 undocumented workers, the news was all about immigration violations, but now the focus is on the employer, Agriprocessors Inc.
That’s because it turns out that while purportedly giving ritual consideration to the animals to be slaughtered, Agriprocessors failed to treat with dignity, or legality, the teenagers, and children, some as young as 13, in its employ. The 57 adolescents, some working 17-hour shifts, six days a week, testified to wielding knives and other dangerous tools prohibited for young workers.
The Agriprocessors incident raises difficult questions in the Jewish community. If meat is denied the kosher label because the animal does not die within seconds of precise slitting, is it kosher when the 13-year-old child who processed it was illegally hired, worked a 17 hour day and was refused overtime pay? What if a 16-year-old undocumented youth, who put in 17-hour shifts, six days a week, leaving no time for anything but work and sleep, said in an affidavit, “I felt like I was a slave?”
These violations happened in Iowa, but they occur elsewhere as well, for a simple reason: the Wal-Mart mentality.

Soulless corporate mindset

We have allowed that soulless, unpatriotic global-corporate mindset to control government policy. As a result, the rich have gotten richer while the middle class has paid the bill and gone bankrupt. The great builder and protector of the middle class, collective bargaining, has been eroded by deliberate corporate actions over the past quarter century. Meanwhile, the national debt has increased; inflation and unemployment are up, and foreclosure signs mar every neighborhood.
Corporate lobbyists secured from compliant politicians so-called free trade agreements that have resulted in the loss of millions of good paying, often unionized manufacturing jobs. Those jobs have gone to third-world countries where investigations have shown workers often labor long, grueling hours and are not even paid their own countries’ minimum wage. Then their products are shipped back to the U.S. to be sold at cheap prices at Wal-Mart by workers who are paid less than a living wage and are denied full-time status and health insurance.
What comes around, goes around in the Wal-Mart world. When uninsured Wal-Mart workers get sick, American taxpayers foot the bill. They pay for coverage through Medicaid, the health insurance plan for the poor. That’s what the Walton family, which owns Wal-Mart, banks on. Literally banks on. When American taxpayers step up and pay for half of all Wal-Mart employees’ health care, that certainly helps the Waltons stay among the 25 wealthiest families in the world.
Wal-Mart workers would benefit tremendously from forming a union. Workers who belong to unions earn 30 percent more than nonunion workers, and they are 59 percent more likely to have employer-provided health insurance. The same goes for those workers at Agriprocessors. If they had a union, it could file grievances over the hiring of children, against unpaid overtime and about unsafe working conditions.
In surveys, more than half of U.S. workers, nearly 60 million, say they would join a union immediately if they could. But they don’t get that opportunity under the current Wal-Mart mentality global-corporate system. The political system has been stacked against collective bargaining. Global corporations hire “union busters” to intimidate, harass and fire workers who try to organize unions. Workers are fired in a quarter of the campaigns where workers try to organize unions at private companies. Even when workers successfully form unions, they can’t get a first contract 44 percent of the time because companies refuse to bargain meaningfully.

Employee Free Choice

There is a solution for this problem. It’s called the Employee Free Choice Act. It would restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain. It would allow workers to create unions by collecting signatures from a majority of workers. As it is now, a company can demand an election for a union. Under the Employee Free Choice Act, workers may have an election if they want one, but the signatures are sufficient in most cases. This puts the workers in control of their union instead of the company.
The Employee Free Choice Act also would increase penalties for companies that intimidate and fire employees trying to form unions. And it would establish mediation and binding arbitration when the employer and the workers cannot agree on a first contract.
The Employee Free Choice Act has bipartisan support in Congress and polls show it is backed by two-thirds of the American public, including Republicans. It passed easily in the House last year, but in the Senate got only 51 votes, not the 60 needed to stop a Republican filibuster.
Fearing the Employee Free Choice Act could win in the Senate if a few more Democrats secure seats there in the fall elections, Wal-Mart took action in recent weeks. Obviously, Wal-Mart fears that Employee Free Choice means less money for the Waltons, and more free choice for its employees.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Wal-Mart executives began indoctrinating thousands of store managers and department heads about what the company claims are the evils of unionization in an attempt to get them to vote Republican. These managers told reporters that the executives informed them that workers would be forced to pay large amounts of union dues and get nothing in return and be obliged to go on strike and get no compensation.

Contracts like CEOs

Apparently the nation’s largest private employer failed to mention that a portion of union dues goes into a strike fund to provide money for workers who vote to strike. In addition, what workers get for union dues is a contract, guaranteeing them certain salaries and benefits – like the contracts CEOs demand when they are hired by boards of directors.
All of this from a company that flies rapid response teams out to any of its more than 5,000 Wal-Mart stores worldwide to quash brewing union activity.
Global corporations like Wal-Mart have hired the likes of Coalition for a Democratic Workplace and Employee Freedom Action Committee, run by former tobacco lobbyist Rick Berman, to blockade the Employee Free Choice Act. They are trying to make big business out to be David in this David and Goliath struggle, although it is union membership that has shrunk to David size over the past half century. Since its height in 1953, when 35 percent of workers belonged to unions, membership has now fallen to 12.1 percent.
A big part of the reason for that is constant harassment by big business. Let’s go back to Agriprocessors. Three years ago, Human Rights Watch investigated working conditions in the meatpacking business and found, among other things, that companies often use illegal tactics to crush union organizing efforts. The report, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants,” says that when workers tried to defend themselves against harsh working conditions by forming unions, employers used fear and intimidation to stop them. “U.S. law does little to protect workers who try to organize. Enforcement efforts drag on for years, and even decisions that favor workers are usually too little, too late,” report author Lance Compa wrote.
He offered this example: At the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., management fired union supporters, threatened plant closure, stationed police at plant gates to intimidate workers and orchestrated an assault on union activists. When the National Labor Relations Board ordered a new election, Smithfield immediately appealed. In 2000, Smithfield created a company security force that under North Carolina law had public police powers. In 2003, it used trumped-up charges, Compa said, to arrest workers who were active union supporters.

Human rights

The meatpacking industry chooses to use undocumented workers, Human Watch found, because they are easily intimidated. As in Agriprocessor, immigration officials will swoop in and take away a large chunk of a meat packing work force at the drop of a quarter in a pay phone. Human Rights Watch found that some employers use this ability as a threat against undocumented workers who are trying to organize unions.
In addition, what employers like Smithfield and Agriprocessor have up their sleeve is a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling saying that undocumented workers who are illegally fired for union organizing are not entitled to back pay for lost wages.
Despite all of Wal-Mart’s money and conniving, on rare occasions, a union organizing effort wins. And then, the global giant responds by shutting them down.
In 2000, when the United Food and Commercial Workers finally organized a small number of butchers in East Texas, Wal-Mart immediately phased out butchers at all of its stores and stocked prepackaged meat. Similarly, when a store in Canada voted to unionize, Wal-Mart closed the whole store, contending it had been unprofitable.
This really comes down to a moral issue, just like it does for Jews who question whether meat processed by child laborers in abusive, illegal conditions is really kosher. The question for this country is whether it is moral to allow continued rule by Wal-Mart mentality, with its cheap imported wares of dubious safety manufactured under questionable conditions in foreign countries, then imported and sold in stores by American workers paid less than a living wage and denied health care and the right to organize a union.
Restoring workers’ freedom to organize and bargain collectively would protect them against the kinds of abuses alleged Agriprocessors. And it would begin to rebuild America’s great middle class as well as re-establish one of our country’s fundamental liberties: the right of free association.