No Friend of Labor
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No Friend of Labor
By Dmitri Iglitzin and Steven Hill
The Los Angeles Times
Saturday 09 December 2006
Thanks in part to the National Labor Relations Board, most American
workers haven’t seen their share of the booming economy.
While President Bush points to low unemployment and a resurgent stock
market as signs of a strong economy, most Americans don’t feel so bullish.
Median incomes are flat, healthcare costs are soaring, pensions are being
de-funded and corporate employers are threatening to shred the social
contract with their employees that has prevailed for 60 years.
The balance of economic power has become increasingly one-sided, and
one reason is that a key institution - the National Labor Relations Board,
the country’s chief arbiter of labor disputes - remains solidly in
anti-worker hands. Although a quasi-judicial entity appointed by the
president and empowered to adjudicate labor disputes, the NLRB actually
sets the rules that govern those disputes and thereby exerts an enormous
influence over who prevails. In case after case, the Republican-dominated
board has taken positions that have hurt American workers.
In one recent case, the Oakwood Healthcare decision, the board found
(by its usual 3-2 Republican majority) that a group of Michigan nurses are
excluded from the protection of the nation’s most important labor laws on
the spurious grounds that they are “supervisors,” not employees. In one
stroke, these workers - and potentially tens of thousands of others - lost
the right to be in a union and to advocate collectively for workplace
improvements.
The same day as the Oakwood decision in late September, the board also
cut back on the right of employees to wear union buttons at work. That case
arose out of a dispute in San Diego at the W Hotel, which, according to its
owner, the Starwood Hotels & Resorts chain, seeks to give its guests a
“wonderland” hotel experience where they get “whatever they want, whenever
they want it.” For its employees, however - mostly low-paid Latino laborers
- the hotel is no wonderland. Some wore buttons bearing four words -
“Justice Now! Justicia Ahora!” - and the name of their union. The W
demanded workers take them off.
The NLRB sided with the W because the buttons were “controversial.” W
guests now need not worry about having their wonderland experience marred
by seeing employees exercise their 1st Amendment rights. That rule is now
precedent and can be applied to workers in labor disputes across the country.
But what happened in San Diego is nothing compared to what happened to
workers in Jacksonville, Texas, just the day before. Back in 2000, the
employees of a small meat-cutting department at a Jacksonville Wal-Mart
voted to unionize. A week later, Wal-Mart announced that it was phasing out
in-store meat-cutting departments nationwide. It took six years for the
NLRB to conclude that Wal-Mart had unlawfully retaliated against workers
trying to unionize. Even then, the board disregarded the ruling of its own
administrative law judge and decided that, even though Wal-Mart violated
the law, it can’t be ordered to restore the unionized meat department.
These are just the latest among dozens of anti-worker NLRB decisions
in recent years. The cumulative effect has been devastating, particularly
in a global economy in which workers’ rights are being eroded in the face
of lowest-common-denominator labor conditions in places such as China and
India.
A nationwide study by the University of Illinois at Chicago found that:
* 30% of employers fire pro-union workers.
* 49% threaten to close a work site when workers try to unionize.
* 82% hire consultants to fight union-organizing drives.
* 91% force employees to attend anti-union meetings with supervisors.
“Our research clearly shows that firings, bribes and threats are
pervasive,” said Nik Theodore, director of the university’s Center for
Urban Economic Development. “These actions greatly impede workers’ ability
to form unions.”
In 1935, when Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act, it
held the philosophy that protecting the right to organize helped to restore
“equality of bargaining power between employers and employees” and even to
remove “sources of industrial strife” and to “safeguard commerce” from
injury. Congress clearly saw workers’ rights as good for the overall
economy. Today, however, the Republican-dominated and anti-worker NLRB is
motivated by a much different philosophy.
Congress could begin rectifying the situation by passing the Employee
Free Choice Act, which already has 215 co-sponsors in the House and 43 in
the Senate, perhaps more once Democrats take control of Congress in
January. The act would make it less difficult to form a union and authorize
stronger penalties for retaliation against workers seeking to unionize.
Democratic congressional leaders need to recognize that many
hardworking Americans haven’t received their fair share of the recent
economic recovery. It’s time to change the rules so that the economy works
for all of us instead of some of us.
Dmitri Iglitzin is a labor law attorney in Seattle. Steven Hill is a
director at the New America Foundation.