US Govt: Doing what it can to forbid people to join a union

As Bush ally Grover Norquist explained in 2004, "Every worker who doesn't join the union is another worker who doesn't pay $500 a year to organized labor's political machine." No wonder Bush's nlrb appointees are so eager to strike blows against labor like the one they delivered this month. Think of it as the bureaucratic equivalent of being thrown down a flight of stairs.

So, some board ruling that some employees are supervisors, means that George Bush is outlawing unions. Right.

Brandon9000 wrote:

So, some board ruling that some employees are supervisors, means that George Bush is outlawing unions. Right.

Nobody ever said anything about "outlawing unions", so thats a straw man.

But in the meantime, the government board's ruling does mean that the employees in question are no longer allowed to join a union.

And yes, the members of the board are largely Bush appointees.

So your problem with the actual phrasing of this thread - "US Govt: Doing what it can to forbid people to join a union" - is?

The votes of the board are decided by Bush appointees. Whats so illogical about holding Bush responsible for their decisions?

And what exactly is incorrect about the quote you bring? Employers generally dont want their employees to unionize - well, they dont have to hire goons to prevent them to, because the nrlb, thanks to Bush's appointees, will rule in their favour anyway; as this ruling, which clearly deviates from the original meaning of the law in order to please the employers, demonstrates.

I am curious how it feels to be psychic.

nimh wrote:

The votes of the board are decided by Bush appointees. Whats so illogical about holding Bush responsible for their decisions?

And what exactly is incorrect about the quote you bring? Employers generally dont want their employees to unionize - well, they dont have to hire goons to prevent them to, because the nrlb, thanks to Bush's appointees, will rule in their favour anyway; as this ruling, which clearly deviates from the original meaning of the law in order to please the employers, demonstrates.

I am curious how it feels to be psychic.

INTIMIDATION EVERYWHERE:

Next week, the House will vote on the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow employees in a workplace to organize as soon as a majority signed cards saying they wanted to do so. (Currently, workers have to go through NLRB-supervised elections that are prone to employer manipulation.)

Opponents of card-check argue that labor bosses will just coerce employees into signing the cards, although as Ezra Klein points out, research shows that union intimidation during card-check elections is far, far less common than undue management pressure under the current system.

Anyway, the bill would potentially help organized labor reverse its long decline, but the White House has already promised to veto it, so it doesn't stand much of a chance.

That didn't stop Phil Kerpen, though, from taking to the pages of the National Review to attack the legislation:

Under existing law, before a union is recognized, an employer has the right to request a federally supervised secret ballot election. This allows both the union and the employer to make their case and lets workers decide on a union without fear of reprisal.

Th[is] bit is rather misleading [..]

Employers are very good at manipulating NLRB elections. During the campaign season, managers get to bring workers into captive audience meetings and tell them about all the horrible things that will happen if they unionize. They can make threats and bribes. They get to fire union organizers, and pay a small fine for their troubles. They can delay and delay the outcome until those employees who voted to unionize have long moved on to other jobs. And so on. [..]

Labor Pains
The New Republic
January 7, 2005

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 was once considered the crown jewel of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. The National Labor Relations Board (nlrb), which it created, was supposed to ensure that workers enjoyed the same freedom of association in the workplace that they did in the political arena. By guaranteeing that workers could organize without being fired or threatened, it redressed the growing imbalance of power in the workplace.

By encouraging the growth of the labor movement, it stilled the fires of revolutionary socialism and Huey Long's populism and laid the foundation for a new democratic pluralism by giving workers a seat in Washington next to business.

For 45 years, the Act worked reasonably well. The ranks of labor swelled without threatening the profitability of U.S. business. The gap between rich and poor, which had widened in the 1920s, was reduced. The afl-cio, courted by Republican and Democratic administrations, became part of the Washington consensus. But, in the 1980s, that consensus began to fall apart when the Reagan administration drastically cut the nlrb's funding--causing huge backlogs of cases--and when its appointee to the board chipped away at employees' bargaining rights and at penalties for unfair labor practices. Bill Clinton tried to undo some of the damage, but George W. Bush has resumed Reagan's approach. Since becoming a majority in 2003, his appointees to the nlrb have taken business's side in more than 25 controversial cases. None of these rulings was earthshaking, but together, they presage an erosion of workers' ability to organize.

To cut costs, business and public institutions have increasingly replaced full-time employees with temporary or apprentice workers who are not paid comparable wages or benefits. Nonstandard workers like these now make up about a quarter of the workforce. Labor unions have begun to organize them, but employers have objected, and the Bush board has taken their side--ruling, for example, that a union at an Oakdale, New York, long-term care facility cannot organize and represent both workers employed directly by the facility and workers who are employed by the facility but were sent there by a temporary staffing agency. It also blocked organizing of disabled janitors (because they are really engaged in rehabilitation rather than work) and artists' models (who are seen as independent contractors because they own their robes).

According to a study of 400 union election campaigns in manufacturing plants by Cornell sociologist Kate Bronfenbrenner, 51 percent of employers in 1998 and 1999 threatened to close a plant if a union won an election, and 25 percent fired at least one worker for union activity. Bush's nlrb has balked at penalizing such companies--even though it is exactly these tactics that the Act was created to outlaw. In 2000, a judge determined that Smithfield Food used 36 different illegal tactics in trying to block unionization at its plant-- including firing eleven organizers--and ruled that the company would have to hold a union election, allow union organizers to post notices on workers' bulletin boards, and let them talk to workers in "nonwork" areas of the plant. On appeal, however, Bush's nlrb ruled that the union should be denied what it termed "extraordinary access" to the company's workers.

Union membership has plummeted from 23 percent in 1979 to 12.5 percent today. Some of that drop is due to a shift from unionized manufacturing industries to nonunionized whitecollar services, but most of the decline stems from the nlrb's acquiescence to aggressive--and often illegal-- employer tactics. American workers are, of course, the principal victims of labor's decline. (Union workers enjoy a 15.5 percent advantage in wages over nonunion workers with comparable skills and are 18.3 percent more likely to have health insurance.) But our democratic system as a whole is also a victim. Unions are an interest group, but one whose scope and concern allows it to speak for the public interest. And, because of its numbers and electoral influence, labor has been able to check the often narrow interests of Washington's powerful business lobbies. Without labor's clout, it's unlikely that Medicare would have been enacted in 1965 or that the minimum wage would have been raised repeatedly over the last 50 years.

With labor's power ebbing, business has increasingly been able to dominate public policy issues, from taxes to environmental protection to Social Security. That might not bother Bush, Tom DeLay, and Karl Rove. But it's not a good thing for the rest of us.