Tom Robbins has an excellent article in last week's village voice about the NRLB and what's at stake for labor in defeating Bush.

In June, by a 3-2 vote along party lines, the Bush board overturned

a 30-year-old rule that provided one of the few protections afforded employees

in a non-union workplace: the right to have a co-worker accompany them when

summoned to the boss's office for a disciplinary interrogation. In July, it

reversed a landmark 2000 decision by ruling that graduate students—who now do

the bulk of classroom teaching on college campuses in return for little pay and

few benefits—are students, not workers, and thus not employees for purposes of

bargaining.

That decision was aimed at disarming successful union organizing

drives at campuses around the country, including New York University, Columbia,

and Brown. The ruling overturned a unanimous, bipartisan vote taken by the

Clinton-era board, which concluded after months of study that the workforce at

many large universities had changed dramatically, with adjuncts and graduate

students increasingly replacing full-time faculty.

Even those at the

workplace margins haven't been able to catch a break. In a little-noticed vote

last month, the board ruled against a group of disabled janitors in Florida who

were seeking the right to join a union. The board said they were not entitled to

do so because they were part of a rehabilitation program. The two dissenting

Democrats pointed out that the janitors reported to the same supervisors as the

rest of the staff and carried much the same workload. The decision was also out

of sync, they said, with the Americans With Disabilities Act, which seeks to

move the disabled into mainstream society. Barring the janitors from joining a

union continued the "needless segregation of those workers," the minority

members stated.