Bruce Raynor responds to the anti-union lobby's anti-card check campaign with this op-ed at the American Prospect's website, demonstrating the complete failure of the NLRB process to compel companies to recognize the results of elections when unions win. It's one of the more powerful arguments I've read for card check, and it only barely touches on mass intimidation campaigns during election drives, such as that apparently perpetrated by Yale New Haven Hospital earlier this month. Read it when you get a chance. Here's an excerpt:
I don't know what the Board was doing over the next five years and two months.
I do know what our union was doing: organizing workers in other places, negotiating contracts for them, trying to improve both their economic circumstances and their voice and power in the workplace. But we were powerless to do much to help the Goya workers during those five-plus years we waited for the Board to rule.
I also know what the Goya workers were doing: they were suffering. They went on about their jobs, without a voice, without power, waiting for whatever raises the Goya bosses felt like giving them -- or not. They were suffering without the benefits of union representation they thought they had voted to secure in 1998. And the four illegally fired Goya workers were looking elsewhere for jobs during those five years because they had families to feed.
And I also know what the Goya bosses were doing over those five years: counting their money and patting themselves on the back. Counting the money they might have otherwise had to give their employees in the form of fair wages, better health insurance, and a decent pension. Patting themselves on the back for making the decision to cease bargaining with the union, knowing that at most -- at most -- all the Board would ever order them to do was to sit down again and bargain in "good faith" with the union.
Finally, the Board did rule -- on the last day of August, 2006. We won on every important issue. The company was found to have unlawfully withdrawn union recognition, and the Board ordered it to resume bargaining with us. But the Board hasn't ordered that Goya agree to a contract for the workers -- it can't under our legal system. The company was found to have engaged in unlawful threats, interrogation, and the like -- and for that, they have to post a notice in their plant saying they won't do it again and pay backpay to workers who lost work because of the company's misconduct. That's it. No fines, no penalties, no assessments, no order to pay the union's (or the government's) legal fees -- none of those remedies are available under our legal system.
So after seven years, winning doesn't look all that different from losing for these workers. They have lost seven years of wage increases, health care benefits, pension contributions, and other essentials that families need -- things they could have bargained for if they had a contract. Some lost their jobs, most lost respect for their employers, and immigrants lost faith in the system of their new home.
Our union, for one, simply can't accept wins that turn into losses. Workers are already too far behind -- no federal minimum wage increase in 10 years, pensions disappearing, and the ever growing divide between what working people earn and what their CEO's take home. Workers need to win whatever and whenever we can. So we decided a few years ago to stop using the Board as a means of organizing workers. The Goya case is everything that's wrong with the law and with the Board. We get weak decisions that come too late to matter much. Employers get exactly what they want: huge delays at virtually no cost and a non-union workplace even when their workers have voted, overwhelmingly, otherwise.
This is the 1400th post on this blog. (If you're reading this as an imported facebook note, you can ignore this part.) This year has seen far fewer posts than the previous two years of this blog's existence, because I've been busy, because there's been a great deal i've been unable to write, and because I've often found myself in situations like I am now in, in which i have papers to finish and no time to blog. But the discrepancy between the 439 posts between late April and Dec. 31, 2004, and the thus far 365 posts this entire year, a figure inflated by youtube clips and cameraphone picket line images, is interesting. In a few days, I'll post my usual end of the year entry, but until then I'll be relatively quiet as i try to finish work i should have finished already.
Happy holidays.
Neutrality agreements and card counts are not enough either. They did not prevent the same problems for the workers at Verizon discussed with Goya and Yale-NH workers trying to organize. With each passing year more and more corporate lawyers are learning how to turn neutrality agreements into tools for the corporations. Corps have more legal resources. Trying to keep up with them will bankrupt unions. Bottom-up organization is the way to go and the mindset they will either deal with us or the company will be no more.
ReplyDeleteNo one's claiming that card check can and should replace worker organizing and mobilization. Indeed, it's useless without them unless you are trying to sign sweetheart deals to inflate dues collection, which certainly is not the case at YNHH. Moreover the question of lawyers subverting neutrality agreements applies as much to any other area of labor law, particularly to contracts. At the moment, the labor movement is in no shape to follow the IWW's lead and stop signing contracts, so instead enforcing them and making them benefit workers depends on rank and file organizing and mobilization, on shop stewards who can organize members around grievances, etc.
ReplyDeleteCard check isn't perfect. Like a contract, it's a tool. It may sometimes be double sided. It;s certainly only as useful as the organizing behind it. But it's still better than having the deck completely stacked in the other direction, in a process which affords corporations every opportunity to derail unionization efforts with minimal censure or risk.