Month: February 2016

Friedrichs Is Dead; Labor’s Crisis Is Not. The ‘Scalia Dividend’ Is a Rare Opportunity for Unions.

The Friedrichs vs. CTA Supreme Court case, a nakedly partisan assassination attempt on the labor movement, has died with Justice Antonin Scalia. What cannot die with it is the sense of existential crisis within the labor movement. We need a far-reaching conversation about the pathway back to increased activism, membership and power. Like few moments before it, the Friedrichs case sparked a broad consensus within labor that our movement faced an existential crisis and that business as usual was a prescription for assisted suicide. Unfortunately, too many union leaders and staff based out of Washington, D.C. are now at risk of being dismissed as a bunch of Chicken Littles who overhyped a sky that never fell by the people who have the greatest ability to determine labor’s future: the local leaders and disengaged members. It was a mistake to use the Friedrichs case to forge this somewhat rare agreement that […]

With 3 Recent High-Profile Walkoffs, Is the Wildcat Strike Back?

Three high-profile wildcat strikes have caught business watchers and union leaders by surprise in recent weeks. Could they be bellwethers for a rising tide of worker militancy? A wildcat strike is one that occurs with little notice or legal sanction. Wildcats are often organized in violation of a contractual commitment not to strike or a legal prohibition to do so, and in defiance of both the employer and official union leadership. Non-union workplaces wildcat by striking without formally certifying or affiliating with a union. Wildcat job actions have sparked some of the largest strike waves and union gains in American history, and the revitalization of the 21st century labor movement will require a degree of worker organizing that is not dependent on union staff and resources. So spontaneous job actions merit attention. The sudden return of the wildcat Longshoreman at the New York and New Jersey ports launched a classic […]

Could a New NLRB Case Limit Bosses’ Best Anti-Union Tool, the Captive Audience Meeting?

The captive audience meeting, “management’s most important weapon” in an anti-union campaign, is finally being challenged in a petition to the National Labor Relations Board that could help re-balance the scales in union representation elections. Held in all-staff, small-group or one-on-one formats, employers use these mandatory meetings to confuse and intimidate employees into voting against union representation. In a 2009 study, labor relations scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner found that nine out of ten employers use captive audience meetings to fight a union organizing drive. Threatening to cut wages and benefits in 47 percent of documented cases, and to go out of business entirely in a staggering 57 percent, these captive audience meetings correlate with an unsurprising 43 percent union win rate when used. Such meetings were illegal under the original National Labor Relations Act. The courts eventually decided that as long as a boss’s threats were merely implicit, it would be […]