How Union-Busting Bosses Propel the Right Wing to Power
U.S. bosses fight unions with a ferocity that is unmatched in the so-called free world. In the early days of the republic, master craftsmen prosecuted fledgling unions as criminal conspiracies that aimed to block their consolidation of wealth and property. During modern times, corporations threaten the jobs of pro-union workers in over half of all union elections—and follow through on the threat one-third of the time. In between, bosses have resorted to spies and frame-ups, physical violence, court injunctions, private armies of strikebreakers, racist appeals and immigrant exploitation.
The labor question has never been a genteel debate about power and fairness in America.
A new book from the University of Illinois Press’ “The Working Class History in American History” series offers a broad survey of how bosses have historically engaged in union-busting. Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism is a collection of scholarly essays edited by Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson.
The essays that comprise Against Labor cover a period that stretches from the late 1880s to the Clinton era. Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger explore the racist assumptions that were built into so-called “scientific management.” The men with the stopwatches who broke production down into ever smaller tasks had ethnic preferences for each: Lithuanians for grinding steel, “American Poles” for forging, never Mexicans for the night shift and so on. A happy (for management) side effect of this speed up was the simmering resentment between different nationalities that hindered workplace solidarity.
Chad Pearson shines a light on Progressive-era worker organizations that were created and propped up by employers to help workers resist “union monopolies.” In other words, they created unions for scabs to break strikes and open up closed union shops.
Robert H. Woodrum looks at the use of the Ku Klux Klan and employer-sponsored vigilantism to run union organizers out of the Alabama docks and reverse the modest gains southern workers made during World War I. Michael Dennis updates the southern picture by documenting the UFCW’s sustained, large-scale organizing drive in non-union Virginia supermarkets in the early 1990s. Already facing enormous competitive pressure from Walmart, the supermarkets dug in for a years-long fight with little concern for the law. The story is a perfectly concise example of just how broken the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was as a venue for protecting workers by the time Bill Clinton took office.
None of these stories are particularly earth-shattering revelations to people who study unions and union-busting. What’s most notable is how employer tactics get recycled and adapted from era to era, and that no era was free from union-busting. That’s a key point of Against Labor. Editors Feurer and Pearson place their collection squarely within the new body of scholarship on the “rise of the right.”
Contrary to a popular narrative that has an activist right wing resurging in the years between Nixon’s 1968 election and Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers in 1981, the modern right wing began rising in reaction to the New Deal. Many employers simply never accepted the legitimacy of state intervention on behalf of union rights that was enshrined in the original National Labor Relations Act. These employers—mostly small and mid-sized firms—acted as an advance guard against union rights.
They pressed against the edges of the law, testing their ability to fire union activists for cause, replace strikers, lockout recalcitrant unions and restrict organizers’ access to the job site. They learned to love making the NLRB go to court to enforce orders against bosses’ union busting, for in the courts they found far more sympathetic arbiters of management’s rights. The biggest holes in labor law’s protections of workers rights, exploited in the anti-union drives of the 1980s, mostly come from bad court decisions in the postwar years that some people like to kid themselves were a golden age of labor-management cooperation.
Sure, there were employers who talked a good game about their (junior) “partners” in labor, kept their pensions and healthcare plans funded and mostly avoided knock-down, drag-out contract fights. But, clearly in retrospect, they were ready to beat down and bust their own unions just as soon as the advance guard of reactionaries created a political environment where it was possible.
The most fascinating story in the collection, “The Strange Career of A.A. Ahner: Reconsidering Blackjacks and Briefcases,” comes from Feurer. It tells of a hired gun whose career bridged two very different eras of labor-management relations in the Kansas City area. Scholars have referred to the advent of the NLRB as a kind of transition from blackjacks to briefcases for anti-union employers. It’s commonly assumed that the Pinkertons, thugs and company “unions,” employers’ first line of defense against unions in the 1920s, were muscled out of the way by a new generation of lawyers who promised to “work the system” to represent their clients’ interests at the NLRB. But in Ahner we find a direct, lineal connection between the two approaches.
Ahner ran his own detective agency beginning during World War I. For the right price, he would spy on workers, plant bombs and frame union activists (he had lots of friends in law enforcement at a time when there weren’t terribly rigid boundaries between local business and police). This work continued into the 1930s, when he was investigated by a Senate committee probing how employers were violating the new labor act.
Recognizing that times had changed, Ahner improved his image, if not his underlying philosophy. Working with a local priest, he became co-chair of the St. Louis Labor-Management Committee, which counseled conciliation and arbitration. Through this “volunteer” work, he lined up consulting gigs with unionized employers. Mostly this was for bargaining and grievances, where union representatives who knew his history would be aghast to find him sitting across the table with an air of respectability. But occasionally—even in the 1950’s—he was called on for union avoidance work, where he pressed the limits of employers’ rights to their own free speech and to squelch their workers’.
Ahner’s story enriches our understanding of the real roots of today’s anti-unionism. One wishes Rosemary Feurer had expanded her research on Ahner and others like him and made that the subject of her book.
It also serves as a warning that today’s union-buster will claim to have “always” had a “productive working relationship” with unions when we begin to win again. But the only “always” that applies to American capitalists is that they are always against labor.
[This article first appeared at In These Times.]
Trump Wants To Privatize Air Traffic Control. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Promising “cheaper, faster and safer travel,” the Trump administration announced a plan this week to privatize the nation’s air traffic control system.
The announcement Monday marked the first day of the administration’s “infrastructure week,” a series of publicity events around one of the only areas of the president’s agenda that has intrigued some union leaders and Democratic legislators.
What they had hoped for was an increase in public spending to create good jobs and repair our nation’s transportation systems. What Trump wants is to give public assets away to corporate interests, while reducing pay and benefit standards for workers.
The official justification for privatizing air traffic control is to speed the conversion from a radar-based system to a more accurate GPS one. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been converting the system, but it does not anticipate finishing the job until 2020. An actual investment in infrastructure could give the FAA the resources it needs to do it faster, but if Republican politicians have any true religion, it is belief in the magic of the “free” market.
Unfriendly skies
The Trump administration’s announcement comes at a time when the public has historically low levels of confidence in our unregulated, private, for-profit air travel industry. An incident in April in which a physician was dragged off of an overbooked United flight aroused public outrage and fairly common agreement that flying in America has become, to borrow from Stephen Colbert, “a trip up the Devil’s butthole in a flying aluminum suppository.”
While always privately operated, the airline industry was once heavily regulated by federal authorities who determined which airports each airline could serve and even how much they could charge customers. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 was touted with similar promises of being somehow better and cheaper and offering more options.
Private sector corporations’ first priority is to turn a profit—not to serve the public. The deregulated airlines have been accused of colluding to jack up fares and fees and limit service to unprofitable locations. They routinely overbook flights and bump paying customers off of flights. Seat size and legroom rapidly approach Lilliputian proportions, unless one is willing to pay more for an “upgrade.” Indeed, the unregulated airline industry has so successfully monetized its greedy refusal to ensure basic levels of passenger comfort that if they all instituted a $25 “No Face-Punch Fee” tomorrow, many of us would sigh, shrug and pay it.
And Trump wants to hand these jackals the control over where, when and how quickly planes can move from point A to point B, when their primary motivation will be saving two minutes and $10 with each decision?! No thanks.
Echoes from the past
Trump’s mad plan to wreck the air traffic control system brings to mind the last time a feckless actor threatened everyone’s safety with a wanton disregard for the professional skills and experience of air traffic controllers. It also happened in the first year of his presidency.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan inherited an unsettled contract dispute with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). Finding the Carter administration—the same one that deregulated the airline industry—to be a stubbornly recalcitrant employer, PATCO actually endorsed Reagan in the 1980 election (hey, he was a former union president). Reagan’s administration repaid that favor by dismissing the union’s demands for more reasonable hours and better equipment.
So PATCO went on strike. As federal employees, they had no legal right to strike—a fact that the new president reminded them of with an order to return to work within 48 hours or be fired.
Reagan’s firing of the striking air traffic controllers was a signal event in labor relations. Private sector employers soon followed suit by bargaining their unions to impasse over concessionary demands, forcing them out on strike, permanently replacing the workers and finally decertifying their bargaining units.
Air traffic controllers eventually organized a new union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), which was certified 30 years ago this month. But the work of air traffic controllers remains incredibly stressful and understaffed. If Trump’s plan is successful there is no guarantee that the new private operator will retain the current workforce. Indeed, there is a good deal of incentive to hire few of the workers, tear up the union contract and lower pay and benefits for new, less experienced workers.
But, if NATCA could rebuild from the PATCO debacle then it seems likely that some union would organize the privatized air traffic controllers. If that happened, the workers would find themselves in an ironic and auspicious position. A privatized workforce would find itself regulated by a set of laws that entertain much more of a formal right to strike. If pushed too far by the privatizers on low wages, low staffing and technology that doesn’t keep up with the times, employees could go on strike—for their own working conditions and, perhaps, for the safety and dignity of air passengers everywhere.
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]
Republicans Will Turn the NLRB into a Force for Union Busting. We Can Turn It Back.
Here comes the anti-union crackdown.
According to a recent Bloomberg report, Donald Trump has submitted the names of two anti-union lawyers to the FBI for vetting. This is a precursor to nominating them to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by June to cement a Republican majority that will reverse many of the pro-worker decisions and policies that the federal agency has advanced in recent years.
Marvin Kaplan works for the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission. William Emanuel is a lawyer at the union-busting firm, Littler Mendelson. Either of these garden-variety union-haters could have been appointed by Jeb Bush, John Kasich or whatever bland man in a navy suit the Republicans might have nominated if the reality TV star hadn’t bumbled his way into the GOP nomination and presidency.
On the potential chopping block are the board’s expedited election rules, the organizing rights of graduate employees and workers at charter schools, the rights of subcontracted employees to join their coworkers in a union, the ability of unions to organize smaller units within a larger enterprise and the culpability of a parent company for a subsidiary’s illegal behavior.
As inevitable as this right turn is for our nation’s workers’ rights board, so, too, should be our planned counterattack.
Don’t ignore the NLRB
Last summer, I wrote about the NLRB’s turn towards pro-worker activism. I noted that most unions were slow to notice the change and slower still to press an agenda of legal activism at the board. The next few years will demonstrate why unions tend to view the NLRB as a hopeless venue for workers’ rights and a place where organizing campaigns go to die.
There is a macho component to labor’s preference to organize and bargain without appealing to state intervention (even when voiced by women!). And it is absolutely true that if more unions adhered to an organizing model that prioritized organizing committees made up of workplace leaders, face-to-face conversations and escalating actions that challenge the boss’ authority that more unions would win without having to resort to the NLRB as an umpire. But even that kind of organizing would only bring a couple thousand workers into unions—the ones unions are currently spending millions of dollars to put organizers into the field to organize—not the tens of millions of workers that we need to organize.
The plain fact of the matter is that before the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) was passed in 1935, unions only had an enduring presence in the coal and garment industries and a handful of skilled crafts. American employers have always fought unions with a fierce intensity. For crying out loud, Andrew Carnegie hired a private army to gun down his striking employees and their families! Unions need the power of the state to curb the worst abuses of corporate America.
And they do themselves no favors by not taking the NLRB as seriously as the right wing considers the board. The Wall Street Journal blared, “Don’t Ignore the Labor Board” in an editorial just four days after Trump was sworn in. The right’s think tanks and law firms spent eight years honing their anti-union agenda and the nation’s leading business paper was eager to implement it. I wish I could tell you that unions and their allies were devoting anywhere near the brainpower and enthusiasm to the subject of what the next Democratic-majority NLRB could accomplish.
Partly, this is a problem of institutional memory. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, most activists could only recall the NLRB as being an awful adjudicator of workers’ right for the 12 years of Ronald Reagan-George H. W. Bush (and only kind of “meh” during the 1970s).
Take, for instance, the biggest missed opportunity of that period: restoring the legal right to strike. Employers in the 1980s blew the dust off of an obscure 1938 Supreme Court decision, called NLRB v. Mackay Radio & Telegraph Co., to legally justify firing and permanently replacing workers who went on strike. That decision contained two massive caveats: that an employer could not have union busting as its primary motivation for permanently replacing the strikers and that it would go out of business if it was not able to replace the striking workers.
The Reagan-Bush NLRB did its best impression of a fake wrestling referee and looked away, never seriously investigating an employer’s justification for hiring scabs to steal union members’ jobs. The AFL-CIO pushed a bill in the 1990s to restore the right to strike, but it was killed by a Senate filibuster. I am aware of no sustained effort by unions to convince a Democratic labor board to revert to the constitutional standard and force union-busting employers to prove that they’re not union busting and that they would go out of business if they couldn’t fire all of their striking employees.
Reversing the reversals and pushing forward
Late in its term, the NLRB under Barack Obama actually did issue a ruling that narrowed employers’ ability to hire permanent replacements because an employer was stupid enough to admit that its goal was, in part, to punish the union. That new standard is certain to be reversed or simply ignored by Trump’s NLRB. But it is an example of the kind of reform that unions should push the board to adapt in the first year of a Democratic administration.
Aside from restoring the right to strike, unions should push the next Democratic majority to move quicker to restore the Obama board’s policies and precedents. How many graduate students graduated out of the bargaining units they were organizing, waiting for the Obama board’s recognition of their rights? Given how nakedly partisan these actions have become, let’s just get it over with right away.
In terms of a proactive agenda, my favorite reform is to push the NLRB to re-establish an equal time rule for pro-union speakers if an employer forces employees to attend a mandatory captive audience meeting. Such a standard used to exist, and the NLRB is on record since 1966 as inviting unions to make a case that it should be restored. (Again, that pesky institutional memory caused a real blind spot.)
Another thought, while Yale graduate employees are fighting for recognition of the “micro-units” they won under Obama’s NLRB, is for unions to resume a vigorous pursuit of bargaining unit certification anywhere that enough workers want representation. As Charles Morris documented in his 2005 book, The Blue Eagle At Work: Reclaiming Democratic Rights in the American Workplace, the early NLRB used to certify minority unions as the bargaining agent for that union’s members only.
The directive that unions have to win majority support and must represent all workers regardless of their desire to be a part of the union was never the intention of the framers of the NLRA. But that burden has become a part of the system that traps us and restricts our growth and power.
Unions and their allies should be convening research teams to plot out a campaign of regulatory and judicial activism. That work should begin now.
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]
What the Big May Day Strike in a Small Pennsylvania City Teaches Us About Organizing
The first May Day of the Trump era saw scores of major actions in cities across the United States, but perhaps the most impressive demonstration of worker power took place in the small city of Reading, Pennsylvania. There, 127 stores—about three-quarters of the businesses in the city—shut down in protest, and an additional 500 mostly agricultural and construction workers participated in the general strike, according to organizers. The protest even spread to nearby Allentown, where two dozen more stores closed for the day.
Spearheaded by Make the Road Pennsylvania, a community group that organizes working-class Latinos, the strike was a protest of the county sheriff’s plan to authorize his deputies to act as immigration agents, in cooperation with the Trump administration’s assault on immigrants. While Berks County is one of the economically depressed areas that carried Trump to a win in Pennsylvania, the people of Reading are as unlikely to support his vision for “making America great again” as they are to agree that “America is already great.”
Although the majority of Reading’s residents are Latino, and another significant percentage of the population is African-American, Reading’s mayor and city council are almost entirely white, thanks to a combination of gerrymandering and the political donor class. That’s where the idea of hitting decision-makers in the wallet developed.
“No sales means no sales tax,” says Make the Road Pennsylvania director Adanjesus Marin. “Most of their revenue comes from the communities they’re attacking.”
According to Marin, organizers spent four weeks getting workers and businesses to commit to the May Day strike. Stores that agreed to participate had signs in their windows and flyers near their registers to make visible the growing movement. Many of Make the Road’s activists come from Central America, he says, and have experience in their home countries’ labor movements, so the idea of a May Day action was quickly embraced.
Although the international day of workers’ celebration and protest on the first of May originated in Chicago in the 19th century, for generations since the Cold War, Americans were more likely to associate the holiday with Soviet military parades than with workers’ rights. What May Day events did get organized were often small rallies for dozens of faithful dissidents.
Then, in 2006, May Day came roaring back with the first major “Day Without Immigrants” strike. More than a million immigrant workers and allies struck and staged major rallies to protest the last Republican president’s “get tough” posturing. May Day has been a day of activism and protest—sometimes larger, sometimes smaller—ever since.
As important as reviving International Workers’ Day is in the United States, the actions of Reading’s shopkeepers contribute to something even more essential: reviving the strike. Major work stoppages, those involving 1,000 or more workers, have declined by approximately 90 percent over the past four decades, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That period has been marked by a sustained anti-union offensive by employers. Beginning with the Phelps-Dodge strike in 1983, companies dusted off an obscure Supreme Court precedent that gutted the legal right to strike by taking away workers’ right to return to the job when the strike is over. Companies hard-bargained over pay freezes and benefit reductions, dared their unions to go out on strike and hired scabs to take the strikers’ jobs and vote the union out.
As a result, strikes today are seen by union leaders and members alike as very risky propositions, and job actions have declined accordingly. That is a problem that compounds itself. Our greatest power is still the work we do and our occasional refusal to do it. But if workers don’t see examples of other workers going on strike, what is going to get them thinking about their power and how to exercise it?
What are particularly needed are examples of work stoppages that don’t look like traditional union strikes. The majority of American workers want to be in a union, but our rigged system makes winning a legally certified bargaining unit damn near impossible. If the 90 percent or so of workers who don’t have a union are to protest to demand a better life, a strike is not going to look like bargaining to impasse, printing up picket signs and marching in a long line or a protest pen in front of a factory. But it could look like Reading’s May Day general strike.
Most of the businesses that closed—lunch counters, small grocery stores, cleaners—were single proprietorships or family businesses employing less than five people. “They don’t do better than workers who sell their labor in a traditional way,” says Make the Road’s Marin. Our nation’s labor laws don’t even treat most of them as employees who have rights; many are treated as employers under the law. But they are workers and their strike is an example of a bigger, broader labor movement that fights for more than just wages, hours and working conditions. A labor movement that stands up for the whole community, with the whole community, can inspire more workers to weigh and wield their power. Let Reading be an example.
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]