Trump and the Art of the (Union) Deal
The ascendency of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a joke that both bores and terrifies me, but that is not the subject of this blog post. An article in today’s NY Times, “Donald Trump and the Art of the Public Sector Deal,” provides an interesting insight into his shrewd use of public/private deal-making to build up his real estate empire, but misses an even more interesting story about an early example of Trump’s pragmatism around unions.
Unlike his more ideological counterparts in the business world, or his Koch-funded competitors for the Republican nomination, Trump has treated unions as a cost of doing business – when, that is, those unions have organized and demonstrated the power to make their existence a fact of life.
The Times story tells of how Trump, in 1978, secured a 40-year tax abatement from city and state officials in order to redevelop the “closed, blighted eyesore” that had been the truly grand Commodore Hotel into the shiny glass monstrosity that we now call the Grand Hyatt Hotel. What the story does not mention is that part of the price tag for that tax abatement was a card check neutrality deal with the NY Hotel Trade Council, the union that had represented the workers at the Commodore when it had closed six years earlier. Although not well known, it is probably one of the earliest examples of such a neutrality card-check agreement in the modern era.
But the union just won the card check by the skin of its teeth. It is difficult to reconstruct precisely what happened. It’s possible that the neutrality was quietly subverted by lower ranked managers who conducted a whisper campaign of lies or intimidation. (Early neutrality agreements didn’t build in strong penalties for violations of the agreements.) It’s also possible that, like the workers at the VW plant in Tennessee a portion of the Grand Hyatt workers psyched themselves out that the union could make the hotel less profitable and lead to layoffs. (After all, the previous workers at the Commodore had all lost their jobs.)
Whatever the case, the union went to the table in a weakened position…which Trump exploited. All hotels represented by the NY Hotel Trades Council are under the terms of the same collective bargaining agreement, and have been since 1939. Trump pushed for concessions, not in wages but in working conditions. He got them in a side agreement, while the hotel nominally signed on to the Industry-Wide Agreement.
But then he did something truly clever. He signed a “Me Too” agreement with the union for the upcoming round of negotiations. A “Me Too” is basically a “pre-signing” of the next contract. It means that an employer agrees in advance to all the terms that its competitors will ultimately settle upon, while securing a no-strike pledge during the contract campaign and beyond. You can see the value of a “Me Too” to a non-ideological employer. But the value is also huge for the union, freeing it to single out particular members of the employers’ bargaining coalition for job actions and pressure.
Trump signed a “Me Too” for every round of negotiations, and after he sold his stake in the hotel the new owners continued to do the same. There actually was a lengthy industry-wide strike in 1985, but the Grand Hyatt Hotel remained open for business.
It wasn’t until the year 2004 that the Hotel Trades Council finally got the Grand Hyatt fully signed on to the Industry-Wide Agreement and won for the workers at the Hyatt the same work rules as the rest of the city, which is, itself, an interesting story but one for another time.
Good Write-Up in the Nerd Press
I rarely write directly about work on this blarg, but some of this year’s big adventures got a nice write-up from Beryl Benderly at Science Magazine. Relevant excerpts follows:
On 20 July, the postdocs at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, received official recognition for their new union. It’s the nation’s third postdoc union, but the first to be part of the same union as their lab chiefs.
After a swift and successful signature-collecting campaign, the 350 postdocs on the university’s three campuses became a bargaining unit of the Rutgers Council of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)-American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Chapters. Affiliated with both AAUP, the professional society for college and university teachers, and AFT, a national labor union within AFL/CIO, this hybrid group represents all of Rutgers’s faculty members, research associates, and graduate student employees. A sister union under the all-university AFT umbrella represents the administrative staff.
[snip]
It was, in fact, a drive several years ago to solidify the position of campus administrators by bringing them into the union that first sparked interest in organizing the postdocs. As organizers spoke with “administrators, some of whom were in the laboratories, we would encounter postdocs very frequently,” recalls Shaun Richman, an AFT national representative. “We had all these anecdotes of postdocs sort of sauntering up to us and saying, ‘Hey, can we get into this whole union thing?’ “
Then, “earlier this year, Rutgers AFT representatives [began] asking around to postdocs about their particular conditions and their interest in unionizing,” says postdoc Alan Wan, who was “heavily involved” in the drive. “Obviously, since the faculty and the graduate students–the members of the community that we interact with on a daily basis–are in the union,” many postdocs also became interested, he continues.
A major part of the union’s organizing strategy was having a group of postdocs committed to the cause talk to other postdocs “to hear their stories [and] make the case,” Wan says. “If we had a conversation with someone and they were really positive, we tried to get them involved,” Richman adds. A second strategic step was talking with PIs, because “the postdocs are essentially the employees of the faculty, who are our union members,” Richman continues. “We knew we had to have conversations with some leaders of that community. … There [were] fears. For a principal investigator, I think the gut reaction is … ‘This is going to break the grant. We can’t afford it. We’re not going to get renewed.’ “
But [AAUP-AFT past President Lisa] Klein, who discussed the union with fellow PIs, reports encountering no serious opposition. “Some jokingly said, ‘So I can’t abuse them anymore?’ ” she recalls. “There was no reluctance on the part of these PIs. They did want to see that the postdocs were treated as member of the community.”
The talking campaign was done quietly, “one-on-one, usually colleague-to-colleague,” Richman says. “There was no Web site, … no leaflets.” Once the organizers “knew we were in a position that we could get a majority of the postdocs to agree,” Wan continues, “we officially started the card campaign” right after Memorial Day. The talking took several months, but the official campaign to collect signatures took under 2 weeks. State law makes unionization automatic if more than half of a work group give their signed consent, just as in California. “Two-thirds of all the postdocs signed,” Wan says.
Sussex CCC: Respect Your Employees!
Nearly three years after organizing their union, the professional and support staff at Sussex County Community College have had to endure union-busting efforts and attacks on their free speech rights.
Take action by telling the college administration to respect their employees’ rights and bargain in good faith with the American Federation of Teachers, and join us on Tuesday, April 28 from 4:30 to 6:00 for a rally in support of the union at Sussex CCC.
One College Hill Road, Newton, NJ 08760.
Call 413-627-6490 for more information.
Is It Too Late To Make A Different Choice?
The Employee Free Choice Act might have died this week. Arlen Specter refused a deal wherein labor unions would encourage their members who are registered Republicans to support the Senator in a tough primary in exchange for his vote for cloture. Instead, the entire Republican caucus will filibuster the Act. Now is as good a time as any to ask: Why did the entire labor movement choose to make the Employee Free Choice Act the all-or-nothing focus of labor law reform?
The Free Choice Act is a fairly narrow tweaking of a legal framework that has become a union-busting machine. It does nothing to address so-called “Right To Work” rules that allow scab workers to utilize union resources without paying a dime in dues. It does nothing to outlaw, or even curtail, the use of permanent replacement workers by employers during strikes and lockouts. It does nothing to repeal the sections of the Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin Acts that outlawed union solidarity in the form of unions taking a fight with one employer to a related secondary employer. It does nothing to expand the right to organize to the millions of employees whose rights have been systematically stripped from the Act: supervisors, graduate employees, temps and on and on.
The Free Choice Act does provide for some financial penalties for employers who violate the terms of the act and the basic human rights of their employees. That would be put some teeth in a regulatory machinery that routinely gives employers a slap on the wrist for firing union activists. It would also curtail ability of an employer to thwart a successful unionization effort by subsequently going through the motions during bargaining and never agreeing to a first contract, by subjecting first contract negotiations to binding arbitration after three months. And, finally, it would allow unions to organize through majority sign-up procedures.
I’ve been organizing under a majority sign-up law in New Jersey for a few years now, successfully. Does it make organizing easier? Only slightly. In the private sector, card check has been used very successfully by UNITE HERE and SEIU, usually in combination with a neutrality agreement with the employer. Perhaps that combination of card check neutrality has dazzled too many labor leaders and caused us to put all our eggs in one EFCA basket.
Make no mistake: card check is not neutrality. Even with financial penalties, employers will still campaign against unionization. Employers will still fire union activists and threaten to go out of business. They will be fined, after the fact. In the meantime, union supporters will lose their resolve and give up. Under the curent framework, even after a majority (usually 60% or more) have voted for a union by signing authorization card, they still must vote a second time, some months later after enduring a phalanx of legal hearings, captive audience meetings and the firing of activists. All too often, when that second election is held, many of the employees who had signed cards are frightened into not voting or voting no. All that EFCA gives us, then, is that the initial cards count as the votes, and those votes are impounded at the National Labor Relations Board while the employer beats up and scares the shit out of the employees who voted for the union. EFCA will get you a bargaining unit, but it will not get you a union.
As best as I can tell, the fantasy is that moments after the Employee Free Choice Act is signed into law, the large industrial unions will send hundreds of organizers out into the field to collect cards at major employers in retail, shipping and even manufacturing – Wal-Mart, Toyota and so on – get the cards, get the bargaining unit and get get the first contracts by arbitration. Then, hopefully, with new dues resources, the unions would turn around and actually organize these new union members, gain thousands of new labor voters and press for greater reform. It sounds wonderful, but it it, I believe, a fantasy. Unfortunately, I don’t think that most unions are prepared to run major nationwide campaigns like that. At least not effectively. And at the AFT, the Free Choice Act will do very little for us since most of the private sector workers in our field are still not defined as “employees” under the act.
Gaining card check and doing little with it is far worse than never gaining it at all. Just think of how much fund the Wall Street Journal would have fun with that. Labor gets its dream bill to make organizing “easier” and workers still don’t sign up in droves. It seems to me far better to focus on winning fines against union-busting employers, compulsory arbitration for first contracts and expanding the Act to define as “employees” the workers in the information economy whose unionization is as crucial to labor today as General Motors’ was 70 years ago.