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.
Champion of American Labor?
Too often Social Democrats are consumed by their grudges. Getting through the biographies they write about their heroes can be a tedious chore. Worse, the subjects of these biographies are poorly served by books that devote more attention to attacking enemies than defending their subjects’ virtues. Arch Puddington’s biography of Lane Kirkland is an egregious offender.
Kirkland, President of the AFL-CIO following George Meany’s retirement in 1979 until he was pushed out of office in the mid-1990’s, presided over an enormously difficult period for American labor. The decline in union density was accelerated by open hostility from the Reagan-Bush administration and a cottage industry of aggressive union-busting consultants, while corporate globalization shipped millions of unionized American jobs overseas. Kirkland’s reputation is as something of a Nero-type character who fiddled with anti-Communist foreign policy while Rome burned.
That is certainly an unfair over-generalization, but “Lane Kirkland: Champion of American Labor” does its subject no favors by devoting several large chapters – almost half the book – to championing Kirkland’s Cold War diplomacy, while tacking on a few dozen pages at the end to document Kirkland’s trade union achievements. Otherwise, Puddington’s book is about settling scores, but even here there is little useful scholarship. Names are invoked as a short-hand. Bella Abzug, without explanation is singled out as an example of hated “New Left” style politics, while Henry “Scoop” Jackson is similarly name-checked as the Great White Hope of the New Deal coalition.
Kirkland is deserving of a critical re-evaluation from a serious biographer, particularly in light of the fracture of the AFL-CIO during the Sweeney-era. It is literally true, as Puddington briefly notes, that the AFL-CIO was never more united, or could claim a larger number of members, than on the tenth anniversary of Lane Kirkland’s tenure as AFL-CIO President, thanks to his assiduous courtship of the unions that left the fold during the Meany years. It is ironic that the large unions that Kirkland wooed back into the House of Labor – the Teamsters, Auto Workers and Miners – played pivotal roles in the effort to oust Kirkland from office a few short years later. Unfortunately for the reader, Puddington shares no insight into the breakdown of support that Kirkland suffered amongst these unions.
To his credit, Kirkland was an early and insightful critic of NAFTA trade policies, and could voice an opposition that was internationalist in orientation. And, contrary to the popular image of him, Kirkland did take modest steps to tun the tide of labor’s declining fortunes. Readers (including myself) may be startled by the reminder than Kirkland started the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute which has trained a generation of organizers.
Future labor scholars would be better served by a new Kirkland biography that pays more attention to these chapters of his life, as well as conducting a more critical evaluation his aggressive involvement in foreign policy. A key question to be explored is the influence of Kirkland’s career path on his executive decision-making. Kirkland was the first president of a labor federation to not only not rise from the rank-and-file or elected office, but to have never been employed as an organizer or Business Agent. Having never cut his teeth on the core functions of a labor union, could that have influenced Kirkland to focus energy and resources on foreign policy work that most union leaders would skip? Could it have deprived him of the political calculus to know when you’re losing the support of your board?
Standing Up, Sitting Down
It figures that it would take the United Electrical Workers union to try to rally the fighting spirit in America’s battered working class with a sit-down strike at a shuttered factory in Illinois. The UE have a proud history of daring and desperate fighting stands that culminated in their expulsion from the Congress of Industrial Organizations early in the Cold War for refusing to purge their ranks of Communists. That fight resulted in the loss of over a hundred thousand members and the union’s relegation to the sidelines of the labor movement. The UE that survived those terrible fights of the 40’s and 50’s remained a leaner, meaner fighting machine; a union that prized democratic rank-and-file control, labor education, the long haul struggle and the value of a symbolic fight.
The tactic of the sit-down strike was expelled from the labor movement long before the Communists who perfected it. The great wave of sit-down strikes that formed the United Autoworkers, United Steelworkers and other mass production industrial unions of the CIO-era were contemporaneous with the legal fight over the constitutionality of a new law that enshrined labor’s legal right to organize. Many employers, declaring that the National Labor Relations Act overreached Congress’ authority to regulate interstate commerce, simply decided to ignore the law and continue to fire union activists in spite of government orders to recognize and negotiate with the duly-authorized unions they chose to represent them. The workers compelled the employers to recognize them and the unions they formed by taking control of the factories until the employers relented and began negotiating for good contracts.
The Supreme Court, in some respects, merely recognized the fact of this de-facto truce when they declared the NLRA constitutional in 1938, and ordered the reinstatement of all terminated union activists. However, the court attempted a balancing act by declaring that employees terminated for engaging in illegal activities in the course of their union activity were not entitled to reinstatement. Sit-downers – trespassers and thieves, all – could thus be fired for engaging in such a strike. Having won the legal right of a union recognition process in the NLRA, therefore, most unions abandoned the sit-down strike tactic and reached a tacit understanding with management that most employers respected until they resumed open warfare with the labor movement in the late 1970’s.
While management has spent the past thirty years firing union activists and shuttering factory gates as legitimate labor relations strategies, most unions have continued to respect the earlier understanding with management, to follow the rules of the National Labor Relations Act and to get their asses kicked. The UE has changed that, but, really, what did they have to lose?
What did they have to gain, you might be asking? Well, first of all, federal law requires a company to provide at least 60 days advance notice to its workers before closing a factory. Republic Windows only provided three. Fifty-seven days’ pay is not chump change when you’re facing unemployment. The UE’s contract with Republic further called for severance of a certain number of days paid for each year of service, which would provide a badly needed cushion to those workers at a time like this. And, finally, there’s the possibility that the layoffs and factory closing may not be necessary at all, that Republic may be preparing to open a new (non-union) factory, with new (non-union) employees a few states away.
By sit-downing in the factory the union has made it impossible for Republic to sell it. Would you buy a building that was infested with 200 angry union members? By focusing their wrath and the media glare on Bank of America, the bailed-out bank that initially refused Republic Windows the loan that would have kept it afloat, the union has harnessed the public rage over a $700 billion Congressional bail-out that has protected the interests of the rich investors who created this recession while screwing the rest of us. Desperate people who might otherwise have been portrayed as greedy union members are instead valorized as aggrieved community members.
Win or lose, the United Electrical Workers have provided a shining example of the potential of resistance to cut-backs in these lean times. I hope that my own union, which is formulating a public campaign to resist disinvestment in public spending, can galvanize the public with the fights we pick and the way we fight them.