Selling Us Down the Kentucky River

Leaving for school tomorrow, now seems a good time to reflect upon the greatest current threat to labor unions: the group of cases that are collectively called “Kentucky River.” Jonathan Tasini efficiently sums them up:


In a normal, sane world, these cases (involving nurses) would not pass the smell test: the employers are seeking to classify these nurses as “supervisors” because they exercise “independent judgement” (“yes, that patient is going into cardiac arrest so I better do something”) and “responsibly direct other employees.” Doing so, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, would potentially take as many as 8 million workers out of union bargaining units. Poof. with the stroke of a pen.

If the Bush-dominated National Labor Relations Board rules as predicted against the rights of professional, skilled and educated workers than the boss whose workers I have been organizing for the past few months can legally refuse to deal with our union. That this system could justify denying the right to organize and bargain collectively to a group of workers who may have wide discretion in their daily assignments but are denied any kind of job security, are frequently paid a pittance and denied pensions, maternity benefits, child care and more with no power to do anything about it individually is an indictment of the state of federally protected workers’ rights. It begs the question: is it time to abandon federal labor law?

Prior to 1937, labor relations in the U.S. had a Wild West character. Unions organized and struck employers and ensured that “unfair” (read: non-union) products would not be bought, sold or distributed by union members. Bosses on the other hand fired and blacklisted union activists and set up sham “company unions” to nullify their workers’ complaints. Workers’ rights (and pay and benefits) were guaranteed only insofar as the collective strength of the unions could make the boss’ violation of them a Very Bad Idea.

This resulted in so much strike activity and economic instability that the government finally intervened and with the National Labor Relations Act established certain legal rights for workers engaging in collective activity, as well as an orderly process for enforcing those rights and certifying workers’ choice of union representatives through elections. The law worked well and millions of workers took the opportunity to organize unions at their jobs, winning massive pay increases, great new benefits and generally contributing to the nation’s economic recovery following the Depression and war.

But the law never covered all workers, only those defined as “employees” under the act. Government employees were excluded, and only gained rights as state governments passed laws that covered them. In a nod to the racist Dixiecrats, whose support was essential to passing the law, farm workers and domestic employees were excluded. Employees who worked for companies not engaged in interstate commerce (which was more narrowly defined before the civil rights movement), like hotel and restaurant employees, were not covered at first. We often make the mistake of saying, as a shorthand, that these workers who are not defined as “employees” under the act can’t be in unions. What’s more accurate is that their legal status is still in that pre-1937 Wild West. They can still organize, and if they are effectively united and strong can compel an employer to recognize and deal with their union, but the Boss is also free to fire and blacklist anyone at all.

Of course, the Boss has been pretty free to fire, harass and intimidate employees who are trying to form a union for a long time now. Decades of Reagan and Bush Board decisions, backed up by a few key Supreme Court decisions, have perverted the law so that it now exists as a framework for employers to conduct a legal 30 day reign of terror before a union authorization election. For this reason, most unions that are serious about organizing have largely abandoned the NLRB election process in favor of pressure campaigns to get the employer to voluntarily recognize the union based upon a majority of workers signing union authorization cards. Fearing the threat to its union-breaking authority, the NLRB is considering a rule that would deny card check-certified unions the traditional 12 month time bar against petitions to certify or decertify any union following recognition, effectively forcing a costly election.

The problem with completely abandoning the NLRB process is that subsequent amendments, in 1947 and 1959, also defined a “union” under the act and created a legal framework for liquidating renegade unions. For example, when the government decided that Communists couldn’t hold elected positions in labor unions, well, you might ask, what constitutional authority did they have to limit anyone’s right to free assembly? The answer is none, really. You are free to organize a free association, elect a Communist as your president and call yourselves a union, but the NLRB need not legally recognize you as a “union” and can keep you off any certification (or decertification) ballot. So, for example, when the old CIO-affiliated United Electrical Employees (UE) refused to comply with the anti-Communist provisions of the Taft-Hartley amendments to the act, the AFL’s International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) petitioned to replace them as the certified bargaining representative at scores of companies, and only the IBEW was allowed to appear on the ballot, resulting in tens of thousands of UE members being “raided” by the IBEW and leaving the UE a shadow of its former self.

The same legal fate awaits any union that violates provisions of the act, including especially those that ban powerful union strategies like expanding picket lines to companies that are allied with the principal employer, refusing to ship, sell or stock any goods made by non-union workers and demanding union recognition for so-called “supervisors.”

All of the unions that I have worked for are in a position to withstand such a threat. Sure, some chintzy “union” could exploit the situation to petition for a sham election and replace the Hotel Trades Council or 1199 as the titular, legal “union” on record, but the workers would know which union secured the strong contract, high wages and excellent benefits that made their jobs “good jobs,” and would retain loyalty to the real, renegade union. But such bold and effective unions are, alas, not the norm.

The union I currently work for is also in a strong position to fight the law. The vast majority of our contracts are characterized by shockingly high salaries and generous benefits that translate to significant member loyalty and we have the additional protection of having most of our members working in the public sector, which is not affected by the NLRB at all. Plus, we have “no raid” deals with our closest competitors.

But it’s still scary as hell to step outside the relative comfort of 70 years of established law and go back to the Wild West.

Union Beer

When it comes to beer, there is only one factor that’s more important than price and taste: is it union? Molsons, Miller, Anheuser-Busch, Pabst are all good union products. Always look for the union label, comrades, even when getting loaded.

Beer drinkers, I regret to report that Yeungling is on the Unfair list. Management at Yeungling are busting the longtime union for their workers, Teamsters local 830. They cut off negotiations long before the recent contract expired and threatens employees’ jobs if they didn’t sign a petition to decertify the union – all in blatant violation of federal labor law. But the law won’t mean anything if people keep drinking their union-busting beer. Boycott Yeungling, Yuengling Premium Beer, Yuengling Light, Lord Chesterfield Ale, Dark Brewed Porter, Traditional Lager, Light Lager, and Original Black & Tan.

Let the company know that you deplore their wholesale violation of their employees’ rights. Demand that they resume negotiating with the union before you ever take another sip of their beer.

Yuengling Brewery
5th & Mahantongo Streets
Pottsville, PA 17901
(570) 622-4141
http://www.yuengling.com/contact.htm

(This article was written while under the influence of Labatt Blue – “UNION MADE” in London, Montreal and Vancouver, Canada.)

Searching for Comrade Obermeier

On September 9, 1947, federal agents stormed the offices of Hotel & Restaurant Employees Local 6 and arrested the president of the union, Michael J. Obermeier, on politically motivated immigration charges. Obermeier had been the president of Local 6 for the last ten years, and a militant union leader for food workers in the city since 1922, having organized hundreds of hotels and restaurants and thousands of poor, immigrant, minority and female workers in the hospitality industry to fight for respect and dignity on the job, higher pay and lower hours.

The Red Scare was the perfect pretense to chase troublemakers like Obermeier out of the industry, and the Taft-Hartley Act (passed two weeks earlier) already laid a legal framework to remove Communists from union office, but Obermeier was an even easier target because he had not entered the country legally in 1913. Despite his German translation and propaganda work in support of the US war effort during World War II, and his repeated applications for U.S. citizenship, he was deemed to be an undesirable alien subversive shortly after the war.

The feds were likely alerted to Obermeier’s position, status and “threat” by the officers of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union who had welcomed Obermeier and his comrades into the unions only a decade earlier in an effort to drive the mafia out of the union and organize the thousands of workers who were crying out for the union but were suddenly shocked – SHOCKED – to find out that the officers of their largest local were COMMUNISTS!

It was a scenario that played itself out in countless CIO unions that were “bored from within” by Communist elementa, but the H&RE were an AFL union that had invited the Communists in before they spat them out. The officers of Local 6, and the Hotel Trades Council to which it was affiliated, were faced with the same choice of repudiating the Communist Party and their earlier politics, or being thrown overboard. Obermeier’s close partner, Jay Rubin, rejected him and their radical politics and claimed allegiance to the U.S. flag and the bureaucratic union regime, and he continued to lead the union for much of the rest of the century.

Obermeier took the fall for the New York local’s radicalism. He was found guilty of perjury for having denied past or present Communist affiliations when he had applied for U.S. citizenship, even though he had been a member of the party from 1930 until 1939. He was deported to Germany on December 11, 1952 and died in Spain on May 28, 1960.

Much remains obscure about Obermeier. Who was he? Where, exactly did he come from? How did he come to the independent syndicalist trade union movement? And how from there was he attracted to the Communist Party and the Trade Union Education League? Did he recruit Jay Rubin to the CP, or did Jay Rubin join first? What political beliefs did he have that were independent of the CP? What happened to him when he was repatriated to Germany? And what the fuck was a German Communist (and, I suspect, a Jew) doing in Fascist Spain?

I have been studying Obermeier, Local 6 and the movements that spawned it, for most of the year and I am not much closer to the answer. My research continues.

Living on in the Archives


History is awfully fragile. I spent yesterday at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library system (my new girlfriend, “Sybil,” as I like to say, with whom I have been spending all my Saturdays) reading through the 70-year-old archives of the “Free Voice of the Amalgamated Food Workers.”

The Amalgamated Food Workers was an independent union, focused mainly in the hotels, restaurants and bakeries of New York City. They were born in the IWW-led strikes of 1912 and 1913. Those strikes are today most infamous for Wobbly organizer Joseph Ettor’s inflammatory battle cry, “If you are compelled to go back under unsatisfactory conditions…go back with your mind made up that it is the unsafest thing in the world for the capitalist to eat food prepared by members of your union.” The press, of course, seized on these words of more evidence of the IWW’s un-American sabotage and denounced all the strikers, who went back to the shops under unsatisfactory conditions.

The Wobblies brought controversy, but no organization to speak of, so the workers who remained reorganized themselves into an independent union that lasted for 17 years, organizing the kitchens and dining rooms of Manhattan’s fanciest hotels. The “Free Voice” is a fascinating document of the times, as radicalism remained even as the union took on bread and butter issues like hours and wages. Evident in those pages was a wide variety of Wobbly, Socialist and Communist sympathies with fraternal greetings from Soviet Russia, Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood and William Z. Foster. This was a trade union that organized along amalgamated industrial lines, and strove to expand its ranks to include all the workers in their industry, regardless of race, sex or language (Each edition included German and Italian translations; Yiddish, Lithuanian and other languages were apparently available).

Eventually, the union was supplanted by a Communist-led, T.U.U.L. affiliated union, the Food Workers Industrial Union, which was led by men like Jay Rubin and Michael J. Obermeier who has previously been leaders of the Amalgamated. In 1935, the unions merged and Rubin and Obermeier pressed further to merge with the AFL-affiliated Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders Union. They wound up as leaders of the newly chartered Local 6, as well as the amalgamated New York Hotel Trades Council.

In its last issue, the “Free Voice” took stock of its legacy:

The organ of the Amalgamated Food Workers, the “Free Voice,” can now be incorporated into history as a vital organ of the Labor Movement and will live in its archives as a reminder of the fearless weapon that it was in furthering the struggle of the working class against the obstacles that beset it.

What’s sad is that this archive had been stored in a warehouse until specially requested, and the paper was so fragile and bitter that it crumbled to be touched. The New York Public Library is one of perhaps three archives left of the “Free Voice,” perhaps the last archive that is not microfiche, and is incomplete, missing many volumes and issues.

Although the union that they helped organize lives on as a powerful advocate of workers in the hotel industry, the names, thoughts and deeds of those radical pioneers is all but lost. I hope, in some small way, to correct that.