The Rats and the Big Rats
The Bush appointed National Labor Relations Board is poised to curtail the use of those giant inflatable rats that we’ve grown to love. A staple of labor demonstrations for the last decade, the rats are apparently a victim of their own success: increasingly viewed as a signal to the public not to patronize certain ratty, union-busting establishments.
That any branch of the government would ban an effective tactic of the labor movement should come as no surprise. The law’s just not on our side. The Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin amendments to the National Labor Relations Act expressly restricted labor’s solidarity power by banning so-called “secondary activity.”
“Primary activity,” for your edification, would be the employees of Company A striking and boycotting the products of Company A (for example: the UFW grape-pickers at Gallo striking and calling for a boycott of Gallo wines – that boycott is now over, by the way). “Secondary activity” would be the employees of Company A calling for a boycott of Company B for engaging in business with company A (for example, the UFW picketing wine stores that continued to carry struck Gallo wines – something that never happened, because of the law).
Try to imagine Teamsters deliverymen refusing to transport struck goods or UFCW grocery clerks refusing to sell struck goods or even UNITE HERE garment workers picketing Gap stores for selling sweatshop-made underwear, and you’ll see how the law denied the labor movement one of its most potent weapons. In fact, all of this talk about how the labor movement was at its peak membership when the AFL merged with the CIO in 1955 usually fails to mention that Taft-Hartley was passed by Congress in 1947, and Landrum-Griffin followed in 1959.
What about free speech, do I hear you cry? Well, yes, there is that pesky first amendment, and the courts have ruled that speech alone is exempt from labor regulations.
So, one can stand in front of a wine store and shout, “Do not shop in this store, because the rats are selling lousy wine made by scabs,” and that is fine. You can even hand out fliers saying the same.
Once you combine that free speech with any kind of activity (say, picket lines or picket signs), the courts have ruled that you are making an illegal “signal” to the general public to boycott the establishment, in violation of the amended National Labor Relations Act.
About ten years ago, the Laborers union begin accompanying their handbilling with large inflatable rats, as way of attracting attention to themselves and their message. The idea caught on like wildfire and other unions started doing the same. The message was certainly not a clear signal at first. I remember the first time I handbilled with a big rat, sometime in 1997 or 1998. More than a handful of passersby stopped and asked, “Is this about Giuliani?”
Now, people love the rat. As the sight of the big inflatable rats has become more familiar in New York City, people cheer when they see them, honk in support and jeer the bosses (whom, the rats are meant to evoke, in case the meaning was lost on you) and the judges and lawyers have taken note. “The rats think the big rats are a ‘signal,'” noted my UMass classmate, Jen Badgley, when we first heard about this in our labor law class this spring.
The rats admittedly are a signal to those of us with a little conscience and class consciousness (although, I’m not really sure how many people truly have the cause of labor in their hearts to allow for any kind of activity to be a meaningful “signal”). My favorite rat quote comes from the legendary president of the Transport Workers Union, Mike Quill, who responded to Taft-Hartley’s anti-Communist provisions by saying, “I’d rather be called a red by the rats than a rat by the reds.”
Another quote from Mike Quill is more appropriate at this time: “the judge can drop dead in his black robes.” That’s what he said to the press after being sentenced to prison for taking his union out on strike in violation of New York’s public sector Taylor Law.
Three weeks later, it was Quill who was dead, felled by a heart attack. Jail was not kind to the old man. Such is labor’s lot.
Meeks and CAFTA: Follow the Money
Gregory Meeks is catching well-deserved heat for his support of the Central American Free Trade Agreement – a NAFTA-style trade deal that narrowly passed in Congress last month. Defeating the bill was the top political objective of organized labor this summer, and Meeks was one of only 15 Democratic congressmen to join with Bush and the Republicans in supporting the bill.
Meeks has enjoyed dependable support from labor – over a quarter of all financial contributions to his 2004 re-election came from unions and his name has appeared on the Working Families ballot line for the last three election cycles – but now there are many in the labor movement demanding that he be cut off from any further support. The Working Families party, and many of the city’s labor unions, will be sending mailings to 75,000 union members who live in Meeks’ district, documenting the damage of CAFTA, while fishing for potential candidates to run against Meeks.
“This isn’t about retribution,” claims Brian McLaughlin, president of the one million-member Central Labor Council, but “voters in Queens didn’t elect Greg Meeks to send American jobs abroad.” New York State has lost over 61,000 jobs to overseas plant relocations since NAFTA, according the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and studies indicate that the state could lose another 50,000 after CAFTA.
This isn’t about protectionism, either. We now have ten years of NAFTA to study. Those good jobs that left the US did not translate to equivalent jobs in Mexico. Health care and pensions did not follow those jobs, and the pay was low – even by Mexican standards – and there is no reason to expect a different outcome from CAFTA.
No reasonable person opposes free trade as a concept. Our coffee beans, mangos and maple syrup have to come from somewhere, and people around the world deserve the opportunity to work, make money and support their families. But trade bills like NAFTA and CAFTA only raise the corporate bottom line, not human living standards.
Rep. Meeks recognized these flaws when he cast his “yes” vote on July 27. “Despite the fact that CAFTA is by no means a perfect agreement,” he said, “voting it down was not a valid option because it would not subsequently be replaced by a perfect agreement.” Well, no, but voting it down would have handed the Bush administration a strong rebuke and ensured that any future Central American trade deal incorporate more labor and environmental protections.
As much as Rep. Meeks would like to portray his vote on CAFTA as a profile in courage, the truth is that it was very calculated gamesmanship. In a face-to-face meeting with Brian McLaughlin before the vote, Meeks indicated that he was still on the fence but that he would not cast the deciding vote against labor. With a final vote of 217 to 215, he did just that. Why? Call me cynical, but I think the distinguished gentleman looked at his campaign treasury and saw that Big Business contributed over twice as much money as Big Labor.
Meeks’ biggest campaign contributors are banks and financial firms like Prudential and the Bond Market Association, thanks to his seat on the House Financial Services Committee. The Working Families party is calling on House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to remove Meeks from his committee assignment, saying that he has “used [his] committee membership cards to access corporate America’s ATM at the expense of working families.”
It’s a tough line, but we’ll see how long it lasts. The WFP refuses to rule out endorsing Meeks again in 2006.
Greg Meeks is emblematic of the weakness of labor unions operating within the Democratic party, and the moral bankruptcy of the party itself. How can working people depend on a congressman like Greg Meeks to protect their jobs, homes, health and safety when he takes so many legal cash bribes from investment firms and banks that do not have the interests of working families at heart?
What working families need is a political party that is truly independent of corporate interests. The Working Families party was supposed to be a step in that direction, but it has been far too cautious about running independent campaigns and directly challenging bad Democrats. It’s time for the WFP to prove its mettle.
The Boss, and the Boss’ Boss: the Strike at British Airways
The wildcat sympathy strike at British Airways is wonderfully inspiring and a real victory for working people around the world. Of course, the mass media is emphasizing the nightmare stories of tourists stuck in traveler’s limbo, and complaining that this isn’t even British Airways’ fault. Like hell, it’s not.
Like many modern corporations, British Airways has subcontracted a major department – its in-flight food service – to another company. You come across this all the time, even if you’re not aware of it. If you stay at a hotel, but eat breakfast at its restaurant, that restaurant is probably owned and operated by a separate company. If you purchase a computer and call technical support, you’re probably speaking to an employee of another company – based on another continent. The motivation of the boss is to cut costs and remove extraneous concerns.
An airline already has to pay and manage pilots, flight attendants, grounds crews, reservations agents, customer service call centers and so on and so forth. Add to that all the considerations and payroll of running an in-flight food service: the staff, the decisions, the menus. So, British Airways simply hired another company to do work that the airline itself once did, and it probably hired that company at a lower cost than the operations once cost the airline directly. How does the subcontractor provide the same services at a lower cost? Through “scientific management,” also known as “sweating the workers.” Faster, harder, cheaper. Work, work, work. Cut corners. Limit the menus. Slash the wages.
In the drive to cut costs and raise profits, this company – American-based Gate Gourmet – abruptly fired 670 of its workers last Thursday. Those workers might have received paychecks from a different payroll processor, but they worked alongside the grounds workers, flight attendants and pilots of British Airways, and, seeing their coworkers summarily dismissed from their jobs like that, the workers at British Airways protested by walking off the job and throwing the airline into complete and utter turmoil.
So don’t go shedding any tears for poor, innocent British Airways. They established the low budgets in food service that forced Gate Gourmet to cut those jobs. They are every bit as much the boss as the company that actually fired those 670 workers. The workers at British Airways and Gate Gourmet are holding both corporations responsible for the management decisions that take place at the work site. In so doing, these workers have drawn a line in the sand across the globe. They are saying your corporate shenanigans will not shield you from your responsibility to negotiate with your workers. Solidarity extends across payroll departments.
Congressman Meeks on the Defensive
On July 27, the US House of Representatives narrowly passed CAFTA by a vote of 217 to 215, thanks to 15 Democrats who went to the other side and voted with the Bush regime for multinational corporate interests. My representative, Gregory Meeks was one of the “CAFTA 15”.
Like any good citizen, I called his office before the vote to express my opposition to the bill. Now that the bill has passed, I have a new card to play. I have recently been hired to write a new bi-weekly column for the Times Ledger newspaper group in Queens (Queens’ largest community newspaper, with over 50,000 paid subscribers). My first article should appear either this Thursday or next and will focus on the fallout from Meeks’ vote.
On Sunday, I attended a press conference organized by the Working Families party, and attended by representatives of labor unions in the AFL-CIO and Change to Win. After the press conference, when I was done asking a few follow-up questions to Brian McLaughlin, I was approached by Rep. Meeks’ Communications Director, who was apparently hanging out in the back of the press conference to make sure that reporters came away with Rep. Meeks’ position. I’ve received his earlier statements, but I accepted her new materials and incorporated part of Meeks’ justification in my column (the particularly lame complaint “Despite the fact that CAFTA is by no means a perfect agreement, voting it down was not a valid option because it would not subsequently be replaced by a perfect agreement”). She wanted to get me more material, but my deadline was essentially later that night.
This morning, Jonathan Tasini posted a shockingly indecorous e-mail from Rep. Meeks’ senior policy advisor on his blog (quoted below):
You’re so politically stupid, it is not funny! You send out a press release, and get 1 or 2 media outlets to cover it, and then put it on your blogs as if it some big deal believing your own hype! Please. We welcome your racists campaign. Keep it up. Instead of the 96% of the vote we got last cycle, you racists will help us get 100% for sure! By the way, I hope you saw the numerous newspapers articles and editorials praising Rep. Meeks for his courageous vote and standing up for his district and NYC. Congressman Meeks will continue to fight for the 51% of unemployed black males in NYC and working families regardless of the lies put forth by your racist campaign. I bet you couldn’t find our district if you were standing in it. By the way, since your last email cited Crain’s NY, I hope you saw their editorial today regarding Cafta, along with the many others. So keep up your racist campaign. But just a warning to you, when we respond back, you better be prepared. Because we will fight back your racist campaign of misinformation. And it will be just as ugly and nasty as you and your fellow Nadar klansmen. Put that in your elitist pipe and choke on it!
After reading that letter, I decided to reach out to Rep. Meeks very friendly Communications Director. At a quarter to 11, I sent the following message:
Hi Candace,
I appreciate the materials that you gave me on Sunday. I incorporated some of Rep. Meeks’ position in my column, but I haven’t received any follow-up material from you. My deadline was yesterday, but I may be able to open it up again.
Specifically, I may want to address this e-mail quoted below that has apparently been circulated by Mr. Mike McKay. I find the vitriol and language shockingly indecorous for a Congressional aide. Was Mr. McKay speaking for Rep. Meeks when he sent this e-mail?
Four hours later, I received a personal phone call from Rep. Gregory Meeks. Unfortunately, I was at work when he called.
I must say that I’m rather surprised that my little old column (not yet published) and blarg have elicited a prompt, personal response from a United States Congressman. I suppose it’s safe to say that Rep. Meeks is feeling the heat from his support of CAFTA. I look forward to speaking with the distinguished gentleman as soon as possible.