7-14-06,11:33am

In a protest filled with symbolism that resonated from civil rights marches in the 1960s, nine union and religious leaders, backed by some 1,500 chanting workers, locked arms and blocked streets at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., for nearly half an hour today at the height of the lunch hour.

Chanting, “We’re Union, Get Used to It!” and “Labor Board, You Ain’t Right, You Ain’t Gonna Take Our Rights,” workers from a gamut of unions protested the Bush-appointed NLRB’s failure to do its job and protect workers’ rights. In recent months, the labor board has systematically taken away workers’ rights and is poised to bar millions more workers from belonging to a union.

Packing the sidewalks outside NLRB headquarters and spilling into the streets for more than two hours, workers such as Herman Brown of the D.C. Nurses sought to send a message to the labor board.

“I’m concerned about what’s happening in this country,” Brown said. “The Bush administration wants to take away our right to organize. We’ve had enough.”

Romay Tatum, a member of the United Mine Workers (UMWA), joined the march because she believes it’s important that workers have the freedom to belong to a union.

“The need for a union is just as strong as it was in the 1930s when the National Labor Relations Board was created,” Tatum said. “We still have to fight for everything. It’s just that today we have to fight the people who were supposed to protect our rights.”

In an impassioned speech, Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts, flanked by mine workers from Pennsylvania, reminded the union crowd of its legacy of fighting for justice:

Jesus marched for justice. Ghandi marched for justice. Martin Luther King marched for justice. John L. Lewis marched for justice. Moses marched for justice. We are marching for justice today.

The American labor movement has gotten on its feet and hit the streets and ain’t nobody gonna turn us around.

Roberts was one of nine activists who locked arms and blocked a busy D.C. intersection across from the NLRB. The others were: Coalition of Black Trade Unionists President Bill Lucy; Washington Metro AFL-CIO President Joslyn Williams; UMWA Organizing Director James Gibbs; AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff; Job with Justice Executive Director Fred Azcarate; Martha Kuhl, secretary-treasurer of the California Nurses Association; Sandra Falwell, a member of D.C. Nurses Association; and Rev. Ron Stief, team leader of the United Church of Christ’s Public Life and Social Policy Team.

In a series of cases known as “Kentucky River,” the NLRB soon will decide whether many nurses, building and construction trades workers, journalists and others should be classified as “supervisors.”

If the NLRB expands the definition of supervisor to include such workers, an estimated 8 million workers no longer will be able to join a union. That figure would be in addition to the 8.6 million workers already barred in recent years from joining unions because they have been excluded from labor law coverage.

The NLRB has refused to hear oral arguments on the Kentucky River cases—and has heard no oral arguments, a fundamental part of any due process, since the Bush administration took office. In fact, the NLRB denied union requests to hear oral arguments in these cases.

The AFL-CIO and a group of 30 law professors are filing separate motions today to have the NLRB reconsider its refusal to hold oral arguments.

At the rally in front of NLRB headquarters, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson summed up the sentiments of the day when she said:

We believe that when we work hard for a living every day we should be able to say what we want to do at work. We deserve the right to join a union and stay in a union. How can this board make a decision that affects us without listening to all sides?

In a weeklong series of actions nationwide, workers in 20 cities took to the streets to protest the NLRB’s decisions. Actions took place today in Portland, Ore.; Phoenix; Chicago; Milwaukee; and Albuquerque, N.M.

Two new reports back up the workers’ charges that the NLRB is taking away their rights.

In Supervisor in Name Only, the Economic Policy Institute reports that the new definition of supervisor could result in more than 50,000 workers in each of 35 occupations, ranging from registered nurses and computer systems analysts to private guards and police officers, losing their right to join a union or bargain collectively. In 24 other occupations, more than 30 percent of those employed could lose their union rights. According to the report’s authors, Ross Eisenbrey and Lawrence Mischel:

The upcoming cases all involve whether these employees can be classified as supervisors and thus excluded from NLRA protections and participation in collective bargaining because they “responsibly direct other employees” while using “independent judgment.” But until now no one would have called these employees “supervisors” in the traditional sense because they do not have authority to hire, fire, discipline, evaluate, or promote the employees they supposedly supervise.

Another report, President Bush’s National Labor Relations Board Rolls Back Labor Protections, released by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, chronicles a series of NLRB decisions that have eliminated workers’ freedom to join a union.

Miller says:

Over the past five years, President Bush has stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union members–and American workers are paying the price. Millions of workers have lost their right to organize into unions, their basic human rights have been trampled, and businesses have essentially been given free rein to make it as difficult as possible for their employees to organize. Collective bargaining has helped millions of workers negotiate a living wage for their families, helping create the middle class itself.