6-14-05, 9:38am
The Bush administration demands higher standards of democracy from countries abroad than it is willing to practice here at home, insists a new report published by American Rights at Work, a non-partisan organization that advocates for workers rights.
Specifically, the report, titled “Free and Fair?: How US Labor Law Fails US Democratic Election Standards,” argues that under the Bush administration’s control of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal regulatory body that oversees collective bargaining issues, conditions imposed on workers make organizing a union and bargaining for better pay and conditions extremely difficult.
In fact, argues the report, conditions that hamper union elections do not match the rhetoric and claims the Bush administration makes about democracy and free and fair elections.
For example, in the State Department’s 2004 Human Rights Country Reports, the administration criticized sharply numerous countries for failing to provide unfettered access to the electorate by opposition parties, to provide access to the media, and for creating a legal structure that unfairly favors ruling parties.
The report argues that if the Bush administration applied similar standards to labor law and union elections in the US, workers would have a better chance to organize unions and have a say at work.
Unfortunately, Bush’s standard of democracy seems to apply only to countries that it doesn’t like or is trying to impose its agenda on.
Another important double standard is the Bush administration’s claim that it seeks to protect workers’ rights. According to the State Department, it supports “freedom of association [of workers] and the effective recognition of the right to organize and bargain collectively.”
Never has this claim been shown to be more utterly false than when it comes to the process workers have to endure when trying to organize unions in the United States.
During the process of forming a union, NLRB procedures fail to live up to the standards of US democracy and the standards the Bush administration claims to follow when judging election overseas.
According to the report, corporations enjoy a one-sided advantage in representation elections while employees must overcome hurdles that mock serious practice of the concept of “effective recognition of the right to organize.”
Employers have full access to employee information, control their schedules while they work, and have unfettered ability to threaten, harass, or cajole workers into voting against unions.
Employers can visit workers at workers’ homes, send them anti-union mailings, and can hold mandatory “captive audience” meetings during which workers are warned and threatened not to support the union.
The administration, for its part, has shown very little interest in practicing its claim to uphold “freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to organize and bargain collectively.”
According to the AFL-CIO, in 2002, the administration threatened to veto the bill that created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) if Congress didn’t include provisions that dramatically scaled back the collective bargaining rights of DHS employees. Since then, Bush has threatened to go after contracts with air traffic controllers.
Bush denied the right to bargain collectively to airport security screeners who now enjoy long hours and low pay for the work they do.
When federal employees at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, members of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 1827 in St. Louis, MO in 2003 started talking about safety and health along with racial and gender bias issues in the workplace, Bush terminated their collective bargaining rights with a stroke of his pen.
Bush intervened in California in 2003 to oppose a state law that ordered accountability for all taxpayer funds and states subsidies given to corporations and prohibited their us in anti-union campaigns.
The law also mandated the state’s neutrality in union organizing campaigns. The Bush-appointee controlled NLRB voted to support a lawsuit brought by the Chamber of Commerce to block the law.
Bush also revoked collective bargaining rights for Department of Justice employees.
In order to even the playing field and create an environment that ensures workers’ democratic rights as well as their right to collectively bargain, a new approach to labor law is needed.
The labor movement has endorsed a law called the . This law would require employers to recognize a union after a majority of workers sign cards authorizing union representation. It also would provide for mediation and arbitration of first-contract disputes and authorize stronger penalties for violation of the law when workers seek to form a union.
This law would give workers democratic rights that are the cornerstone of democracy in the political arena and in the workplace.
--Joel Wendland can be contacted by e-mail at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.
