7-11-06,9:25 am
Mary Beth Maxwell is executive director of American Rights at Work, a nonprofit organization formed in 2003 to investigate and expose abuse of employee rights in the workplace, publicize the inadequacy of U.S. labor law and advocate change in the struggle to win workplace democracy.
If you ask most people in America why there are fewer members of unions, they have ready answers. They think it’s because of technology or because manufacturing jobs have left or it’s due to globalization and changes in the economy. They agree how important unions were in the old days, but wonder if maybe they just don’t fit anymore—maybe that’s why fewer workers have unions today.
There are three answers to that question that most people in America don’t know—and need to know—that explain why so few workers have unions.
The first is that employer interference with workers making a choice about a union is completely off the charts. At American Rights at Work, we crunched the government’s own numbers from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and demonstrated that literally every 23 minutes in the United States—in the United States of America—someone is illegally discriminated against or fired for trying to exercise their rights at work. That’s really an outrage in a democracy. There is a level of lawlessness in the U.S. workplace in terms of firings and surveillance and intimidation that I think would stun most people if they knew about it. We commissioned a report from the University of Illinois at Chicago that found 30 percent of employers fire somebody illegally during organizing campaigns. Further, 49 percent of employers threatened to shut down the worksite if people were to vote for forming a union, and 82 percent of those employers actually hire high-priced union-busting consultants to coach them in how to defeat those campaigns.
Second, most people in America have no idea that union-busting is a massive, for-profit industry—it’s simply not “some workers want a union and some don’t.” Workers are up against hired guns, coaching managers and middle-managers and co-workers on how to defeat a union organizing campaign.
In one case we brought to the attention of the New York Times, a group of 400 workers were trying to form a union at a manufacturing plant in South Carolina. Their employer, EnerSys, sued Jackson Lewis, their union-busting consultant, for malpractice. What came out in the course of that lawsuit, which normally never gets told, is that EnerSys paid Jackson Lewis $2.7 million over 10 years to coach managers to defeat that campaign. The company even called it a relentless and unlawful campaign to oust the union. Supervisors were counseled to fire people and they did. The company was counseled to fire supervisors who didn’t want to go along with that kind of illegal activity. That’s a primary reason that fewer workers today have unions.
Finally, the current legal system in the United States that’s supposed to protect workers’ rights is broken. It’s outdated. It’s completely manipulated by employers, coached by these union-busting consultants, who want to game that system. There are no meaningful penalties for illegal behavior. If you fire a worker, you can pretty much get away with it by paying very small amounts of back pay awards—sometimes years and years after the situation’s been addressed or after the NLRB has found an employer guilty.
For instance, a woman named Verna Bader was illegally fired for trying to form a union. She was 60 years old during the union organizing campaign. We met Verna 12 years later when she was 72 years old and still waiting for the NLRB to make a decision about whether or not she had been treated unfairly. The system is simply not working.
There is another way.
Cingular Wireless, and their partnership with CWA, demonstrates the strength of an entirely new model that would work so much better for companies, work so much better for workers and work better for our overall economy. [Cingular Wireless agreed to remain neutral in its employees’ efforts to form a union. As a result, a year after its 2004 merger with AT&T, some 17,000 former AT&T employees have joined CWA.] To address the crisis we face in terms of workers’ rights, and to build on the proven success of the Cingular example, there also is momentum around policy change through the Employee Free Choice Act.
The Employee Free Choice Act would create real penalties for illegal behavior. If an employer breaks the law, the employer should pay a price. The act would create a process and reasonable timelines to facilitate employers and workers settling contracts. It also would expand what’s called “card-check,” or majority sign-up. Majority sign-up is a process by which employers freely choose to recognize a union if a majority of employees provide signed cards authorizing union representation. An interesting note: This process requires a majority of the workers in the workplace, not just the majority of people who might participate in an NLRB election.
Frequently, majority verification is paired with a neutrality agreement, which makes for a process with less conflict, in which both parties come up with some rules of conduct so workers can have a free choice, and also so the workplace is not disrupted by unnecessary and costly conflict. Not only is majority sign-up a long-standing and legitimate process of union formation recognized under current law, it’s become the predominant way in which workers are forming unions. More than 80 percent of new organizing in recent years is occurring outside the NLRB—because the current system is broken.
There’s a growing list of employers—and I think Cingular Wireless is really at the top of the list of setting an entirely new model—that are pursuing new ways to work with their employees and reduce costly conflicts all too common in the NLRB election process. Majority verification and neutrality agreements help establish workplace partnership and collaboration—a strategic asset in today’s economy. A year ago at American Rights at Work, we launched our Socially Responsible Business Project to also tell the good news and highlight models such as Cingular where the employee-employer relationship could be so different.
Companies and unions are creating new models and voting with their feet. They are moving increasingly outside of the current legal framework. The Employee Free Choice Act would build on the best of that innovation and update our laws to better reflect the realities of the American workplace. Every worker deserves what the workers at Cingular Wireless get—a fair chance and a free choice. Let’s make it the law of the land again to protect workers’ freedom to form American Rights at Work
