Labor Update: Hearings Today Over NLRB Proposed Rules For Organizing

by Tracy Kurowski

On June 21st, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) proposed new rules  dealing with union elections, a process that has not been significantly changed since the Taft Hartley Act in 1947.

An open meeting on the rules has been scheduled for today July 18th and written comments will be accepted until August 22. After the 75 day comment period ends the Board, if it deems  necessary, will make revisions then implement the new rules.

Almost immediately after publication of the proposed rules, conservatives started to submit their testimony to the corporate media echo chamber which began touting the proposed changes as an assault on market freedom and democracy.

The Wall Street Journal claimed it usurped Congressional authority. Bloomberg spinned it as an “activist” NLRB on behalf of workers.

The National Review depicted the new rules as a lurid sexual act, “In a nutshell, the NLRB’s proposed rules would implement ‘quickie elections’.”

The proposed new rules come at a time when union membership has reached historic lows. Currently just under 12% of the workforce is unionized. If you discount the public sector, that number drops to around 6%.

Unfortunately, as union membership has declined, so have wages for American workers.  Inequality in the U.S. has grown steadily since the 1970s at almost the exact rate as union membership declined.

Despite what the corporate press says, the National Labor Relations Board , which issued the proposed rules, isn’t some fly-by-night part of the government invented by Obama  to turn the country into Kenya or whatever nonsense Tea Party Sqwakers alledge.  Just this month, on July 5th the National Labor Relations Act celebrated its’ 76th Anniversary. Congress passed the law in the1930s in order to protect workers from exploitation, hence the name Labor in the act, not business.

At the time of its passage, just 10% of workers belonged to unions and they faced everything from Pinkerton police beating, harassing and murdering them for trying to organize.  Or falling to their deaths to avoid burning to death in the case of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in which company owners locked workers in the plant in order to keep union organizers out. One hundred forty-six women were killed on that dreadful day one hundred years ago.

By 1945, during the heydey of union organizing the number of American workers who had chosen to join unions had increased to over 35% of the labor force, a truly remarkable effort that led to the creation of what has been called the Greatest Generation. This was an era when babies boomed, highways were unrolled across the country, and men (at least those of European descent) born into poverty in city ghettos could buy a home, feed their families, and retire with dignity instead of disease.  

The heart of the National Labor Relations Act is in Section 7 which states:

Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid and protection.

Fast forward to today and the new makeup of the NLRB  – mostly professionals from unions rather than professional businessmen – has recognized that the rules for organizing long stacked against protecting workers rights to “self- organization and to engage in concerted activities for collective bargaining” must be modernized to deal with 21st Century realities.

THE MYTH

But as they say, no good deed goes unpunished. So when the NLRB, a government body charged with protecting the rights of workers, finally obliges that responsibility the conservative hacks across the media broadcast accusations that their efforts will ruin America.

The persistent mythology regarding organized labor in the USA would have you believe that desp
ite declining membership and wages, in lieu of the fact that workers pay more for health insurance, and regardless of the trend toward workers self-funding 401 K plans instead of retiring with defined pension plans, it is workers who choose to organize into unions that have brought about America’s economic decline.

This ironic mythology puts gangster masks on nurses, firefighters and teachers.

It paints portraits of assembly line workers as greedy miscreants who would destroy American democracy in order to maintain access to affordable health care.  

It sketches call center operators, school lunch cafeteria workers, and CNAs barely earning more than minimum wage as money-grubbing enemies of the free market and all that is good in America.

This fiction would lead an unwitting observer to believe that a building trades member sweating in the hot sun roofing or freezing his ass off in a ditch fixing a winter water main break somehow bilked the nation’s economy out of billions of dollars that should have rightfully gone in the pocket of stock shareholders instead.

Work is no longer relevant according to this version of American economic success.  In this fantasy we all are supposed to do better when Capitol prevails.

The echo chamber repeating this narrative is most vocal in OPEDs of the country’s leading newspapers (Wall St. Times, NYT, etc.). The message is repeated on cable news, local newspapers, and now on paid-for tv ads by right-wing groups like Americans for Prosperity with access to unlimited anonymous funds.

Squawk box pundits who negotiate their own lucrative contracts within the media empire go on air daily, nightly and vilify collective bargaining as a deal with the devil.

Ironically, no one in these echo chambers asks why is it that as union membership has declined over a generation the economy has grown worse for the majority of Americans.

As stock values soar and return to pre-recession levels, one out of eight Americans receive food stamps to keep them from going hungry.

Foreclosures and bankruptcies continue unabated as banker bonuses bounced back.

THE DOSE OF REALITY

The economic realities for most workers in the USA, if it can be depicted as a fairy tale, is less Disney and more Brothers Grim.

The housing market nest egg that promised workers retirement security continues its spiral downward. Nationwide home prices fell 11.5 percent over the previous nine-month period, a rate of decline not experienced since 2008.

All major metro areas the firm tracks showed quarter-over-quarter price declines.

For the past couple years, mass layoffs plagued the country, but now layoffs have slowed, things haven’t gotten any better because nobody’s hiring. Long-term unemployment is worse now than during the great depression. The Washington D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute says the percentage of people without work for six months or longer surpasses every economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Promise of education more of a pathway to debt, leading to what is being called the Lost Generation by the AFL-CIO: young workers for whom there are no jobs. No good jobs, no entry level jobs, few jobs to pick up training for the future. Even McDonalds jobs are scarce.

And when jobs do open up, competition is fierce among the millions of unemployed. According to the AFL-CIO blog, “Stunning, just stunning. Nearly 17,000 people applied for jobs at a Ford plant in Kentucky, according to USA Today. The applications are now going into a lottery and Ford will determine who gets to proceed to be considered for the 1,800 jobs that pay $15.51 an hour.”

A lottery not to win big, but the win the chance at a hard working plat job that will earn you 2/3 median income in USA.

What this country needs, what the people of this country need, is a chance to join unions to turn the job market around. The arguments against workers’ organizing have everything to do with corporate American maintaining its stranglehold over workers’ negotiating power. Right now, we are in a race to the bottom where the employer sets the standard and workers figure out how they can stretch that paltry income  each month.

With fairer rules in place, people can self-organize and demand better.

Tracy
Kurowski has been active with the Labor Movement since 1997 when she
became a member of AFSCME 3506 which represents Adult Educators and
Coordinators at the City Colleges of Chicago. She has since served as
AFL-CIO Community Services Liaison in the Quad Cities Area and most
recently is working as a WIN Organizer for the Iowa Federation of Labor.