In 2007 I sent the following open letter to all democratic candidates running for President. This included John Edwards, Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama. I received a reply from only the Obama campaign.......it is included at the end of the already long letter. But I figured it would be good for a laugh if little else.
Since the issues brought up in the letter, most centrally the desperate need to strengthen the National Labor Relations Act, remain unresolved issues, I will likely send an updated version of it to the Democratic candidates this time around as well. Here it is:
Dear Presidential Campaign:
I am writing this letter in hopes of getting a clear indication of your candidate’s position as it relates to the Union organizing rights of employees, short comings of the current National Labor Relations Act and its enforcement, and indeed, what place, if any, your candidate sees for the American Labor Movement in the future of 21st century America.
The response I get to these questions will determine whom I support both in my state’s upcoming Democratic primary, and in the general election to be held in November of 2008. Before I ask my specific questions however, I must engage in a considerable digression, in order that the reader understand why theses issue are so critically urgent to me, both politically and personally.
You see, a few weeks ago, I did something that many would consider fool hardy in these decidedly anti-union times. Without the organizational backing of any local or International union, I presented the non-union company I have worked for these last three years, with a letter, copied to the Regional Labor Board office, expressing my intention to exercise my Section 7 rights to attempt to organize or assist in the organizing of a Union.
My primary purpose for taking this action at this time was to put myself fully under the protection of the National Labor Relations Act as I begin a slow, deliberate and informal effort to better educate workers on their NLRA rights and to dissipate the fear and distrust that the company’s “non-union policy” has put into them over the years. For example, almost every one the few employees I have told of my actions have responded with some form of warning about the inevitability of my being fired. While I am not at all oblivious to the fact that this is a real possibility, maybe even a probability, this is not the central point. That point is that these workers have been subtly intimidated into believing that they can be fired for exercising rights that are suppose to be perfectly legal under the NLRA.
If I am to be fired, so be it. It is safe bet that it will cost the company considerable measures of time, trouble and treasure regardless of the final outcome. Over the hundred and fifty year history of the Labor movement a significant number of men and women have given their lives for the right to organize and collectively bargain with employers. Others have suffered beatings, intimidation and severe economic hardship. By comparison losing a forklift driver’s job for the just cause of defending those rights just seems like the least I can do under the circumstances. The far more important question to me is whether the National Labor Relations Act has any real meaning left for the American worker at all.
Having said all that, I must also say that I have no immediate plans to run a formal organizing campaign here yet. There are two main reasons for my reluctance. The first of these has to do with the culture of the place, with its many racial and cultural divisions, minor language barriers, rampant “good ole boyism,” and an almost irrational sense of worry, fear and sometimes mild hostility that emerges when someone even mentions the word union. Clearly, this shop is not close to ready and if it is ever to be ready it will likely take a considerable length of time to over come these obstacles.
My second reason is much more closely linked to the purpose of this letter. This reason has to do with my own fear that if a successful organizing campaign were mounted, the company might well engage in the common corporate practices of refusing to bargain, creative changes in ownership that amount to little more than corporate deed swapping, and/or ultimately even the illegal act of closing the plant. These fears are based in my own experiences in the trenches of the labor movement, as a shop steward, as a local executive board member, as a chief steward and finally as the full time president and business agent of a substantial, if scattered, multi shop-unit local union. In these roles I have seen the National Labor Relations Act fail to protect workers at least as often as I have seen it work for them.
A single example will suffice to make to make my point. Back in 1997 I wrote a letter to the CEO of the company I worked for at the time confronting him on the company’s abandonment of it’s “twenty year commitment” to Total Quality as defined in an agreement that had been negotiated between the Company and the International Union only a few years previously. I also severely chastised him the company’s recent strategy of buying up non-union plants in the south in order to close union ones. As it turned out this letter and the brief correspondence I sent the International Union when I forwarded it to them, convinced the International that something had to be done. A number of union conferences were called bringing together all locals with bargaining agreements with this particular company for the purpose of planning concerted action. The company rather foolishly failed to respond, so in September of 2000 the Union engaged in its right to solve these issues in what the NLRA calls “economic combat”. The strike turned out to be the largest in the history of the industry with twenty something plants nationwide, employing more than 7000 workers, being taken down in a rolling strike that just kept getting worse and worse for the Company. The stock price of this publicly traded company plummeted. After 28 days the company finally yelled “uncle!” and the strike was settled.
Almost immediately the retaliatory plant closings began, although my own home plant was not shut down until about 21 months later. A few months after this they finally got to their primary target, their flagship plant in rural Alabama where the strike had begun. This had been the most profitable plant of their core business. There were no sound “economic” reasons for the successor company (one of those corporate deed swaps had taken place) to close this plant. It was purely a retaliatory act designed to punish not only the 700 workers that had struck with such uncommon solidarity, but also an entire small town whose newspaper had strongly supported the strikers, and whose civil authorities had respected the Union’s right to peacefully strike.
Thus the reader may understand my reluctance to put the workers I work with now under the precarious protection of the National Labor Relations Act. Unless forced to act early by the company’s actions, I cannot see myself filing for a Board supervised election before sometime in 2009 or 2010, when hopefully, legislators and an agreeable President will act to preserve the safety value that the NLRA has provided for these 70 plus years by revisiting the Act and making it fair again. If they do not, Organized Labor will soon all but perish under the ongoing hamstringing that began in 1947 and actively continues in the Bush Administration even today. Once that has happened and the corporate “free traders” have fulfilled their vision of “world wide free trade” by the degradation of western standards of living to that third world nations, the American worker will have only two options left. The first will be complete submission to varying conditions of wage slavery to the corporate elite and the governments they control through their PAC and lobbying money. The second will be forceful resistance of the type that Eugene Debbs and even more radical Labor leaders advocated in the darkest days of the early 1930’s. To most reasonable, but nonetheless freedom loving, Americans, neither option can be particularly attractive.
So even though I have been out of the Labor Movement for nearly four years, I now find myself arguing for all of the usual changes to National labor Relations Act and its enforcement that Union advocates customarily make; for card check elections, for expanded rights to organize contracted and lower level managerial employees, for an end to illegal threats and worker intimidation in organizing campaigns, for strengthened anti-retaliation provisions of the law up to and including the forfeiture of facilities and equipment of companies that cannot bring themselves to abide by the law. I also here argue that the legal definition of “managerial rights” must be limited in two critical respects. First, all of those loop holes by which companies run away from unions or the threat of a union organizing campaign must be closed. Secondly, unions must be able to use their bargaining muscle to encourage companies to adopt Qualitative management systems based in statistical methods and the superior long term efficiency of consensus decision making in order to protect the long term economic success of Unionized facilities. This is not only critical to the long-term economic interests of individual workers, it is even more vital to correcting the millions and millions of decisions of quantitative management over the past century or so that cumulatively now have our species, and almost all others, teetering on the edge of a looming, world wide, ecological catastrophe.
Many say the day of Unions is over. In some ways I was not long ago almost of the same opinion. But the consequences of this are simply too grave. The modern national and multinational corporation is potentially at least, the greatest institutional evil facing modern humanity. It bears most of or much of the responsibility for the greatest problems confronting us, from the root causes of Global Warming, to those of the “War on Terror,” to those of the healthcare crisis and the energy crisis, and even to those associated with the break down of first the extended, and, now the nuclear, family. The power of these cold, corrupt and inefficiently bureaucratic corporations must be checked. Planet Earth is the only natural occurring biosphere we can prove to exist anywhere at the present, and even if others are soon discovered we will not be able to reach them for many centuries to come. It is essential to the survival and prosperity of our as yet unborn descendants that this biosphere be maintained. It simply cannot be sacrificed to stroke corporate egos and feed unbridled, short term, greed. Thus, this generation of Americans has even better reasons to resist the economic tyranny of corporations than that first generation of Americans had to resist the political tyranny of kings. I believe, that strong and effective trade unions remain our best hope of keeping that resistance relatively peaceful.
Here are my questions:
What changes to the National Labor Relations Act, if any, does your candidate support and would be willing to sign into law?
What changes in enforcement procedures of the NLRB would your candidate use his presidential authority to effect?
Does your candidate understand that Organized Labor is the only institution in our whole society that as any hope at all of getting the insatiable greed of these massive corporations back in line so that the countless problems associated with a sustainable post industrial Human Ecology can at last be qualitatively and systematically tackled?
Is your candidate willing to give Labor its teeth and claws back in order to achieve these essential ends?
I thank the reader for taking up so much of his or her valuable time. Unfortunately, some questions, like the answers to them, are complex and far-reaching. They cannot be asked, or answered, in simplistic 30-second sound bytes.
Barrack Obama's Response
Dear David,
Thank you for contacting me about organized labor. I appreciated your note because we share common goals – for Americans to be able to work and raise their families, see a doctor when they need to, educate their children, and retire with dignity and respect.
I began my career as a community organizer working with churches, unions and ordinary people to foster economic development in Chicago neighborhoods devastated by steel mill closings. As president, I will bring mentality of an organizer into the White House, because the men and women who sustain American industry – and the unions that represent them – deserve a president who will join forces with organized labor to lift up working Americans and keep good, high-paying jobs in our communities.
In the Senate, I cosponsored the Employee Free Choice Act, because workers should be able to choose whether to join a union without harassment or intimidation from their employers. The Act requires employers to recognize a union if the majority of employees have signed cards designating the union as its bargaining representative, mandates arbitration if negotiations over a first contract stall, and imposes penalties on employers that illegally coerce workers not to join unions. I have also fought for expanded collective bargaining rights, overtime pay, and workers’ rights – including workplace safety, reasonable wages, and health coverage.
Thank you again for your message.
Sincerely,
Barack Obama