Yesterday,
workers picketed in Tampa and 17 other cities. Today,
nurses are expected to picket in Oakland. Later in the week, they will also picket in LA, Chicago, and Bangor, Maine.
They are picketing over something known as the Kentucky River decision, which will hurt workers, especially workers in skilled fields such as nursing. Nurses want the right to organize. Among other things, they are demanding a reasonable nurse-to-patient ratio. As a potential future patient, I also want nurses to have a reasonable nurse-to-patient ratio.
Before you read any further, I recommend having a look at the diary American Workers' Freedom to Form Unions Threatened Under Bush NLRB. Tula Connell provides an excellent analysis of everything that is going on - and gives us a history lesson.
I've never been in a union, although my mom was in a teacher's union while I was growing up. I'm not the world's most well-informed person on the subject of labor.
That said, here's what I've gathered:
1. If you are a supervisor, you can't be in a union
2. A really clever way of keeping people from forming unions is by calling them "supervisors."
3. If we could call everybody a supervisor, then we'd have no more unions.
4. Bush's buddies want to do that.
Here's your five second history lesson:
Our government passed the National Labor Relations Act in the 1930's. The bit about supervisors came into play in 1947...
From Tula's diary:
By 1947, corporate-backed Republicans in the House and Senate, who had spent years trying to legislatively hamstring the NLRA , succeeded in passing the Taft-Hartley Act. With its passage, Taft-Hartley basically destroyed the main goal of the NLRA: to give workers a fair chance to decide whether to form unions.
Taft-Hartley includes a dirty laundry list of rules, but among the most significant--although the least noted at the time of the law's passage--is its ban on supervisors forming unions.
So, the Ford foremen's union was abolished. And the growing number of white-collar, "middle management" professionals who proliferated throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were powerless to join together and bargain collectively with their bosses.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which was established by the NLRA, is an independent body that regulates labor.
So - what's the problem? Bush's buddies want to exploit American workers... the NLRB is there to shield the workers from Bush's evildoers... oh wait, Bush appointed the NLRB.
Folks, the foxes are fat and happy outside the now-empty henhouse, and they have feathers stuck in their teeth.
The NLRB consists of a General Counsel and 5 board members. They are:
Ronald Meisburg (General Counsel) (R): A recess appointment! Well done, Bush! From what I've read, he's described as a "reliable anti-union vote".
Robert J. Battista (Chairman) (R): Before serving on the NLRB, he was an employment lawyer representing employers at the Detroit law firm of Butzel Long.
Wilma B. Liebman (D): She used to be a lawyer for the Bricklayers and the Teamsters. Clinton appointed her and Bush kept her on. Her term is up this August.
Peter C. Schaumber (R): Another recess appointment. He used to be a labor arbitrator and a corporate lawyer.
Peter N. Kirsanow (R): Kirsanow was an attorney who representated management in labor cases prior to his appointment on the NLRB.
A year earlier, as a member of Project 21, a group of black conservative leaders, Kirsanow championed anti-union legislation in California that was intended to keep labor out of politics.
Dennis P. Walsh (D): Walsh is a Democrat. And a recess appointment.
So what we have here is an "independent" board consisting of 4 Republicans and 2 Democrats. Kirsanow sounds like he's the most anti-union and anti-labor of the bunch, but don't discount the other 3 Repugs. After all, Bush appointed them.
Now return to the original idea that Bush's buddies (i.e. the NLRB) wants to designate as many workers as possible "supervisors" so they can't form unions.
Back to Tula's wisdom:
Under Taft-Hartley, a supervisor is defined as
...any individual having authority, in the interest of the employer, to hire, transfer, suspend, lay off, recall, promote, discharge, assign, reward or discipline other employees, or responsibility to direct them, or to adjust their grievances, or effectively to recommend such action, if in connection with the foregoing the exercise of such authority is not of a merely routine or clerical nature, but requires the use of independent judgment.
That sounds like my boss. Whether or not you think supervisors should have the right to form unions, it's difficult to argue with that definition of the word "supervisor."
The Kentucky River story picks up here.
Kentucky River Community Care Inc. operated the Caney Creek Development Complex in Kentucky, a nonprofit mental health facility. The complex wanted to categorize six nurses as supervisors, making them ineligible to join a union.
The NLRB found that the six nurses were not supervisors. The decision went to a federal appeals court (which overruled the NLRB) and then SCOTUS (which upheld the appeals court, led of course by Scalia).
In light of that decision, the NLRB invited interested parties to file amicus briefs in three additional labor cases that, while separate from the Kentucky River case, involve some of the same labor issues.
The board asked parties to argue the meaning of "independent judgment." For example, "What is the degree of discretion required for supervisory status?"
In other words - what do you consider a supervisor? Is it a waiter training a new hire, or a nurse showing another nurse how to do something? Or is it my idea of a supervisor - hiring, firing, promoting, rewarding, etc.?
The NLRB's decision on this will be unveiled very, very soon. The Scalia decision was issued in 2001. The previous NLRB decision was before that. The members of the NLRB are mostly fairly new. Each serves a term of five years... oh, except for all of those recess appointees :) Even though some of the members have been on since the good old days of Clinton, on the whole there's been a decent amount of turnover on the board.
"The impact is likely to be particularly dramatic in the health care industry, in construction and in other skilled occupations where it is common for higher skilled workers to direct the work of lower skilled employees," the federation said.
The California Nurses Association said that the upcoming ruling by the NLRB could reclassify hundreds of thousands of RNs as "supervisors."
Keep an eye out for this story in the news while we wait for the decision. You might have to use a magnifying glass when you look for updates in the newspaper. It was really stinking hard to pull together enough facts to write this diary. The news just plain isn't really covering it, and it's important - not just for nurses, but for anyone who is or will be a patient.