This may make your eyes glaze over but it's damn important. The National Labor Relations Board issued a very bad ruling in the past few days--why am I not surprised--in a very important "card check" case. In a nutshell, what the NLRB ruling has done is guarantee more workplace strife, less peace between workers and employers and more brutalization of workers.
The background: Dana Corp. and Metaldyne Corp independently agreed to neutrality and card-check agreements with the UAW. Just to review: card check simply means that the employer agrees to recognize the union upon the showing of a majority of cards signed by the workers. And neutrality is just as crucial: as we know, the real reason there are not millions more people in unions is because of the reign of terror most employers unleash on workers who want to organize; when the employer remains neutral, workers get to make the choice in an environment free of intimidation and fear.
Both employers eventually recognized the union. Within days, ginned up by anti-union groups like the Right To Work Committee, workers filed petitions to decertify the union--when I mean "within days," I'm serious: in the case of Metaldyne, it was just 22 days and, at Dana, just 34 days. There is just no way such a petition would have been filed without outside manipulation.
Without getting into every twist and turn, the demand for a new election was rebuffed at the lower levels of the labor law bureaucracy for a very sound reason--it has been long established labor law that once a union is recognized, there has to be a reasonable amount of time that passes before someone can file to oust the union. There is good, logical reasoning for that notion, if you ponder it for a moment: if a minority could continually ask for new elections and could file petitions every few weeks, the union and the employer and the workers could never have peace. The workplace would always be in turmoil--and that is bad for the employer, as well as the workers.
On appeal, the cases reached the National Labor Relations Board, which has three Republicans and two Democrats. And now comes the tortured ruling--in the future, any voluntary recognition would be followed by a 45-day window in which a minority could file a petition to have the voluntary recognition effectively overturned. Crazy.
Think of it: you are the company. A few workers file to overturn the voluntary recognition you just agreed to. Why on earth would you make any serious efforts to bargain a contract with the union if the entire recognition was being thrown into potential limbo? Even with the best intentions, a company would probably hold off on trying to reach a deal.
The same is true for the union: if you were now faced with the need to ward off a decertification effort, you would be hard-pressed to both bargain a contract and try to fight the NLRB process.
As the two Democrats on the board, Wilma Liebman and Dennis Walsh, point out in their dissent, the Republican-majority is effectively creating more conflict by inventing a "window" as if the voluntary recognition procedure did not clearly air all views:
"Finally, the majority insists that the employees need the 45-day window period to "debate among themselves", to "fully discuss their views," and "to solicit support for decertification." The majority thus implies that employees need an anti union campaign to exercise free choice. Employees, however, have already had the entire period during which the union solicited authorization cards--which the majority agrees may be a substantial period of time--to discuss their views and marshal support for or against the union. There is no need for a "window period" that provides an antiunion minority of employees a second chance to drum by enough support to oust the union.
And the overall impact:
The majority's window period allows this minority to thwart, or at the very least work against, the majority, by creating a disincentive to meaningful collective bargaining at the same time it gives that minority the opportunity to marshal support for ousting the union.
[the bolded words are my emphasis]
Cleverly, the Republican majority says, well, we continue to support voluntary recognition--even though you have to know that they would love to try to throw that out that right, too. But, by creating this new "window" it undercuts the very idea of voluntary recognition--a way for employers and workers to reach a fair settlement and build a productive workplace environment. With the 45-day "window," the Republican-majority is almost guaranteeing more strife.
What is often lost in the zealotry of the anti-union animus pouring out from most corporations is that the conflict over unionization hurts employers, too. After a brutal organizing drive, in which employers engage in firings, intimidation and the sowing of fear, the workplace just can't return to normal. Workers feel alienated. And that does employers no good in terms of productivity and loyalty to the company on the part of pro-union supporters.
Last observation: if anyone wonder whether there is any difference between the two major political parties, you can be sure that a Democratic-majority NLRB would not issue such a ruling.
P.S. I thought this was more important to post than a new update on labor presidential endorsements but that will come tomorrow perhaps. For the record, Sen. Clinton snagged the endorsement of the American Federation of Teachers--not surprising but an important union for her campaign.