Cross-posted at the Writing on the Wal.
On February 14, 2007, Vice-President Dick Cheney promised to protect workers' rights. Stop laughing, I'm not making this up. This is part of his speech before a breakfast with the National Association of Manufacuturers:
America is also a country that takes very seriously the right of men and women to work, and to organize within the law. The American labor movement has a proud history and has long reflected a basic principle of our democracy: fair elections decided by secret ballots. This principle will be put to a test in Congress this year. It's important for everyone in the debate to remember that secret ballots protect workers from intimidation, and ensure the integrity of the process. (Applause.) Beyond that, if workers do decide to form a union, they and their employer should be able to negotiate without having terms forced on them. Our administration rejects any attempt to short-circuit the rights of workers.
This is the same line of argument adopted by the National Chamber of Commerce, which has set up a group called "Coalition for a Democratic Workplace" which has the Internet address of "myprivateballot.com." This organization exists solely in order to fight the Employee Free Choice Act, the most important piece of legislation before Congress this term other than whatever bill finally gets us out of Iraq. Nevertheless, they are actually running an ad on Talking Points Memo right now trying to make it look like this law is some kind of threat to democracy.
Don't be fooled. The provision of that act that has these folks so up in arms mandates something called card check. That means that if a majority of workers sign a union card, there does not have to be a union representation before bargaining can begin.
Isn't this undemocratic? Shouldn't workers have the right to express their preference without harrassment. As the AFL-CIO Q&A on this bill explains:
When a majority of employees votes to form a union by signing authorization cards, and those authorization cards are validated by the federal government, the employer will be legally required to recognize and bargain with the workers’ union.
Majority sign-up is not a new approach. For years, some responsible employers such as Cingular Wireless have taken a position of allowing employees to choose, by majority decision, whether to have a union. Those companies have found that majority sign-up is an effective way to allow workers the freedom to make their own decision—and it results in less hostility and polarization in the workplace than the failed NLRB process.
Does this law preclude the secret ballot? No. The AFL-CIO again:
If one-third of workers want to have an NLRB election at their workplace, they can still ask the federal government to hold an election. The Employee Free Choice Act simply gives them another option—majority sign-up.
As a self-designated Wal-Mart watcher, I thought I'd give a few examples from Wal-Mart's gigantic NLRB case file to back-up the AFL-CIO's point about the current system being broken and how Wal-Mart and Cheney's version of democracy is really no democracy at all.
On March 4, 2000, Brian Lockyer posted a notice on a break room bulletin board at the Boone, North Carolina Wal-Mart where he worked that stated, in part:
Do what other Wal-Mart stores are beginning to do. Vote for union representation.
Someone from management quickly took down the bulletin board and Lockyer was fired shortly thereafter allegedly for failing to clock out during his lunch break.
Is Dick Cheney worried about this worker's right to get his message to his peers? Can you have a fair election if one side can't campaign? I don't think so.
When meatcutters at the Wal-Mart in Jacksonville, Texas voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers, Wal-Mart refused to bargain with them. Then the company shifted their entire meat selection over to case-ready meat, effectively outsourcing the meatcutters' jobs so that they would no longer have to deal with the union. Only last year, the Republican-dominated NLRB ruled:
"Clearly, the duty to engage in effects bargaining continues. The situation is analagous to that of an employer which closes a plant and has a duty over the effects of that decision. Such an employer cannot escape teh duty to engage in effects bargaining simply by saying, "No one works here anymore; the bargaining unit has disappeared."
Had the union had card check, they might have organized the whole story, making this tactic much more difficult, albeit not impossible. When workers at the Wal-Mart in Jonquiere, Quebec voted to join a union, Wal-Mart closed the entire store. Let's see if Wal-Mart is willing to close stores all around the country at teh same time.
Perhaps the best-known example of Wal-Mart's anti-unionism comes in the story of Josh Noble, the ex-Wal-Mart auto/lube employee featued in Robert Greenwald's Wal-Mart movie who started organizing his section of the store in Loveland, Colorado. After rounding up nine co-workers to support the election in his unit, they ended up losing arepresentation election there 17-1. As the NYT explained in 2005 when it happened:
"Every day, they had two or three antiunion people from Bentonville in the garage full time, showing antiunion videos and telling people that unions are bad," Noble said.
What irked him most, Noble said, was that after one union supporter was fired and two others moved away for college, Wal-Mart transferred in six workers. He believes all were antiunion.
This is standard operating procedure for Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. There are, in fact, many, many more Wal-Mart cases I might have chosen. I just picked the first few that I could figure out. Yet it is impossible to tell how or even if these cases have eventually turned out because the NLRB election process literally takes years. That's another reason why the Employee Free Choice Act is so important. Not only will it make employer intimidation impossible, it will bypass this excrutiatingly long step if a dispute arises from that election and therefore make it easier for the will of employees to be expressed while it still matters.
The difference between political democracy and workplace democracy should be easy for anyone to grasp. Your employer doesn't know who your choice for President is, but if you want to participate in a union election and win you have to make your preference known in order to reach other voters. Employers have power over their workers. Unions have none. That means if you want to join a union you are risking your livelihood, especially if you work for a notorious union buster like Wal-Mart.
Clearly, the people doing the harrassing are employers like Wal-Mart, not the unions. Why is this simple fact so hard for Dick Cheney to grasp? Because employers game the system everyday and his administration doesn't care. The Employee Free Choice Act isn't undemocratic, the sick system we have now is.
And yes, I know President Bush is going to veto this if it reaches his desk. Nevertheless, if the left blogosphere falls victim to this Cheney/NAM snowjob we aren't going to be able to get it to the next Democratic President either.
JR