Only 8 percent of the American work force belongs to unions today. This is a long descent from the long ago heyday of the labor movement where 1 in 3 Americans belonged to a union.
There are many reasons given for the decline of the labor movement. The decline of blue collar jobs, Right to Work (for less) laws, permanent replacements and technological changes in the workplace are a few ideas offered. But, in reality, they only tell just a fraction of the story.
In today's environment, a lot of people do not know that employers have complete and total access to voters, are free to intimidate them with little or no consequence, can force voters to listen to their side of the campaign, and can delay elections and outcomes almost indefinitely.
I have seen evidence of this first hand as someone who has been both a union organizer and someone involved organizing a workplace. These incidents are not exceptions to the norm either. They happen time and time again and receive very little press attention, if any.
Most Americans believe the process of organizing a union is relatively simple and involves holding an election where workers vote either "yes" or "no" to unionization. This is how a majority of Americans organized unions in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s after the Wagner Act establishing the National Labor Relations Board was first passed.
Unfortunately, as time passed from the first days following its passage, the number of employer-friendly laws, statutes and legal precedents piled on to the point where we now have a labor law structure that even shocked a group of Chinese government officials earlier this year who thought that the United States, of all countries, would have something more Democratic.
Under the National Labor Relations Act, it is illegal for an employer to "interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees." It is also illegal for an employer to engage in "discrimination in regard to hire or tenure of employment or any term or condition of employment to encourage or discourage membership in any labor organization."
Sounds fair, right? It's illegal to fire or coerce employees during a union organizing campaign. However, this rule is violated time and time again.
According to a study by Kate Brofenbrenner at Cornell University,
"Ninety-two percent of private-sector employers, when faced with employees who want to join together in a union, force employees to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union propaganda."
This includes not one of two of what are called "captive audience meetings." This includes a series of false and misleading videos featuring every stereotype of union members imaginable, sometime one a day for weeks on end - all in a carefully crafted attempt to poison workers' minds and turn them against each other. In one organizing campaign, at a Ralston-Purina plant in King William County, VA African American workers were exposed to a anti-union documentary of Martin Luther King's death which blamed his death on the fact that he was marching in support of union janitors. After the meeting, one newly-minted union opponent blamed me, a young 26 year old organizer, for killing Martin Luther King.
The study also found that 51 percent of employers threaten to shut their doors and move if the employees vote for the union. Now, employers cannot actually say "we will shut down if. . ." but instead douse workers with propoganda relating how "other plants" have shut down when in the same exact situation. Of course, that is not always the case. The folloing quote references the case of Frank Perdue, who stepped right into a successful anti-union campaign at his plant in Dolthan, Alabama in 1995
He told the African American workers there that "you nig--rs are lucky to be getting paid what you get,"I'll close this whole f--cking plant and ship every job here to Mexico," etc. This is in addition the typical anti-union rhetoric.
Of course, it wasn't just the threat of plant closures that might have scared workers away from joining the union. The following may have had just a little to do with it as well.
Perdue Farms poultry plant workers - most of whom are African-Americans - witnessed a cross-burning on June 14, 1995 outside their Dothan, Alabama plant gates. . .
LIUNA accuses the anti-union committee of "a pattern of harassment and intimidation for four weeks in its effort to defeat the organizing drive" at the plant.
Multinational Monitor
I was involved in that campaign and I can tell you first hand that the cross-burning was just the tip of the iceberg.
When union organizers visited union supporters at home, the local sheriff and his deputies follow with video cameras in tow. According to the sheriff, this was for "our protection." A few weeks before the election, the local sheriffs also decided that an anti-solicting law would also work pretty well. According to the company and the sheriff, this was to protect workers from the union organizers who were visting their wives while "they weren't at home."
Needless to say, with all the firings, threats (Frank Perdue himself came to the plant and told workers that they owed him for not moving their jobs to Mexico where he could only pay 25 cents an hour), harrassment (one pregant union supporter was allowed to take only one 5 minute bathroom break during the entire day and was fired for taking a second in the afternoon) - the union lost the campaign miserable. Even three months after 800 out of 900 workers signed authorization cards asking for a union - only 240 went above and beyond all forms of bravery and stuck it out to vote yes.
Some would say that Perdue is the exception, rather than the rule. That, in my experience, is far from true. If anything, their tactics serve as an inspiration to some.
Verna Bader is someone I never met, however, her story is told day in and day out by the 23,000 workers at thousands of companies. There are many more who are still waiting for the NLRB to rule on their cases, but this is just one.
Once Verna and other union supporters were identified, harassment by the foreman and anti-union co-workers plagued their final months at the company. Verna described instances where the foreman would stand behind her machine for hours, watching her every move. She recalled him threatening her, "GÇÿIf you do get a union in here, youGÇÖre gonna find out that you arenGÇÖt gonna have a job, because itGÇÖs by the grace of me that youGÇÖre here.GÇÖ" When two anti-union Taylor employees repeatedly threw metal parts at the glass window of the lunchroom where she and the other pro-union workers sat, the managers ignored their complaints.
After all the indignity that Verna and her co-workers suffered, the company had one final surprise up their sleeve. They closed down her department and moved it to another plant in Kentucky. The International Association of Machinists (IAM) helped her and her co-workers file charges at the National Labor Relations Board, designed to protect workers' rights. This was in 1992, during the first Bush Administration. In March, 2003 , the NLRB finally got around to ruling that the company pay her and her co-workers backpay. The company still has not done so.
The constant delay of justice at the Nastional labor Relations Board has become so extraordinary and common that it is hardly surprising the board is constantly referred to as a "joke."
In 1995, workers at Case Farms in Morganton, NC voted for a union by an overwhelming margin. Over 50 strikes and walkouts later with hundreds of firings interspersed and a refusal to offer pay raises - the company still has refused to bargain with the workers and might never do so unless existing labor laws are changed.
One more worker deserves mention here, for his story is just as atrocious as it is long. Frank Taylor was a worker at CSR HydroConduit in Wilson, NC and a leader in a successful organizing effort in August of 2000. He was the longest serving employee at the plant which make precast concrete sewage connections and pipe canals. He was also known for his work ethic and for never having missed a day of work in six years. And he had a wife and children with a pretty decent mortgage.
A month after the successful election, the company made a decision to resist the collective bargaining effort rather than take part in it. While the law requires employers and unions make a good faith effort at collective bargaining, it does not require (unlike every other industrialized nation) that an agreement be reached.
Due to his prominence as an outspoken labor advocate, Taylor was fired. He was given a forklift to run that was shipped in from another plant. The foklift barely worked and aboiut an hour into working with it, the front of it (I forgot what it's called) broke off, almost crushing another worker.
This incident led to management's justification for firing Taylor, even with an unblemished record. To add insult to injury, the company denied him his unemployment benefits and (while I cannot prove it) he was blackballed by other employers in the community.
A group of us took up a collection for Taylor and held him over with jobs we found for him for about a year. Being in a part of North Carolina where we had no union presence, we searched everywhere to find him a job. We eventually found one in Raleigh, but he had already lost his house, his car and eventually his wife and children.
These stories are not even a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of Americans who every year are terminated, harrassed and coerced for trying to organize a voice at work. They are not limited to just blue collar jobs either, the experience of the registered nurses employed at the Salt Lake Regional Medical Center can attest to that:
Nurses are calling on IASIS Healthcare, parent company of Salt Lake Regional, to end their appeal of a United American Nurses (UAN) union election in May 2002 and allow the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, D.C. to count the ballots. (Ballots have been impounded by the NLRB, at the request of the hospital, since the election nearly two years ago.)
From a Press Release, United Association of Nurses
Can you imagine what people would do if the results of the midterm elections were impounded? Can you imagine if they were impounded for four years, all in an effort to keep from sitting Democrats like Jim Webb and Sherrod Brown? How is this any different? And why is it legal?
The effect of these weak labor laws has been the biggest contributor to the decline of the American labor movement over the past 50 years. Because of the effect of union density on wages, benefits, and working conditions on not only union workers but non-union as well, this has contributed to the systematic deterioration in living standards for all Americans, whether or not they belong to a union or not.
So what is the next step?
First, we must expose, embarrass, and shame and those anti-worker employers who engage in and support these tactics.
We must demonstrate our support for those workers who are engaged in organizing a union at work, to boost their courage and confidence to win their fights.
Every organizing campaign must be treated as to what it is, a community fight for justice that effects everyone in the community.
We must change the climate for all organizing campaigns so it doesnGÇÖt take an extraordinary act of courage for workers to exercise their freedom to form or join unions.
A survey by Hart Research indicates that 53% of non-union workers -- or 57 million -- would like to be in a union, if they had the opportunity.
Imagine the economic and political power working people would enjoy if just half of these workers GÇô almost 30 million GÇô were union members and part of the labor movement. Imagine what kind of power middle and working class Americans would have to leverage the corporate fat cats who troll through the halls of power in Washington today.
And even if you are not interested in joining a union due to idealogical reasons, just the fact that workers in this country are systematically exposed to a brutal campaign of mass coercion, threats, and firings shouyld be enough to make the libertarian in each one of us stand up and take notice.
The AFL-CIO and Change to Win Unions are united in passing what is known as the
Employee Free Choice Act. The bill, sponsored by Ted Kennedy in the Senate and George Miller in the House, looks to end the current system of employer harrassment and intimidation and replace it with a system similar to that in the rest of the industrialized world where workers can choose whether or not they belong and are guaranteed a contract of some form if and when negotiations break down between employer and union.
Of course, when this passes, it will not be without a fight. This is a fight that will be maybe one of the most unprecedented ever. Corporate America is already starting to gear up for it by funding astro-turf organizations like unionfacts.com which are looking to brand a negative view of unions in workers' minds before the idea even takes off.
Why are they fighting this so hard? They fought the current system tooth and nail when it was first passed in 1932, but then changed it over the years to something more of their liking. The last thing they want is if any form of Democracy is actually included in labor law.
So get ready to hear more about this bill, and get ready for the right wing attack on it. Today, several thousand workers and union activists are gathering on the Capitol steps in the 20 degree cold with the sponsors of this bill.
This is going to be a fierce and nasty fight. What's at stake is literally the basic premise of who will be writing our nation's economic policies (health care, outsourcing, pensions, social security, wages, civil rights, free trade agreements, etc.) - will it be the corporate lobbyists or working Americans?