Congratulations

Congratulations to airport screeners at San Francisco International, who voted today to be represented by SEIU Local 790. The screeners are employed by Covenant. This is a huge win because these 1000 airport screeners are the first private screeners in the country to be represented by a union.

In No Particular Order

I did an arbitration today against a management lawyer who was bragging about how his client had filed DOL charges against HERE Local 5 in Hawaii for "taking bribes" (getting free parking at the employer's resort while on union business). I sort of ignored him because it made no freaking sense, but then I saw this article. I will be sharing this with all my clients because I think this will be a new cheap and easy unionbusting tactic.

The Change to Win conference has generated moderate buzz, but because the conference reiterated the main themes of CTW (organize or die, Dems can't rely on them) and did not roll out any major news, there's not much to say. Terry O'Sullivan is saying it's when-not-if for the Laborers' departure from the AFL-CIO.

If they want a great first target, I suggest Gov. Schwarzenegger, who vetoed AB48, which would have raised minimum wage today. Thanks, Gov. Enjoy your 33% ratings while you're still in office, a$$hole.

A number of NHL players have filed Board charges against the NHL Players Association for the way the executive director election was conducted. See here. It seems to obvious to say, but I wonder if this ship-jumping is somehow related to the recent contract concessions. Hmmm.

The Women's Movement is the Labor Movement

Today was the first day of the Change to Win Coalition conference, where aggressive new organizing campaigns are the focus of the coalition's growth strategy. Anna Burger was chosen as the head of the new labor federation. Significantly, this is the first time a woman will chair a labor federation.

After my last post, I felt like a loser for not reading the NLRB Weekly Summary containing all the Recent Unpleasantness the Board will serve up for us. I won't re-cap the cases; you can read the bad news for yourself. What struck me about these decisions is Wilma Liebman's willingness to speak out forcefully against the Board's wrongheadedness. To whit:

"The majority's failure to set aside the election here, based on the conduct of supervisor Carlos Adkisson, rasied questions about whether the Board now applies a double standard: one for prounion supervisory conduct and one for antiunion supervisory conduct....Our law with respect to antiunion supervisory conduct must be no less strict than our law with respect to prounion supervisory conduct."

Werthan Packaging, Inc. 345 NLRB No. 30.

"The majority's ruling on both issues are based in part on recent decisions that retreated from well-established principles of Board law that weakened employees'
protection under the Act."

Stanadyne Automotive Corp. 345 NLRB No. 6.

"The majority defends the Employer's statement on grounds that actually establish that they were objectionable. Its failure to address a long line of precedent is startling. Today's decision continues an unfortunate trend of breaking with precedent to give employers greater leeway in making coercive prediction about the effects of unionization. According, I dissent..."

TNT Logistics North America, Inc. 346 NLRB No. 21.

Props to Wilma Liebman for making the record* on the obscene pro-employer excesses of her colleagues, day in and day out. It's women like her that make me feel sheepish about bitching about the low-end anti-union attorneys I deal with every day.

*Also, props to the Weekly Summary editor who gives Liebman every inch of space she deserves, citing Liebman's dissent in every summary. Dear Weekly Summary editor: Thanks and I hope I did not just get you fired.

Bad News, Weird News, Not News

I said last week that I would be summarizing the new NLRB decisions, and a week has passed and I cannot even bring myself to read the weekly summary. The decisions are so uniformly awful, so uniformly contrary to Sections 1 and 7 of the Act, it makes me feel like I live under an oppressive oligarchic regime.

Except the U.S.'s most friendly oligarchic buddy Saudi Arabia just passed labor laws that permit women to work (in more jobs), provides 10 weeks of maternity leave, and require child care when 50 or more women are hired. 4 percent of employees must be handicapped, and all workers get a minimum 21 days off. Retirement age is 60 for men and 55 for women. The law sets minimum working standards and prohibits slavery. Now, I am not touting this as revolutionary - in fact, it's a nationalistic move for Saudization of the workplace, and there are a host of other problems. BUT it's an improvement over their existing labor laws, i.e. progress, which we don't see much of in this country.

Bad news - check. Wierd news - check. Not news? I hope this counts: Business Week reports that Change to Win is a threat to the status quo, and says that labor's future may be brighter than it has been in years, if the Coalition's organizing plans are effective.

The Coalition's convention starts tomorrow. I would be interested in hearing dispatches from the meetings.

Federalizing the Right to Work More/Earn Less

An earlier post noted that Bush has suspended the Davis-Bacon Act for post-Katrina reconstruction. In other disheartening news, the House Small Business Committee held a hearing on September 8 to determine whether to make "right to work" national. The speaker list included Mark Mix, of the National Right to Work Committee. Fred Feinstein, former General Counsel of the NLRB, testified that "compulsory unionism" is already prohibited by Taft-Hartley, but he probably felt like a evolutionary biologist at a Kansas school board meeting. No union officials spoke, but representatives from Boeing, Penloyd and Colt Manufacturing testified.

Although that legislation (H.R. 500 - the National Right to Work Act) is predicted to fail, legislation requiring secret ballot elections before recognition (outlawing card check agreements and recognition) looks like it has more legs. The Secret Ballot Protection Act (H.R. 874) has been hanging out in the Subcommittee on Employer-Employee Relations since March, but its supporters will probably try to push it through before the end of the Bush administration. I would not expect to see it before the 2006 Congressional election, but guess they would try to push it through soon after, depending on whether the Republicans hold the majority.

I will do a recap on the new Board decisions later in the day. Check back later. You already know they suck. The question is, just how hard do they suck?

Sandra Feldman Passes Away

Sandra Feldman of the American Federation of Teachers died last night of cancer. Her obit notes that she was a mentee of Bayard Rustin and Albert Shanker. I recall that the AFT frequently bought space on the New York Times op-ed page for an ad-column written by Feldman. I remember reading it when I was younger and being impressed that she, of all the columnists, got her picture on the op-ed page. And then I found out it was an ad. But so what? since I usually (or always) agreed with her.

Today's Doomsday Alert

I know that some of my earlier posts sounding the alarm about the NLRB likening unions to terrorists may have sounded a little too dire. Okay, well how about plain old criminalization of unions? Does that bother anyone? Read this article about a Teamster president who was caught on FBI wiretap, taped by the employer he was negotiating with.

I know, you think: Teamster, wire tap, same old story - hookers, concrete, Hudson Bay, blah blah, Hoffa, blah blah. But in this case, the Teamster was not alleged to be engaged in any kind of racketeering (at least not so far as the article says). "Federal authorities say Partin threatened to report the company for illegally discharging ethylene dicloride into the Mississippi River if it didn't pay the wages of eight union members for hours of work they missed during the negotiations."

I am not giving a legal opinion about whether what he did is right or wrong. But it is very troubling that the FBI taped 8 contract negotiations meetings to catch him saying it.

It's Official: Unite-HERE has left the building.

As discussed earlier this week, UNITE-HERE left the AFL-CIO yesterday, according to the AP.

Old Economy Labor News

Many news outlets (see here and below) are reporting on the serious farm labor shortage happening in California (and probably elsewhere) during this harvest season. The CA Farm Bureau Federation sent out this SOS today, saying that they are unlikely to get anywhere near the 450,000 farmworkers needed to pick this seasons crops, at least 70% of whom are undocumented. Farmers lay the blame on "stricter border enforcement and a crackdown on falsely documented workers--without also taking steps to ensure that farmers have adequate and orderly access to a legal, temporary workforce".

In the Washington Post article, Bruce Goldstein, executive director of the Farmworker Justice Fund, notes "the industry wants 'an oversupply of vulnerable workers so that they can keep wages low and avoid unionization.'"

UNITE-HERE Leaving AFL-CIO?

House of Labor is reporting that Unite-HERE will announce their departure from the AFofL-CofIO tomorrow. I found this article in The Houston Chronicle reporting that the union will make its decision sometime this week. The repercussions mentioned include the dues hit ($3 mil) the AFLCIO will take (small compared to the $30 mil in per caps that left with SEIU, Teamsters and UFCW), as well as the implications related to Unite-HERE's ownership of Amalgamated Bank. Let me know if you know anything.

In an unrelated note, I did not intend to imply in my earlier post that I think John Roberts will be "liberal" on labor issues. I intended the scare quotes to suggest the irony of the idea that voting to uphold NLRB precedent is liberal. It is only liberal where conservative means ending the Department of Education, FEMA, the EPA and all that other do-gooder bullshit (again with sarcasm). Conservative as in "no federal government at all," like Grover Norquist. John Roberts does not seem that far out there to me. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he's hidden it awfully well, deferring to the authority of federal agencies for 2 years on the DC Court of Appeals to lull us into a false sense of calm so that he could become Chief Justice and wipe out the entire federal government. I can't really get there, intellectually, though. That does not mean I think he's a liberal, folks. The idea that this was Roberts plan all along is about as likely as my hope that he would affirm pro-worker Board decisions, if such a thing should ever come along again.

Oh, and the New York Times will have this piece tomorrow on another novel suit against Wal-Mart, filed on behalf of apparel workers in China, Bangladesh, et al. alleging that Wal-Mart has violated CA state wage laws and contractual obligations by failing to impose its corporate code of conduct on overseas contractors. That basically reiterates the first paragraph or two. I'll add this to my list of Wal-Mart cases I am vaguely aware of and keep you up to date as events warrant.

Roberts' "Liberal Streak"

The Washington Post has this article on Supreme Court Chief Justice nominee John Roberts' voting record. A study of his decisions from his two years in the D.C. Court of Appeals finds that he is typically more conservative than the average federal appellate judge, except on economic regulation and labor issues. I gleen from the article that he is willing to defer to the decisions of federal agencies, particularly the NLRB.

With the rightward shift of the Board, I fear that this means more Supreme Court support for conservative, narrow readings of the Act. On the other hand, if Board cases don't get up to the Supreme Court while there's still a Bush Board, but they do go up once the Board shifts again, we could have some strong favorable law. In other words, unions and their lawyers need to be convinced that they should not appeal any crappy Board decisions up to the SCOTUS, and hope that, once the revolution comes (or the "breath of fresh air" that will seem like a revolution by the time we get rid of this administration), employers do appeal pro-worker decisions.

I'll Just Say It: Bush Drives Me Batshit

I hope you didn't hear it here first: Bush is waiving prevailing wage and minimum wage requirements for contractors who are going to rebuild New Orleans. Working Life has covered this ground. The New York Times thinks this hurts Bush's attempts to rebuild his image (which is no doubt the only thing Bush cares about rebuilding) but who knows? Maybe people have been taking it for so long, they don't even remember what "prevailing wage" is. When the minimum wage is so low, does it even matter that it exists?

Please please please let's not squander an opportunity to create decent-paying jobs. Is it already too late? I hope I am not being alarmist in my fears that this will just be carried off like the other flotsam of the flood, cleared away from the pipe pumping the toxic river of capital....

Oh God, now I'm writing poetry. Stop the madness.

Not Exactly Letterman's Top Ten

The website ExpansionManagement.com (bore me straight to death) has an article titled Ten Reasons Why Companies Relocate a Manufacturing Facility today.

Number 8 is really the most fun:

# 8 — To eliminate specific labor-related situations. Sometimes a company or facility is having a bad experience with unions — recent strikes, costly benefit packages, or whatever — and the only solution is to move as far away as they can.
If this is the reason a company is moving, they should make sure their due diligence goes beyond whether or not a state is “right to work.” Two specific areas to focus on are the history of work stoppages in the new area, and the trend in National Labor Relations Board representation elections (how many, and what percent are won by the union). This will enable you to better predict your future plant’s union status, say, five years from now.

Interestingly, 7 (to access a better or larger labor pool) and 8 (above) are the only two that directly justify outsourcing, which makes me wonder whether Expansion Management.com really "speaks" to its desired audience.

Once Is Never Enough

The Ninth Circuit had already issued a painful opinion (for unions) in Chamber of Commerce v. Lockyer in April 2005, and so when the Petition for Rehearing was granted, some among us hoped that Saul the Organizing Angel had visited the panel in their sleep and granted them new wisdom on the question of whether employers could be barred from using state money to fight unions.

Of course, our hopes were foolish. The new decision is out here, and the Ninth Circuit has found that a California law barring employers from spending state funds to fight unions is preempted by the NLRA because of its chilling effect on employers' free speech rights. Employers' free speech rights. Argh.

This Week's Erosion of Section 7 Rights

The NLRB recently issued a decision in Fiesta Hotel Corp. d/b/a Palms Hotel and Casino (28‑CA‑17853; 344 NLRB No. 159) (see the bottom of the weekly summary). The Board found that the employer had violated one employee's Section 7 rights by interrogating him, threatening him with discharge, etc etc. You know the routine.

But the Board also found that a "ambiguous" Standards of Conduct rule maintained by the employer was not unlawful. Member Liebman noted:

Today’s decision threatens to allow employers to take advantage of the chilling effects of ambiguous rules. To the extent that protected activity is discouraged this way, the employer need never issue an explicit prohibition against it or engage in retaliation after the fact. The result, of course, is every bit contrary to the Act’s goals. Accordingly, I dissent.

This is the essence of employers' anti-union tactics. While there are plenty of employers willing to be outright threatening, more can rely on the application of "ambiguous" rules that result in intimidation and discipline for union activity. Wilma Liebman must feel like she is just shouting down a well. By the way, for the next few weeks/months, Liebman and Battista will be a two-person Board quorum, since Schaumber's term has expired. Let's hope Liebman does not take a vacation until the next Democratic president is elected.