Review of Embedded With Organized Labor

Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home, by Steve Early
Monthly Review Press, 288 pages, $16.95

Ed Sadlowski; Jay, Maine; Pittstown Coal, Tony Mazzochi, the Charlestown Five; Ron Carey – as the names float by on the pages of “Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home,” it sometimes seems that Steve Early’s new collection of articles must encompass every person, place, or corporation of significance to the labor movement over the past four decades.  Not quite, but actually the volume’s thirty nine essays – most of them book reviews – cover even more ground than that.  For instance, there’s stories of labor journalists from the deep past of whom you’ve likely never heard.  But the topic most of interest to Early, recently retired from the Communications Workers of America but preferring to think of himself as “redeployed,” is the future of the American labor movement.

There was a time when leftists of a certain age asked themselves how they could love a labor movement that didn’t seem to want to love them back. Certainly the welcome mat wasn’t out on that day Early recalls “In May of 1970, [when] hundreds of flag-waving New York City construction workers … attacked a crowd of antiwar demonstrators on Wall Street.”  The breach between labor and the left would actually broaden two years later when the AFL-CIO refused to back George McGovern against Richard Nixon.  The South Dakota Senator would come closer to espousing the politics of the leftists of the day than any other Democratic nominee in their life time, but for AFL-CIO President George Meany he was too antiwar, too radical. Some see payback in McGovern’s current opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act.  But ironically, the individual he cites for past opposition to the concept of binding arbitration that constitutes one of the bill’s components is none other than Meany.

Still some, like Early, persisted.  A few unions like the United Electrical Workers (UE), which to this day maintains the egalitarian tradition of paying no official a salary higher than the highest you can earn under a UE union contract, actually worked with and encouraged student radicals – such as this writer.  (Early drops the sobering fact that this honorable organization – which had half a million members before leaving the CIO in 1949 rather than submit to the government-driven purge of Communist Party members going on in other unions – has now shrunken to 17,000 members.)

Acceptance came much harder in most other unions, though, but ultimately those who didn’t see the labor movement as a collection of “real-life Archie Bunkers who railed against a whole generation of spoiled ‘meathead’ college kids,” would even prevail, to a degree, and by “the fall of 1999,” Early notes, “steelworkers and radical students were seen marching side by side (or at least on the same side) in street protests against the World Trade Organization.”

The signal change of those intervening years was John Sweeney’s 1995 election as AFL-CIO president.  Although a book that Early reviews on that subject bears the tile, “Not Your Father’s Union Movement,” his election did represent a return to the past in the sense that afterward the labor movement would again more or less openly welcome the left as it generally had before the Cold War.  Of course, with Joseph Stalin now more than forty years dead and the Soviet Union itself gone for a decade, this thaw came none too quickly.

Sweeney comes in for his share of criticism in Early’s book, yet it seems fair to say that he did pretty much try to do what he said he would  –  reverse the long term decline of labor that Early notes in the book’s first paragraph: “When I first got involved the labor movement in the early 1970s, unions still represented almost a quarter of the country’s workforce.  Now, unionization is down to 12.4 percent overall and only 7.6 percent in private industry.”  Sweeney had assumed the Federation’s leadership largely on the strength of the fact that his own Service Employees International Union (SEIU) had been an exception to the general downward trend, largely due to the fact that much of its constituency was public employees, more than a third of whom are now unionized.

But Sweeney has not been particularly successful in reversing the overall trend, although SEIU has continued growing to the point where it is has become the nation’s largest union.  And in 2005, Andy Stern, Sweeney’s successor at SEIU, led unions comprising about a third of the AFL-CIO’s membership into a rival Change to Win federation dedicated to doing what Sweeney could not.  About the best thing that can be said about the split to this point is that it has not damaged the labor movement nearly as badly as some had feared.  The overall national percentage of union membership has even risen for the past two years, although it remains lower than before the split.

Not one to see easy fixes for labor’s decline, Early is skeptical that even the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) currently pending in Congress will represent the cure-all some hope for.  He cites a Canadian labor relations scholar’s findings that “union density and bargaining coverage are falling even in provinces such as Saskatchewan and Quebec that have card check and first-arbitration clauses” – precisely the EFCA items that its advocates hope will save union representation drives from the often debilitating process of National Labor Relations Board elections and management refusal to bargain.  The measures he thinks are really needed – repeal of “Taft-Hartley Act restrictions on real union solidarity and the Supreme Court’s seventy-year old sanctioning of the use of striker replacement” are not part of political discourse today – “except in the speeches of Ralph Nader.”

And as SEIU has dominated the labor movement of recent years, so it dominates Early’s book, with Stern coming in for fairly severe criticism.  “Since 1996,” he writes, “when Stern replaced Sweeney, 40 SEIU locals – or 14 percent of its 275 affiliates – have been put under trusteeship to implant new officers.”  While he grants that “[S]ome of those ousted ran old-guard fiefdoms,” others just didn’t want to go along with what he views as questionable programs coming from the top, and perhaps the “air of arrogance and exclusivity” emanating from some SEIU staffers or an “attitudinal style … closer … to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs than to veteran staffers of the trade union movement” that one reviewed author describes.

(The largest of these trusteeship battles is currently playing out with the leadership of the newly formed National Union of Healthcare Workers claiming to have filed decertification petitions aimed at taking back close to 2/3 of the 150,000 members it formerly led in SEIU’s now trusteed California-based United Healthcare Workers West.)

The fact that book reviews constitute the core of Early’s book naturally constrains him largely to topics that other writers have chosen and many of the more interesting matters are raised only peripherally.  There is the fairly central question of just what a labor radical is to do.  At the one end are the “colonizers” like Wellesley graduate Elly Leary, interviewed in Staughton and Alice Lynd’s “The New Rank and File,” who spent twelve years building cars at the Framingham, Massachusetts General Motors plant.  Jobs like this were hard enough, Early notes, “without the additional task of proselytizing.” The group of radicals that Leary eventually became part of was just about learning its ass from its elbow on how to proceed sensibly when the plant closed in 1989 and they were deindustrialized out of the working class.

At the other end there is “SEIU’s ‘best and brightest’” who come in for Early’s criticism because “most have never been a janitor, security guard, nursing home worker, home health care aide or public employee.”  Of course, Early himself came in for that very criticism back in the mid-1970s as he recounts in the book’s first piece: when he was interviewing coal miners for the United Mine Workers Journal, one obviously wary miner politely shook hands with him, then “looked me in the eye and said knowingly, ‘Ah, pencil hands.’”

And then there’s the question of why the labor radicals do what they do.  I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb in saying that most of the people we encounter in these pages saw themselves as socialists, if not by that name precisely then by some synonym they thought more appropriate to the time and place.  They weren’t motivated just by the hope of a better labor movement, but of a better country, a better world – and they saw the labor movement as the best means to that end.  For that sort of thing we will have to wait for Early’s next book, though – he is currently writing his history of the sixties radicals and the labor movement.  But the current book will give you plenty to chew on for the moment.  And, oh yes, it comes with an excellent index, unusual in an essay collection, but extremely useful because this book is dense – and I mean that as a complement.

I Changed My Mind on Employee Free Choice

Berkeley is filled with bumper-stickered cars. One of a Berkeleyite’s favorite hobbies is telling everyone what his socio-political opinions are by declaring them on the bumper of his car. That car is most likely either a Toyota Prius (with its increased gas mileage, it saves the planet) or the Subaru Outback (which not only gets good mileage, but every model has all-wheel drive: great for the Berkeleyite’s frequent trips out to nature).

One of my favorite bumper stickers is: “Unions: The folks who brought you the weekend.” And it’s true. In this country, we can thank labor unions for a lot of the things we take for granted today in our jobs. Before labor unions, there was no redress for employees who were working long days in unsafe conditions. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle was supposed to be about the horrible working conditions that slaughterhouse employees had to endure, but as Sinclair famously said, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident hit its stomach.” The Jungle is famous not for its exposure of deplorable working conditions, but for its graphic depiction of unsafe food preparation.

It wasn’t until 1935 that Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, which affirmed government support of unions, collective bargaining, and placing restrictions on what employers could do. At the turn of the century, businesses viewed unions with a combination of suspicion and disgust. Unionizing was socialism, and socialism was antithetical to the United States and its tradition of capitalism. Eventually, though, the country grew up and realized that the employer-employee relationship was hideously skewed in favor of the employer. In an industrialized economy — that is, an economy where people work for others instead of themselves — employers have tremendous power to enhance or destroy the lives of employees by hiring or firing them. And because an employee is a single person, he has little recourse when faced with the considerable power of an entire company.

Enter the union, the job of which is to leverage the power of all the workers in a firm against the firm, should it become necessary. Unions today enter into legally-binding agreements with firms. These agreements specify things like benefits and wage rates. When a union agreement is about to expire, it needs to be renewed. At this time, the union and the management each tries to re-negotiate the contract to get the best deal. If the two sides don’t come to an agreement by the time the contract expires, then the union members go on strike. They will refuse to work without a contract specifying exactly what their benefits will be.

But you’ve got to have a union first. According to Robert Reich, formerly Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration and now a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, 1/3 of working Americans belonged to a union in 1955. In 2009, only 8% of workers belong to a union. Part of this trend has to do with the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States. But even this doesn’t entirely explain the decline in unionization: Toyota, the most profitable auto manufacturer in the world, is a non-union shop. Its workers are not unionized, but they have good wages and benefits. Toyota is a benevolent employer. Wal-Mart is quite the opposite. Its workers make a little above minimum wage and they largely have no benefits. Wal-Mart is famously and virulently opposed to unions, engaging in practices that, if pursued by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), would probably be prosecutable in court. Wal-Mart has closed entire stores rather than suffer the possibility of unionization. We cannot always rely on the benevolency of employers in order to get good wages and benefits — hence the existence of unions and a national framework that supports them.

I have written before about the current process of unionization, as have other Demockracy writers, and I will not go into it here. Again, we come around to the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would augment the current system of union creation. Again, I have before explained how it would work. In my previous pieces, I came out against EFCA because it does not have a secret ballot. How, I said, can we get an accurate assessment of whether or not people want to unionize without a secret ballot? I neglected another factor: employer pressure between the initial petition and the actual election. During this period, which usually lasts between 30 and 60 days, employers dramatically increase pressure on employers not to form a union. This pressure can vary from the benign (”workshops” in which union-busters explain to employees why unions are actually bad for them) to the criminal (openly threatening employees with termination if they join unions). Starbucks was found guility of the latter when it fired some employees at a Manhattan store who tried to unionize.

It is this pressure period that causes the disparity we see between the numbers in the initial petitions and the actual elections. An apocryphal 1989 AFL-CIO organizing document declares that, according to its statistics, 75% of employees at a firm need to sign the intitial petition in order to get 51% in the final election. There has not been a study (that I have access to!) that examines the causality of this phenomenon. It could be attributed to peer pressure; that is, when employees’ names are visible, employees will say they want to unionize, even when they don’t. In the privacy of the secret ballot, they are free to vote against the union. But there is another possibility: that employees really do want to unionize, but after two months of propaganda and open threats, employees decide that they don’t want to unionize, after all, due to the possibility of losing their jobs. We have no way of knowing what employees truly want, since there is no test we have that is free from bias, whether from the employer or other employees.

Even though it’s illegal for an employer to fire — or even threaten to fire — an employee for unionizing, it happens routinely. As is pointed out in this sourcebook on EFCA from the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, employers treat NLRB fines (the punishment for violating labor law) as just another operating cost. They will gladly fire employees and then pay the fines, since, in the long-term, paying the fines is cheaper than dealing with a union. Fortunately, one of EFCA’s provisions is to increase the penalties for violating labor law, but even then, the fines are still not so large that the world’s large anti-union companies — Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and Whole Foods among them — cannot write those fines off as operating costs and call it a day.

The only way to forestall those threats is to allow union creation immediately, which is the point of EFCA. It assumes that the initial petition is the gold standard for union desirability and declares that, if a majority of employees state on the petition that they want to unionize, then a union is immediately formed. This way, employer interference in the unionizing process is minimized.

Contrary to anti-EFCA propaganda, the legislation does not “eliminate” the secret ballot. If a union petition garners greater than 30% but less than 50% of employees’ approval, then the secret ballot process is initiated. EFCA does only what makes sense: namely, if at least half of the employees in a firm support a union, then the union is created. The in-between time is often useful only for anti-union employers, who will use the time either to persuade or to threaten.

So, I’ve totally changed my opinion of EFCA. All else equal, making union formation easier is not a bad thing.

Dear President Obama: Don’t Do These

Every pundit with a keyboard and at least one hand is writing about what President-Elect Barack Obama (I’ll never get tired of that) should do in his first fifteen minutes as president. Obviously, he should immediately rescind stupid Bush executive orders: over the weekend, he indicated that he would do as much. Two Bush executive orders are scheduled for the chopping-block: one that placed a moratorium on federally-funded stem cell research from new lines of embryonic stem cells (remember when that was the most our country had to worry about?) and another that prohibits federal funds from being used for overseas family-planning organizations that suggest abortion among their family-planning options. Obama also plans for his new EPA to reverse the Bush EPA’s decision to prohibit California and a dozen other states from enacting their own carbon emissions standards.

These are great! But there are two things that have been bandied about — with varying degrees of sincerity — that are not that great.

The Employee Free Choice Act

Democrats have been trying to get the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 800) passed for over a year. Bush promised to veto it. Obama has said he endorses it. EFCA provides another method for workers to form unions. Currently, the process for forming unions is as follows: a group of workers that wishes to unionize submits a petition to the National Labor Relations Board alleging that a “substantial” number of employees wishes to form a union. This is proven by 30% or more of the employees signing a petition indicating that they want to form a union. The NLRB schedules a hearing to determine if a question of representation exists. If NLRB determines that a question does exist, then it directs “an election by secret ballot” to occur.

EFCA would create an alternative method for forming a union: if a majority of employees signs a petition indicating that they wish to form a union, and those employees sign “valid authorizations” indicating as such, then NLRB will bypass the election process mentioned above and immediately certify the union. This is referred to as “card check” legislation.

EFCA contains other provisions, like permitting binding arbitration if management and the new union fail to agree on a contract within 90 days. It also strengthens protections for employees forming a union, more clearly defining what, exactly, an employer cannot do to employees forming a union (threaten to terminate employees or otherwise harass or discriminate against them during or after the union-organizing process, e.g.). The fine for such interference is increased from $5,000 to $20,000.

Strengthening penalties is the good part of this legislation. Eliminating the secret ballot is the bad part. Labor organizations like the AFL-CIO have been lobbying for this legislation for a long time, arguing that the union-creation process is long and difficult, and in the time between when employees sign the initial petition and when the NLRB calls for the election, management can attempt to dissuade employees from joining the union. If this is true, it still doesn’t explain why the Express process for forming a union must eliminate the secret ballot. The whole point of having a secret ballot in union elections is to protect employees from intimidation or retaliation, from the union as well as from the management. President Obama should veto this legislation or tell Democrats in the Senate to amend it so as to include a provision for secret ballots. There’s no reason why employees shouldn’t have secret ballots.

The Fairness Doctrine

Prior to 1987, there was a fairness doctrine, also called the equal time rule, present in broadcast television and radio. I’ll quote the above-linked website’s description of it, since it’s simple and good:

Simply put, a station which sells or gives one minute to Candidate A must sell or give the same amount of time with the same audience potential to all other candidates for the particular office. However, a candidate who can not afford time does not receive free time unless his or her opponent is also given free time.

(Upon reading the website linked above, I realized that it was written by Howard Kleiman, the very Miami University communications professor whose class first got me interested in First Amendment law!)

Obama and other Democrats have toyed around with the idea of resurrecting the fairness doctrine. A lot of them blame the rise of conservative talk radio (specifically, Rush Limbaugh) on the elimination of the fairness doctrine. With no requirement for equal time for all sides, the airwaves skewed to the right, creating a pulpit from which people like Rush, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, et al. can spew their Republican talking points. Democrats have attempted, in Air America, to create a similar network of their own, but it isn’t nearly as popular.

Legislating “fairness” is a terrible idea, both in principle and in execution. Just last week, the FCC and Fox Broadcasting duked it out in the Supreme Court over the issue of “indecency.” I can only imagine the tremendous amounts of litigation that would ensue from such a doctrine. That’s just the execution. On the issue of fairness, who is the government to determine “fairness”? The idea that the government exists to provide equity of points of view runs contradictory to the First Amendment. All the government does is guarantee that any side has a platform free from government interference; what the sides choose to do with that platform, or the degree to which they choose to use it, is up to them. The fairness doctrine could also give false dichotomy to scenarios in which there really aren’t two points of view (evolution/intelligent design comes immediately to mind; to suggest that both theories have equal veracity and should be debated equally is ludicrous; intelligent design does not deserve to be legitimized by placing it on par with evolution).

President Obama, please don’t pass the Employee Free Choice Act — not unless it’s altered to specify secret ballot elections. And please, please, please don’t bring back the fairness doctrine; it may work pragmatically to stem the tide of conservative talk radio, but as a theory, it’s broken and could lead to the inclusion of points of view that might otherwise be correctly disdained through the marketplace of ideas.