| | Angel Warner, an employee at a Rite Aid distribution
center, sat next to me recently in a congressional
briefing room and described what happened when she and
her fellow workers tried to form a union in their
California workplace. She talked about the surveillance,
constant threats and harassment they endured; how she
and other workers were repeatedly taken aside and
interrogated, one on one, about how they planned to
vote; how two co-workers were fired; and how the rest
lived in fear that any day they, too, might get a pink
slip. The union filed numerous charges of unfair labor
practices and eventually won the organizing election.
But three years after the campaign began, Warner and her
fellow Rite Aid workers still don't have a contract.
Like most U.S. companies, Rite Aid takes full advantage
of current labor law to try to keep workers from
exercising their full rights to organize and
collectively bargain under the National Labor Relations
Act. Far from an aberration, such behavior by U.S.
companies during union organizing campaigns has become
routine, and our nation's labor laws neither protect
workers' rights nor provide disincentives for employers
to stop disregarding those rights.
Late last month I published a study, "No Holds Barred,"
that was presented at the hearing at which Angel spoke.
I looked at a random sample of more than 1,000 union
elections over a five-year period to determine the
parameters of employer behavior during union
representation elections in the private sector and the
limitations of the labor law system established to
regulate that behavior.
In 34 percent of the elections I studied, companies
fired employees for union activity. In 57 percent of
elections, employers threatened to shut down all or part
of their facilities, and in 47 percent, employers
threatened to cut wages and benefits.
In 63 percent of campaigns, supervisors met with workers
one on one and interrogated them about their union
activity or whether they or others were supporting the
union. In 54 percent of the elections, supervisors used
these one-on-ones to threaten individual workers.
The bottom line is that there has been a steady decline
of workers' rights in the past several decades.
Colleagues and I have examined this issue in a series of
studies over the past two decades. My new data show that
employers are more than twice as likely as they were in
the 1990s to use 10 or more tactics -- including threats
and firings -- to thwart workers' organizing efforts,
and they are more likely to use more punitive and
aggressive tactics such as interrogations, discharges
and threats of plant closings, while shifting away from
softer tactics such as social events, promises of
improvement and employee involvement programs.
For the vast majority of workers who want to join unions
today, the right to organize and bargain collectively --
free from coercion, intimidation and retaliation -- is
at best a promise indefinitely deferred. In election
campaigns overseen by the National Labor Relations
Board, it is now standard practice for companies to
subject workers to threats, interrogation, harassment,
surveillance and retaliation for union activity.
The failure of the system to defend workers' rights in a
timely manner multiplies the obstacles workers face when
seeking union representation, creating delays that favor
employers. Employers appeal a high percentage of the
cases to the NLRB, and in the most egregious instances,
the employer can count on a final decision being held up
by three to five years.
A key aspect of proposed labor law reform, the Employee
Free Choice Act, concerns revisions to the rules
surrounding arbitration of the first contract. My
findings show that this provision may be among the most
crucial of the legislation. Fifty-two percent of workers
who form a union are still without a contract a year
after they win an election, I found, and 37 percent
remain without a contract two years after the election.
For employers, labor law provides yet another means to
indefinitely delay unionization.
It doesn't have to be this way. My survey data from the
public sector portray an atmosphere in which workers may
organize free from the kind of coercion, intimidation
and retaliation that so taints the election process in
the private sector. Most of the states in the public-
sector sample have laws allowing workers to choose a
union through card check or voluntary recognition. And
more than a third of public-sector workers in the United
States are members of unions.
Unless Congress passes serious labor law reform with
real penalties, only a small fraction of the workers who
seek union representation will succeed. If recent trends
continue, there will no longer be a functioning legal
mechanism to effectively protect the right of private-
sector workers to organize and collectively bargain. Our
country cannot afford to make workers defer their rights
and aspirations for union representation any longer.
The writer is director of labor education research at
Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor
Relations. Her paper "No Holds Barred -- The
Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing"
was published last month by the nonprofit Economic
Policy Institute. |
| | Posted 6/19/2009 2:04 AM - 2 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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