In today’s New York Times, a full-page ad appeared that emphasized a quote from Bruce Raynor, president of UNITE HERE, in which he says, “There’s no reason to subject the workers to an election” (for union representation within their company, of course). The quote is presented in a way that is highly unflattering to Raynor, linking him to Idi Amin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (nice – Raynor describes the ad further in this linked story).
Of course, the full-page ad in the Times cannot provide the context for Raynor’s remark, so I will attempt to summarize here based on his column (and by the way, the quote is accurate and Raynor totally stands by it).
What Raynor is speaking out against is the fact that workers at Goya Foods in Florida near Miami voted overwhelmingly for union representation in 1998 by a margin of 83 to 31, which was particularly courageous on their parts because of Goya’s anti-union worker harassment.
After electing the union, the workers organized a variety of events within the Miami community to publicize their efforts for fight poor treatment, low wages, supervisor favoritism, and expensive health insurance. Because the union fought back against these issues and misconduct on the part of Goya against the union, the NLRB ended up filing 23 separate violations of U.S. labor law against the company.
Raynor continues…
The union, the workers, and the General Counsel took the case to a trial under federal labor law before an Administrative Law Judge in June 2000. In February 2001, the judge ruled in favor of the union and workers on every single issue in a well written and thoughtfully reasoned decision. He ruled that the four Goya workers were fired illegally for supporting the union and recommended that the NLRB order their reinstatement and back wages (no penalties are provided by the National Labor Relations Act). He found the company guilty of threats against workers who supported the union, interrogation of union supporters, and failure to bargain in good faith as required by federal law.However, as Raynor notes, it took five years for the board to do anything, until…
Of course the Company appealed -- creating another delay of justice. But by July of 2001, the record was complete: the briefs were in, the Board had the transcripts and the exhibits, and the case was, as they say, “ripe for decision.”
Finally, the Board did rule -- on the last day of August, 2006. We won on every important issue. The company was found to have unlawfully withdrawn union recognition, and the Board ordered it to resume bargaining with us. But the Board hasn’t ordered that Goya agree to a contract for the workers -- it can't under our legal system.So, when Raynor says, “there’s no reason to subject the workers to an election,” what he means is that there’s no point in doing that unless legal remedies with teeth are provided for workers who are wronged by their employers so that they may obtain what is due to them and punish those responsible for the negligence that caused the problem.
The company was found to have engaged in unlawful threats, interrogation, and the like -- and for that, they have to post a notice in their plant saying they won't do it again and pay backpay to workers who lost work because of the company’s misconduct. That’s it. No fines, no penalties, no assessments, no order to pay the union’s (or the government’s) legal fees -- none of those remedies are available under our legal system.
So after seven years, winning doesn't look all that different from losing for these workers. They have lost seven years of wage increases, health care benefits, pension contributions, and other essentials that families need -- things they could have bargained for if they had a contract. Some lost their jobs, most lost respect for their employers, and immigrants lost faith in the system of their new home.
But of course, we won’t find that out from The Center for Union Hacks, another front group founded by labor management attorney and restaurant industry executive Rick Berman, who collects approximately $10 million a year so he can attack organized labor and consumer activists, with Source Watch noting that only Berman and his bookkeeper wife know how much of that ends up in their own pockets (according to a July 2006 article in USA Today).
And of course, all of this is intended to derail passage of the Employee Free Choice Act; contact your senator from here and tell them to support it (and kudos to Bob Casey for signing on as a cosponsor).
Trapper John at The Daily Kos has more here.
1 comment:
Support For The EFCA Needs To Be Both Stronger And Smarter
Although its temporary demise will be unfortunate, I think that it’s also OK that, despite the intense national debate over the Employee Free Choice Act of 2007 (EFCA) since the Democrats’ victory in the November 2006 elections, the proposal is dead in the water until Bush 43 leaves the White House forever. He would surely veto this congressional session’s EFCA if it ever made it to his desk, and no one is pretending that sufficient votes exist in the current Congress to override that veto.
When the EFCA debate cycles around again after the November 2008 national elections, I believe that we in the progressive and democratic union movement should be prepared to try to much more effectively persuade the American public that the proposal is a good idea for them as well as for us. In part, we should do so by directly addressing two important points that were under-researched, rationalized or simply ignored during the recent period of debate.
The first of the two points we should be ready to better address is that of the bosses’ recent and ceaseless drumbeat about the sanctity of “their workers” right to secret ballot elections about “going union,” supposedly with their votes cast confidentially after their carefully listening to both sides of the issue.
The employers premised the above position upon exaggeration and malarkey.
The employers chorus conveniently did not state, and nobody on the pro-EFCA side seems to have caught or challenged them with, the parallel legal fact that currently, under the very law (the National Labor Relations Act) that the employers insist upon keeping intact due to its secret ballot provisions, their anti-union forces can soon start to torpedo most any “go union” election result without the nicety of “their workers” having a say in that decision through another secret ballot election.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the federal courts long have held that an employer may even rely upon its own polling of a bargaining unit as a basis upon which to seek to not have to further deal with a union. Obviously, the taking of an opinion poll by an employer is hardly any more secret a process than the securing of a signed union authorization card by a union organizer.
For example, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has held, as recently as April 16, 2007, that:
"Accordingly, because a Board-certified election is not the only legitimate method for withdrawing recognition from a Union, it was not error for the Board to decline to require one here." [East Bay Automotive Council v. NLRB, No. 04-74997, pp. 4300-4301]
What’s more, in making the above statement, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals cited and relied upon a prior holding of the United States Supreme Court that:
"{U}nder longstanding precedent of the [Board], an employer who believes that an incumbent union no longer enjoys the support of a majority of its employees has three options: to request a formal, Board-supervised election, to withdraw recognition from the union and refuse to bargain, or to conduct an internal poll of union support for the union." [Allentown v. NLRB 522 U.S. 359, 361 (1998)]
The next time the EFCA debate rolls around, the point should be made over and over again that the EFCA is an important step to stop employers from continuing to enjoy the best of both worlds, namely that it presently is unfairly difficult for workers to form unions and it is also unfairly easy for those same unions to then start to be ignored or busted by hostile and resentful employers.
The second of the two points that we should be better ready to address is that, with all anticipated nay saying and criticism about this point from our side not withstanding, more than a few persons in our organized labor movement, despite usually the best of deep-seated motivations, are often still prone to engage in many, to be kind, “overly enthusiastic tactics” in securing the desired results in various campaigns.
Since most of the proposed EFCA’s card signing and other organizing procedures will be transparent (i.e. most everyone at a worksite can and probably will know who signed and who didn’t sign union cards), the procedures used to obtain those authorization cards should always be above both legal challenge and ethical reproach. Protections should be built into the EFCA, as well as into unions’ organizing policies, to insure that all EFCA “go union” card signatures are obtained only through laudable and exemplary persuasive techniques that are openly fair and democratic, rather than through the use of excessive peer pressure, veiled threats, harassment, lying, or other repulsive tactics. Those latter tactics are undoubtedly almost as unpalatable to the public, and to many potential members, as are employers’ anti-union tactics such as using captive audience meetings, phony plant closure threats, deportation threats, and firings of key pro-union activists and supporters in order to defeat an organizing campaign.
I’ve been a dues-paying union member in San Francisco since 1971, and a member of the Advisory Board of The Association for Union Democracy for over a decade. I regret that I still periodically see, or read or hear about, quite a few of the same above-mentioned, sleazy, disrespectful and intimidating practices by union staff and members in organizing campaigns, internal union elections, strike votes, ratification votes, dues and bylaw votes, etc., that I first saw more than three decades ago. The public, as well as our own potential new members, must be assured that strong steps will be taken to jettison these counter-productive activities if and when the EFCA becomes law. I also happen to think that it is important that our movement publicly adopt this position no matter what, and regardless of the EFCA’s eventual fate, if our organized labor movement is ever to regain, or even surpass, our former sterling reputation and image as the working person’s champion in the minds of the majority of the American public.
In Solidarity,
Jon Palewicz, J.D.
Former Organizer, California Faculty Association (CFA); and
Retiree, Unite Here! Local 2
San Francisco, California
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