To Change Labor Law, Put Union Busting on Trial

Labor’s failed campaign for EFCA put too much faith in the good will of Democrats in Congress. Photo: Jim West.

Labor’s campaign for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) appears to have failed. It’s time for our movement to rethink a long-term strategy to change this country’s dysfunctional labor laws.

From the start, the EFCA campaign lacked a clear focus on the problem we’re trying to solve: the reign of terror that employers launch against workers when they try to organize. The numbers are familiar: only half of union organizing campaigns result in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election wins; only a fourth get first contracts.

Every union that does private-sector organizing has its own horror stories. Captive-audience meetings, one-on-one interrogation, plant closing threats, firings, and round-the-clock multimedia propaganda blitzes have turned the NLRB election process into the graveyard of democracy and of workers’ hopes.

Many of us have witnessed large, enthusiastic majorities of union card signers—60, 70, 80 percent of a workforce—destroyed over weeks of systematic browbeating, repression, and fear-mongering by the employer, facilitated by the labor board’s procedures.

TOO MUCH FAITH

Many labor rallies and meetings highlighted the victims of union busting, but in labor’s public campaign for EFCA, exposure of employer tactics was overshadowed by feel-good ads about “rebuilding the middle class.” We failed to create public awareness of the ugly reality of employer intimidation.

Because we didn’t put union busting on trial, the enemies of workplace democracy were able to put us on the defensive, portraying EFCA as an attack on the secret ballot by greedy labor bosses who would harass workers into joining unions.

This is not to diminish the great work done in the EFCA campaign. Union members who had never seen an organizing drive are now more aware of how unorganized workers’ rights are violated and why change is desperately needed. Members participated in marches and rallies, and many phoned, wrote, or visited Congressional offices to lobby for EFCA.

But there wasn’t enough mobilization, and mobilization wasn’t central to a strategy that placed far too much faith in the good will of Democrats in Congress and the White House.

We won’t pass labor law reform over the fierce opposition of virtually the entire corporate class without winning public support. And that means making a strong case to the public that the current rules under which workers try to organize are outrageously unjust.

Labor needs to restart the campaign for labor law reform with a long view and a public campaign to expose union busting. One component of such a drive should be a major investigation by a Congressional committee under union-friendly leadership. The precedent is the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee that investigated, exposed, and “busted” the union busters of the 1930s.

Although the Wagner Act had passed in 1935, recognizing workers’ right to organize and establishing the NLRB, many employers defied the new law, expecting the Supreme Court to strike it down as unconstitutional. So Senator Robert M. La Follette, Jr. of Wisconsin, elected on the Progressive party ticket, formed and chaired a subcommittee of the Senate Education and Labor Committee from 1936 to 1941.

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The committee investigated the union-busting tactics of the time: industrial espionage, private police forces, professional strikebreakers, stockpiling of munitions, and employer associations that coordinated anti-union action. The La Follette investigation shone the bright light of public attention on this seamy underside of American industry and helped discredit and weaken employer resistance to unions.

The arrival of a subpoena from this committee was feared not only by the heads of detective agencies but by CEOs of major corporations, who risked having their protestations of innocence publicly demolished by incriminating documents already in the committee’s possession, or by the testimony of the labor spies they had employed.

The campaign of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) to organize basic steel started at the same time as the La Follette Committee. Fear of subpoenas and bad press prompted executives, particularly at U.S. Steel, to forego their nastiest anti-union methods. This eased the task of organizing, and by March 1937 SWOC had its first contract with U.S. Steel.

Similarly, coal operators in Kentucky’s “Bloody Harlan” County felt pressure to rein in their anti-union violence while the La Follette Committee investigated them. The United Mine Workers rushed in organizers and soon won contracts.

Union busting has made a comeback since the 1970s, in a different form partly shaped and legitimized by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. The Wagner Act had prohibited employers to “interfere with, restrain or coerce” workers exercising their right to organize, but Taft-Hartley gave employers “free speech” rights to dissuade workers from organizing.

Business-friendly judges and NLRB officials have, over time, increasingly allowed employer threats to stand (“If the union gets in, we predict the plant will have to close”). The law and the NLRB are so toothless that it pays for bosses to break the law.

A new La Follette Committee could put modern union busting on trial and build public support for restoring the right to organize. Unions could plan organizing strategies around the committee’s investigations, so that an employer’s union-busting tactics could be exposed to Congressional and public scrutiny in real time.

Restoring the right to organize is an economic stimulus, at no cost to the government, because it will increase wages and therefore consumer demand. That’s a point we should continue to make. But we won’t get labor law reform through Congress until we organize public opinion against an unjust system that crushes workers’ efforts to organize.

Al Hart is managing editor of the UE News. A former GE worker, for 20 years he was a field organizer for the United Electrical Workers.

A version of this article appeared in Labor Notes #373, April 2010. Don't miss an issue, subscribe today.
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Comments

MClayton (not verified) | 04/13/10

Hey, I've go some horror stories for you -- how about union organizers showing up at the same person's home four or five times a day at all hours when it's clear the person doesn't want to talk to the union? Or then sitting down the street and watching the house waiting until they can catch the poor worker with the kids outside or cutting the lawn? How about union organizers just plain refusing to leave the house (I'm looking at you, UNITE HERE) until they get the signature they came there for? How about members or potential members being driven to the point of tears, ready to tear their hair out, by harassment at their homes and on their way in to work. Geez, at least when your boss holds you "captive" he pays you for the hour of your life.

And how come there are so many laws regulating what an employer can say about the union, but NO REGULATION over what the union can say about the employer? The union can make whatever promises they want, create whatever bullsh!t stories they want about the employer and that's okay. How about making it illegal to destroy a company's reputation or effect its ability to do business in order to extract a card check agreement? Hey, how about making ALL care check agreements illegal and leaving it ALWAYS up to the potential members to decide and vote?

So sure, labor reform sounds like a super swell idea and I've got some suggestions for that --
>unions are required to mail easy to understand annual full line item financial disclosures (including salaries) to their own members and to show such a disclosure to all potential members before getting a signature on a authorization card
>unions are required to meet strict electioneering requirements like minimum participation percentages and regulated nomination processes and all union elections of any kind are overseen by an outside agency
>regulation on home visits and education for all members and targeted members on their rights not to be harassed in their own homes
>dues increases can only be implemented on a per shop basis by the vote within that shop
>all contract must be ratified by a set percentage of persons working under that contract
>any and all political endorsements and donations must be determined by a direct vote of the general membership so that all political activity accurately reflects the political will of the majority of the rank and file
>all unions are required to inform their members of the process for decertification and withholding of dues for poor servicing

oh, and here's a novel idea -- a PERFORMANCE CONTRACT between every union local and it's membership that spells out how what they are getting for their dues money -- servicing calls per month, negotiating process, the proper handling of grievances and the penalties against the union for failure to represent

oh yes, and certainly unions won't mind reform legislation that requires all unions to disclose to their members and the public any failed attempts to organize STAFF UNIONS including NLRB filings for things like, um....CAPTIVE AUDIENCE MEETINGS, interrogations and other violations of the NLRA BY UNIONS.