American workers fight for union rights

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Can the Employee Free Choice Act bring at end to union-busting and intimidation in the US? by Richard Trumka

When Theresa Gares and her co-workers recently sought to join the Transport Workers’ Union, the New Jersey school bus drivers sought to improve their minimal job benefits. They currently have no sick leave or vacation time. Their health benefits cost between $200 and $500 per month for family coverage but, because their employer classifies them as part-time workers, they only have partial benefits. Despite paying hundreds of dollars a month for coverage, the workers are often left with large medical bills. In short, Gares says she sought a union because “maybe we can have something better”.

But after their employer, Durham School Services, found out about the workers’ efforts to form a union, management began holding weekly meetings to discourage them from joining. One day, Gares was called into the office after dropping off her bus and told she was fired for insubordination. A few days later, another union supporter also was fired.

Gares is challenging her termination with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), saying it is illegal. But in the meantime, she is trying to live with no income and no health benefits.

“These big companies need to stop walking over all of us little people,” Gares says.

Under current US labour law, workers seeking to form a union must go through a protracted NLRB ballot procedure – unless their employer agrees to a majority sign-up process, often called “card-check recognition”. Under majority sign-up, if 51 per cent of workers sign cards authorising a representative to bargain on their behalf, they have a union.

But employers such as Durham School Services aren’t likely to agree to the majority verification process because it doesn’t give management time to harass and intimidate workers as does the lengthy ballot process. As Gares and her co-workers know, the NLRB ballot process isn’t fair: because when workers fear they might lose their jobs if they vote to join a union – or believe other lies management tells to frighten them – there’s a good chance they won’t back the union.

US employer harassment: over the top

In its first Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) highlighted Resurrection’s federal labour law violations. Those violations include “interfering with, and coercing employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed” under the NLRA. But Resurrection’s intimidation and harassment of workers is not an isolated incident in US workplaces. Cornell University scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner studied hundreds of organising campaigns and her findings show that among private sector employers:

78 per cent force employees to attend one-on-one meetings against the union with their own supervisors.
51 per cent threaten to close the plant if the union wins the NLRB election.
75 per cent hire consultants or union-busters to help them fight union organising drives.

Similarly, a study released in March showed that, every time workers try to exercise their freedom to form a union, there’s a better than one-in-five chance a worker will be illegally fired as a result. The study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research documents that in more than one-quarter of union campaigns since 2001, workers faced illegal firing. By 2007, nearly 30 per cent of union organising campaigns resulted in at least one illegal firing. The study finds that pro-union workers were fired in 26 per cent of union election campaigns between 2001 and 2007. The 26 per cent rate is up from about 16 per cent in the last half of the 1990s.

Human Rights Watch, an independent NGO, has concluded that “a culture of near-impunity has taken shape in much of US labour law and practice… Many employers have come to view remedies like back pay for workers fired because of union activity as a routine cost of doing business, well worth it to get rid of organising leaders and derail workers’ organising efforts.”

Union-busting and dirty tricks

Employers in the US have a lot of assistance in fighting unionisation. In fact, union-busting is a $4 billion industry in the United States. When faced with a group of workers who want to form a union, US employers all too often turn to these firms, packed with corporate lawyers who, for a steep price, provide them with all the dirty tricks they can undertake inside and outside the law.

Gregor Gall, professor of industrial relations at Britain’s University of Hertfordshire, visited the United States last year and had this to say about just how extremist US employers are when it comes to workers seeking to form unions:

“Having just visited the US for an industrial relations conference, it’s hard to fully comprehend just how anti-union employers are there. While not wishing to let employers in Britain off the hook for their anti-unionism, their American brothers and sisters are in a different league all together.”

Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act have launched a $200 million campaign to defeat it. Working through front groups with innocuous-sounding names like the Center for Union Facts, organisations like the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce and giant corporations are bombarding the airwaves and filling major newspapers with pricey advertisements designed to turn public opinion against the proposed legislation. More crucially, their lobbyists are deluging lawmakers in Congress with repeated visits and contacts to pressure them into voting against the bill when it comes up this year.

The opposition to unions by big-moneyed corporations in the United States can’t be overstated. In a recent issue of In These Times, Art Levine gives us a blow-by-blow account of a seminar he attended in Las Vegas led by two attorneys from Jackson Lewis, one of the major law firms in the field of union-busting. Union-busting – the so-called “union avoidance” industry – involves more than 2,500 lawyers.

The lawyers gave seminar participants a litany of tricks to derail the efforts of their workers to do what the law says they have a right to do: join together to form a union and bargain for a better life. The Jackson Lewis lawyers encouraged the employers to take a leading role in denying their employees their freedom to form a union. Levine summarises some of what was said:

If a supervisor sympathises with the workers who want to form a union, one of the lawyers jerks his tie upward against his neck to suggest a hanging.
Tell employees stories about other workers in a union going on strike and losing their jobs to replacements because: “It’s lawful. What happens if this statement is a lie? They didn’t have another strike, there were no replacements? It’s still lawful: The labour board doesn’t really care if people are lying.”
Firing workers for seeking to form a union is illegal under current labour law, so Jackson Lewis encourages employers to make sure they fire union supporters for other reasons.

Globalisation of union-busting

Former London School of Economics and Political Science scholar John Logan studied the US multibillion-dollar, union-busting industry and found that the industry no longer is confined to US shores.

“The United States has an entire industry dedicated exclusively to stopping workers from forming a union. Several of these US consultants are now operating internationally and are seeking to expand their business in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. It is essential that union-busting is not allowed to flourish on this side of the Atlantic.”

Employee Free Choice Act

The Employee Free Choice Act would make it easier for workers to join unions.
It was originally introduced in Congress in 2005 and again in 2007 and 2009.
The Act received broad bipartisan support when it came up for a vote in 2007, passing the House of Representatives by a large margin.
Congressional lawmakers will debate the bill this autumn.

To better coordinate efforts against multinational union-busting, the AFL-CIO and its counterpart in Britain, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) are sharing information about the activity of union-busting firms in the United States and Britain. AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and TUC general secretary Brendan Barber signed a joint agreement in February 2008 to work together to eliminate the intimidation of workers who want to improve the quality of their families’ lives by forming a union. Both will jointly lobby governments and relevant international bodies to restrict the activities of the union-busters, develop a shared database of union-busting activity and create “Busting the Union-Busters” training materials.

Introduced originally in Congress in 2005 and again in 2007 and 2009, the Employee Free Choice Act received broad bipartisan support when it came up for a vote in 2007, passing the House of Representatives by a large margin. Congressional lawmakers will debate the bill this autumn. Without the Employee Free Choice Act, union-busting in the United States will grow exponentially and, like every other industry, union avoidance increasingly will turn to a global market to peddle its product. There’s a lot at stake in passage of the Employee Free Choice Act for union members in the US – and for those abroad.

Richard Trumka is the secretary-treasurer of US national trade union centre AFL-CIO.

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in the journal International Union Rights.

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Issue 37 - October 2009

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