Reorganizing Labor

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:


Reorganizing Labor
Andrew Elrod ▪ Summer 2015

Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement
by Thomas Geoghegan
The New Press, 2014, 272 pp.

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 was intended to end a fifty-year-long era of court-enforced union repression and the disruptive and often violent responses it provoked from both workers and management. Regulating industrial relations, the argument went—licensing unions and settling employment disputes with binding arbitration—would restrain the force of class conflict with the reason of corporatist responsibility. “The door of a court of equity,” wrote federal judge Robert Wagner in a 1921 case enjoining a business to abide by a union contract, “is open to employer and employee alike.”

It is difficult to imagine a judge making such a statement today. Even though the NLRA, which Wagner went on to draft and sponsor as New York senator, is still in force, seventy years of judicial tinkering and two legislative amendments (Taft-Hartley in 1947 and Landrum-Griffin in 1959) have put organizers and negotiators, like their pre-NLRA predecessors, haplessly at the mercy of employer-side labor lawyers. The results will be familiar to those who follow labor politics: one in five workers are fired during NLRB election campaigns, according to Cornell’s Kate Bronfenbrenner, and a third of all elections involve such firings; unlawful threats and inducements against organizing workers are ubiquitous; organizers and employers have unequal access to workers; striker replacement is legal; Board remedies to unlawful activity take several years and do not act as a deterrent. Little of this was intended when Congress passed the Wagner Act in 1935. They are the results of the decisions of judges.

Once softened by a full-employment economy, the courts’ imprimatur on American employers’ anti-union regime has plagued anyone wondering how to increase workers’ bargaining power since the stagnation in real wages began forty years ago. So constrained are unions by contemporary labor law that some feel the need to act surreptitiously. The UFCW, in organizing Walmart workers, has denied that its goal is recognition by the corporation or bargaining on behalf of its employees. If it admitted these goals, it would, by force of law, be required to file a petition for a perilous NLRB election within thirty days. Unlike in the de facto restrictions listed above, here the statutory language is clear.

For four decades, organized labor’s insider strategy to amend the NLRA and escape these restrictions has been nothing short of quixotic. Four times union-backed amendments have passed the House, four times they have had some degree of presidential support, yet not one has become law. One might be inclined to give up the insider game, and this is what Thomas Geoghegan’s advice in Only One Thing Can Save Us amounts to. “[W]e need something radically different than old-fashioned U.S.-style collective bargaining,” he explains. In its place, Geoghegan proposes a grand bargain: organized labor sacrifices fair-share dues from nonmembers covered by collective bargaining agreements in exchange for legislation strengthening organizing rights. His amendment would throw the established postwar bargaining paradigm, and the union bureaucracies it engendered, out the window. To win it he proposes a series of mass mobilizations of the sort that won the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. .........................(more)

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/elrod-review-reorganizing-labor