A Civil Solution to Labor’s Problems

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http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13010/a_civil_solution_to_labors_problems

By the summer of 2009, seven months after the election of Barack Obama and what looked like a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate, labor’s campaign to enact the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) had run out of juice. Senators who had co-sponsored the legislation only two years earlier were nowhere to be found when conditions finally seemed to be in place for its passage. As the economy plunged, the administration and erstwhile allies – pounded by the stimulus battle and the gathering storm over healthcare reform – bobbed and weaved to avoid putting serious skin into a fight everyone could plainly see was unwinnable.

The three years following EFCA’s demise were just as discouraging for America’s beleaguered unions. It’s time to reframe how we might think about, communicate and devise a strategy for enacting labor law reform. In Why Labor Organizing Should Be a Civil Right: Rebuilding a Middle-Class Democracy by Enhancing Worker Voice (The Century Foundation Press), Richard D. Kahlenberg – the author of the Albert Shanker biography Tough Liberal – and labor and employment discrimination attorney Moshe Z. Marvit do just that.

The injustice EFCA set out to eliminate was the failure of current labor law to protect workers seeking to organize against employer domination and abuse. Workers are routinely subjected to intimidation, threats, captive meetings, interminable administrative delays, coercive one-on-one hectoring by supervisors, demotions, forced transfers and all manner of retaliation including dismissal. Employers, as a matter of standard operating procedure, absorb the law’s miniscule fines for illegal intimidation or retaliation as part of their overhead for quashing organizing drives. Many organizers, as a matter of credibility and conscience, no longer distribute Your Rights Under the Law palm cards to workers, knowing that the penalties for coercive or retaliatory violations under the National Labor Relations Act are virtually unenforceable and serve no deterrent value.

This was why card check – a process that avoids the risks and retaliation of an employer-dominated election campaign by giving workers the right to unionize once a majority have signed union authorization cards – was the solution advanced as EFCA’s centerpiece. But to those unfamiliar with what goes on during a real-life organizing effort, card check appeared to be a solution without a problem. Worse, it was not hard to portray labor’s solution as the triumph of “the union” over the right to a secret ballot.


***The book's title communicates the problem -- the surprising reality that individual American workers do not have a protected civil right to organize.