U.S. Labor Law Is Broken

[Omaha Steve]

Full article: http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/speakout/mary_beth_maxwell.cfm

U.S. Labor Law Is Broken

By Mary Beth Maxwell



Mary Beth Maxwell

Mary Beth Maxwell is executive director of American Rights at Work, a nonprofit organization formed in 2003 to investigate and expose abuse of employee rights in the workplace, publicize the inadequacy of U.S. labor law and advocate change in the struggle to win workplace democracy.

If you ask most people in America why there are fewer members of unions, they have ready answers. They think it’s because of technology or because manufacturing jobs have left or it’s due to globalization and changes in the economy. They agree how important unions were in the old days, but wonder if maybe they just don’t fit anymore—maybe that’s why fewer workers have unions today.

There are three answers to that question that most people in America don’t know—and need to know—that explain why so few workers have unions.

The first is that employer interference with workers making a choice about a union is completely off the charts. At American Rights at Work, we crunched the government’s own numbers from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and demonstrated that literally every 23 minutes in the United States—in the United States of America—someone is illegally discriminated against or fired for trying to exercise their rights at work. That’s really an outrage in a democracy. There is a level of lawlessness in the U.S. workplace in terms of firings and surveillance and intimidation that I think would stun most people if they knew about it. We commissioned a report from the University of Illinois at Chicago that found 30 percent of employers fire somebody illegally during organizing campaigns. Further, 49 percent of employers threatened to shut down the worksite if people were to vote for forming a union, and 82 percent of those employers actually hire high-priced union-busting consultants to coach them in how to defeat those campaigns.

[LincolnMcGrath]

1. Recommended Greatest

[spindrifter]

2. Here's a Detroit Free Press

poll and article re the impact of the possible GM merger with Renault and Nissan.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2006607140425

[readmoreoften]

3. That's what happened to me. Fired for union activities.

And by a university employer at that.

I will lose my health insurance in August because they chose to retaliate against me, even though I was rated very highly as a teacher even AFTER my bargaining unit went on strike.

[Kenergy]

4. Good post Steve...

I'm in Western North Carolina, and people here reject Unions simply because they don't have the spine
to stand up to their employers. They are completely submissive people. It's pretty pathetic working with
these cowards;
Appalacian Mountain people are like amoebas. Pathetic in-bred morons born without a spine.
There are exceptions to this of course, but they are few and far between.

LOL! Flame away WNC Freepers!!

[htuttle]

5. I knew a guy that worked for a major detective agency for a short time

He was hired to work undercover at Briggs and Stratton in Milwaukee. Apparently, contract negotiations were coming up, and management was keen on gathering as much dirt as they could about the union before they sat down at the table. They were leading him (very forcefully) toward entrapping his cover 'co-workers' and helping the company make the case that the union was forcing them to keep bad workers (and thus gain leverage during negotiations). He ended up quitting because he couldn't stomach it.

He told me that he knew there were at least 10 other detectives from the same agency working at that factory (though he didn't know who they were).

Corporations do this all the time. They don't even follow the law to the letter, since the penalties for violating labor laws have traditionally been very lenient. The cost of getting caught is usually less than even the cost of hiring a detective agency to break the union. "Might as well try," says the Chicago School of Economics.

[unkachuck]

6. well....

....>>>>University of Illinois at Chicago that found 30 percent of employers fire somebody illegally during organizing campaigns<<<<....

....if businesses and corporations aren't following the laws of this country, maybe we should join them....

[readmoreoften]

7. That's the problem...

Bush's NLRB is changing the way the laws are read. We have no protection.

[formercia]

8. I watched it happen where I worked

Management sent in spies to an organizing meeting to identify the pro-union workers and fired them the next week. They were caught at it and wound up shutting down the plant after drying up all of the concessions that the State and local governments had given them.
It was all greed. We competed with their plants in Taiwan, China, Singapore and Viet Nam and still made more profit for them due to better productivity and less scrapped units. It wasn't enough to make more money, it was about domination of a subservient work force.
The CEO of the company was a protege of Werner Von Braun and had the same slave labor mentality the old Nazi used to make V-2 missiles.

[Omaha Steve]

9. Labor cartoon on topic!

[Virginian]

10. Virginia is a right to work state.

I don't know exactly what that means, but it is not good for unions.

I worked in the office for a company that made foam products in Richmond about 20 years ago.

The company was very anti-union. They had made it known that if the Richmond plant organized, it would be closed and operations moved to Mexico.

Someone tried to get a softball team together, but was discouraged from doing that. People even shushed me when I asked if the company had a credit union.

While I worked there, they did open a plant in Mexico. We were appalled by rumors of the low wages the company was paying their Mexican employees. It just didn't seem fair. The answer, of course, would be to organize their Mexican workforce.

The company was privately owned and made enormous profits. They don't sell retail and are basically unknown.