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http://www.americanrightsatwork.org/press/press.cfm?pressReleaseID=40EDITORIAL MEMO: WORKERS ANTICIPATE REVERSAL OF RIGHTS FROM BUSH-APPOINTED LABOR BOARD
Pending National Labor Relations Board rulings could undermine workers’ choice to organize U.S. workplaces
OVERVIEW
Millions of workers who want to form unions or maintain their current union representation will see their labor rights dramatically curtailed, if the National Labor Relations Board ("Labor Board") maintains its recent ruling trend. Some workers who have already successfully created collective bargaining units at their workplaces will see their eligibility status switched on them. Others who are currently coming together in labor unions will see options for organizing eliminated. These rulings come at a time of significant worker organizing activity, with thousands of vigorous worker campaigns across the country and a national campaign to improve labor rights in action.
The Labor Board is the federal agency charged with protecting the rights of millions of private sector employees to form unions and to engage in collective bargaining, as outlined in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Presidential recess appointments on January 17 of Peter Kirsanow, a management lawyer, and Dennis Walsh, a labor attorney, signal that the Labor Board will soon begin to decide major cases. The expected rulings on long-standing, precedent-setting cases could redefine how unions are formed and who is eligible to join them. Of greatest concern are cases on voluntary recognition agreements involving card check, the way most workers join unions today. Workers and their advocates are also watching cases where the Labor Board could decide to eliminate labor protections for broad segments of the workforce, including nurses and other skilled workers in such industries as healthcare, building trades, and transportation, by reclassifying them as supervisors. The cases before the Labor Board all have a common element—a drive by anti-union forces to dissolve labor unions, the proven, democratic check on greed and malfeasance.
Workers' choice to form unions to improve their lives has been eroded, in every practical sense, even before these groundbreaking cases came before the Labor Board. Employers are increasingly using aggressive maneuvers to exploit already weak labor laws. When faced with organizing drives, 30 percent of employers fire pro-union workers, 49 percent threaten to close a worksite if the union prevails, and 51 percent coerce workers into opposing unions with bribery or favoritism.1
These unionbusting tactics have gone virtually unpunished and unchecked by the Labor Board, jeopardizing workers' rights to form unions and collectively bargain. The cases go even further, though, threatening established union membership.
"Today's workers face an unprecedented imbalance of power, tilted toward the anti-union employer," said former Democratic Whip David Bonior, who now chairs labor policy group American Rights at Work. "Yet, even in the face of this opposition, workers are undeterred, successfully improving their lives through forming unions."
Highly visible organizing campaigns of hotel workers in Miami, janitors in Texas, and communications workers across the country indicate that workers in America want and need unions. "If the Labor Board turns its back on workers it will, for all intents and purposes, revoke the right to organize and eventually remove labor unions from the American social landscape," says Bonior.
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