Investigate the NLRB

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/speakout/andrew_kersten.cfm

When was the last time you saw a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision as the topic of a comedian’s shtick? As a labor historian, I was amazed to watch Steven Colbert’s recent “Word of the Day” gallows humor interpretation of the NLRB ruling denying the right of Kentucky nurses to organize on the fallacious grounds they are supervisors. It was funny, erudite, and pessimistic—America’s nastiest social critic, H.L. Mencken, would have loved it.


While wiping the tears of laughter and sorrow away, I thought of my historical research on the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and wondered if we had not returned to 1933 when a famous labor economist boldly proclaimed that the AFL—and in fact the entire labor movement—was on its deathbed. But this new NLRB decision was not a fatal blow as some have commented. Rather, it was yet another bushwacking. President Bush’s NLRB has taken a further step along what amounts to the long march of the open shop movement in the United States.


Andrew E. Kersten, an associate professor of American History and chair of the Department of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

Since the turn of the 20th century, every generation of workers has fought in a class war from above. Employers have methodically worked to make the United States an “open shop nation,”—a nice-sounding concept that in reality undermines workers’ ability to get a voice at work through union membership—and their efforts are far from complete. Still, the NLRB’s recent action is cause for great concern, leaving us to question whether the NLRB can be trusted and what we can do to regain momentum in our decades-old struggle for an equitable society. But given the recent congressional elections, the labor movement is now in a much better position than it has been for a long time. It’s time to recapture the passions of the past and retake the NLRB.



In some respects, the NLRB’s decision was not surprising. It is the end result of years of political maneuverings by extreme conservatives. In fact, the history of the assault on the labor movement extends back to the 19th century when the relationship between labor and management was horrifically brutal. The American Federation of Labor arose in that period. Samuel Gompers and his colleagues built a labor movement whose goals were to stop the violence and repression, to improve working environments and to increase wages and benefits. And, yet, he wanted to do so without the aid of the federal government. He had little faith that the federal government would do anything but serve employers as an army defending the strikebreakers or as a corrupt, duplicitous bureaucratic go-between. Generally speaking, Gompers thought that strong, independent union action for modest economic gains would solve all working-class problems and win the war for the union shop. Time proved Gompers partly wrong.



The union movements’ greatest gains came during the New Deal when President Franklin D. Roosevelt urged workers to join unions—and to his surprise, millions immediately took up the call. FDR’s NLRB established the tradition of fair, open and democratic union elections and an equitable collective bargaining processes. Since the 1930s, conservatives have rallied to attack the New Deal and the NLRB by using the federal courts, by passing restrictive laws such as the Taft-Hartley Act and, finally, by taking over the labor relations bureaucracy itself.



Today’s NLRB is not your grandfather’s and grandmother’s. But that generation of the 1930s and 1940s also had to fight to protect the federal government’s new relationship with unions. During the second World War, when many local union leaders were either away in the service or preoccupied with other wartime activities, employers, operating under the guise of patriotism, pushed for open shop amendments to state constitutions. In several states, including Arkansas and Florida, conservatives won, but in other states such as California, labor won. There’s no denying the history. While workers fought abroad to save democracy, conservatives tried to eliminate it at home. Perhaps we are seeing much of the same today.



But all is not lost. In this season when we are remembering those brave soldiers who planted a flag for democracy thousands of miles away, let’s too remember those “soldiers” in the arsenal of democracy who built the tanks, planes and guns so their battlefront counterparts could win. These workers also fought to protect democracy at home by opposing the open shop movement. Flags of our fathers? How about union flags of our fathers and mothers? Now after the tsunami election (as pundits have called it), we must recapture the AFL’s past and save the NLRB from irrelevancy.



The NLRB’s decision—and the media reaction to it—has sent shock waves through the nation, not just the labor movement and political progressives. It remains up to us to decide what to do with this new political landscape. During next year, the Congress we elected will take up issues such as the minimum wage, ethics and corruption in government and the war in Iraq. As the Democrats set the hearings for Congress, we must urge them to broaden their scope and investigate the operation of Bush’s NLRB. That’s the first step. Then we need to win more elections.



I say: Let’s plant the flags of our union fathers and mothers at city hall, at the statehouse, on Capitol Hill and eventually at the White House. To stop the NLRB from making any more bad decisions, we will have to take back the bureaucracy—and not just the Congress—from the conservatives.

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Andrew E. Kersten, an associate professor of American History and chair of the Department of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, is the author of Labor’s Home Front: The AFL during World War II (New York University Press, 2006).

[CrazyOrangeCat]

1. K&R

[ninkasi]

2. Proud union member here...

I'm retired now, but consider myself a lifetime member of the CWA. Union is the way to go, and I hope union membership increases, for the good of the American worker.