For more than a quarter century, big business has engaged in a successful
campaign of weakening unions, redistributing income away from the working
class, and writing business-friendly rules for the global economy. Yet the
current political climate makes the last 25 years look like a golden era for
workers rights. Called the "most pro-corporate president in
history," George W. Bush has been, particularly since 9-11, engaged in a
relentless, yet largely covert, effort to undermine labor unions and worker
protections.
In March 2001, Bush told 10,000 workers of Northwest Airlines that they could
not strike for 80 days. The President also told United Airlines strikers that
unless they agreed to further concessions the administration would refuse the
$1.8 billion that the airline needed to avoid bankruptcy. After 9-11, Bush
invoked the Taft-Hartley Act forcing workers of the Pacific Maritime
Association to return to work.
Immigrant workers have suffered the most from the “war on unions.” Prior
to 9-11, immigrant workers began receiving better wages and working
conditions. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) negotiated a new
contract for baggage screeners raising their pay from minimum wage to $10 an
hour. Also, the AFL-CIO called for the repeal of the law that makes it illegal
for undocumented workers to work in the U.S. The Immigration and
Naturalization Service was also beginning to reduce the number of raids it
carried out to find undocumented workers.
In the wake of 9-11, the Bush administration used the specter of national
security to justify its attack on public-sector unions, and to stall passage
of the homeland security bill until receiving the right to exempt the 180,000
employees of the new department of most civil-service protections. Congress
passed legislation that created the Transportation Security Authority (TSA),
which oversees baggage screeners at airports and requires all baggage
screeners to be federal government employees. But since the TSA is part of the
Homeland Security Department, employees may not form or join a union.
Congressional legislation also allows Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge to
suspend civil service regulations, allow discrimination, abolish whistleblower
protections, and exempt the department from Freedom of Information Act
regulations. The House has passed legislation that also exempts the Homeland
Security Department from Title 5 of the Civil Service Act, which protects the
collective bargaining rights of federal employees.
After 9-11, to ensure that screeners were American citizens, the INS launched
Operation Tarmac. Operation Tarmac began by picking up immigrant workers who
had access to airplanes. But as time moved on, the Operation began cracking
down on immigrant workers in all sections of airports, even foodservice. In
one instance, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union claims that immigrant
workers were called to an employee meeting where they were arrested by INS
agents.
In December of 2002, the Labor Department issued new reporting and itemization
regulations for unions—an administrative nightmare that will cost unions
millions of dollars. Having asked the new Congress to pass strict penalties
for unions that fail to meet reporting deadlines, the Bush budget increased
spending for auditing, investigating and punishing union violations. At the
same time, the budget cut money for enforcing workplace health and safety
laws, and for investigating corporate violations of worker protections. In his
first two years in office, Bush has already blocked more strikes than any
president in history.
As was reported in the mainstream press, the Bush administration has announced
plans to accelerate the process of contracting out federal work to private
companies, putting the jobs of nearly 850,000 federal employees at risk. This
invites anti-union, low-wage contractors to compete for what are now, in most
cases, decent-paying, union jobs with good benefits. But what went unreported
is that this is proving to embolden conservative governors who are seeking
wholesale privatization and de-unionization of state and local workforces as
well.
Update by Anne-Marie Cusac
It is hard to overstate the importance of this story. The near loss of the
right to organize has the potential to affect every single worker in the
country, though it most drastically affects poor and working-class people. As
the right to organize disappears, so, too, do other rights: the right to
health care, livable wages, and leisure time.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this story is the blatant mistreatment
of those workers who are brave enough to attempt to bring unions into their
places of work. The outright physical abuse, the propensity to fire
organizers, the threats to lay off or cut benefits to any who vote for the
union — all of these are effective strategies that contribute to the sinking
rates of union membership in the United States. The government has little
power to stop employers from using such tactics, and some employers evidently
feel that it pays to break the law. Millions of workers want a union and do
not have one. Less than 10 percent of the private sector is now unionized,
down from a high of 36 percent in the early 1950s.
Since my piece appeared in The Progressive, the NLRB has issued more
complaints showing that companies routinely attempt to suppress unions.
In late April, The Washington Post reported, President Bush took advantage of
a congressional recess to avoid Senate oversight in his appointments of two
more officials to positions connected with the NLRB.
Bush chose Peter Eide to serve as the general counsel at the Federal Labor
Relations Authority. Eide is now in charge of enforcing labor laws that apply
to federal employees. Formerly, Eide directed labor law policy at the United
States Chamber of Commerce.
Bush also appointed Neil Anthony Gordon McPhie to the Merit Systems Protection
Board, which, among other obligations, oversees personnel and disciplinary
procedures that government agencies take against workers.
More information on particular companies that fire or otherwise mistreat
workers who are trying to bring in unions is available on the National Labor
Relations Board web site: http://www.nlrb.gov/. Two experts on these issues,
Kate Bronfenbrenner and Lance Compa, are both associated with Cornell
University and the School of Industrial and Labor Relations: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/.
Bronfenbrenner is the author of several excellent books, and Compa's 2000
report on union organizing and human rights issues in the United States is
available on the Human Rights Watch web site: http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/uslabor/.
Anyone interested in these issues is also welcome to contact me at The
Progressive: (608) 257-4626.
Update by Lee Sustar
It's revealing that the story of a labor movement with more than 13 million
members can be censored with relative ease. The dominant media view in recent
years has been that unions are artifacts of an earlier era and are simply no
longer relevant in the "new" information economy. Full-time labor
beat reporters, once fixtures in big-city newsrooms, virtually disappeared
years ago.
Since the onset of economic crisis, however, some journalists have resurrected
an older media stereotype: that of Big Labor, selfishly protecting its
"special" interests at the expense of the greater economic good.
Developments since the publication of "Employers' attack" make this
clear.
The most important example was the contract battle by the West Coast
dockworkers in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).
Journalists typically portrayed the ILWU as a barrier to progress—even
though it was an employers' lockout that shut down the ports for 10 days in
September-October 2002. President George W. Bush's use of the anti-labor
Taft-Hartley Act, ostensibly aimed at ending the lockout, in fact gave the
employers' dictates the backing of the federal courts—a fact barely noted in
the mainstream press.
Similarly, reporters blamed the crisis gripping the airlines largely on labor.
New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse wrote in an article published
April 27, 2003, "The pilots, the machinists and other airline unions have
obtained some of the highest wages in organized labor in decades past, helping
push their airlines' operating costs so high that the airlines became
vulnerable to downturns and more recently to the emergence of low-cost
upstarts like Jet Blue." In fact, unionized workers at United Airlines
accepted massive concessions in 1994—and the company ended up bankrupt
anyway. Few reporters have examined the human costs of an estimated $35
billion in airline labor concessions—lost jobs, cut wages, broken families
and worse. The same is true of the series of steel industry bankruptcies,
which have wiped out health insurance and cut pensions for tens of thousands
of retirees.
Fortunately, alternatives exist. The reportage and analysis in "Employers
Attack" were expanded in a subsequent article in the International
Socialist Review, "Labor's War at Home" (March-April 2003, online at
www.isreview.org). Web sites such as LaborNet (www.labornet.org), Socialist
Worker (www.socialistworker.org), Labor Notes (www.labornotes.org) Znet (www.zmag.org)
and CounterPunch(www.counterpunch.org) regularly post news and analysis of
organized labor. These outlets have followed one of the most important
political developments in the unions in many years—widespread opposition to
the U.S. war on Iraq and the formation of the organization "U.S. Labor
Against the War." They also frequently cover union reform efforts ignored
by the media.