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<< Statistics are Not Reality | Main | Bush versus Science >> June 21, 2004NLRB Unrolls Assault on Labor RightsPartly due to slow and revolving appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, the Bush NLRB has not had a solid three-member majority (two out of the five members are members of the opposition party) to fully crack down against labor rights. That's now changed. Major decisions are starting to come down and one of the major ones expected was decided just over a week ago. What was the decision? To strip 91% of private employees -- all workers in non-union settings -- of rights under the labor law. This may surprise some people, but rights under the National Labor Relations Act are not restricted just to folks in the AFL-CIO. Anyone acting to defend work conditions in the workplace are protected to some extent by those laws, whether you are in a union or not. How much protection is hotly contested, and the Bush labor board decided-- Not Much. Here's the core of the decision. In 1975, the Supreme Court declared that anyone meeting with a supervisor where they thought they might be fired or disciplined had the right to a labor representative there to act as a witness. In 1982, the NLRB decided this right applied to workers in non-union settings who had a right to a fellow worker there in a similar role. Three years later, the now-Reagan dominated board reversed that decision. But in 2000, in what was called the Epilepsy Foundation decision, the Clinton labor board restored the original right non-union workers had to a witness when they may be fired. This interpretation of the labor law was upheld as valid even by the often anti-union DC Circuit Court of Appeals in 2001. But the Bush board in a new decision, I.B.M. Corp., killed that right for non-union workers, allowing employers to discipline them without witnesses or moral support. But to get a clear sense of how stark the difference between the Bush rightwing majority and a board that actually would represent workers, rather than corporate interests, just look at the language used by the dissent and the majority. Here is what the dissent said in criticizing the decision: Today, American workers without unions, the over-whelming majority of employees, are stripped of a right integral to workplace democracy. . . Under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, all workers, union-represented or not, have the “right to . . . . engage in . . . concerted activities for the purpose of . . . mutual aid or protection.” It is hard to imagine an act more basic to “mutual aid or protection” than turning to a coworker for help when faced with an interview that might end with the employee fired. . . Due process in the nonunion workplace should not be sacrificed on such dubious grounds. Workers without unions can and do successfully stand up for each other on the job—and they have the legal right to try, whether or not they succeed.But the Bush majority saw preserving corporate management rights as more important than the labor rights they are charged with protecting: We simply observe that some employers, faced with security concerns that are an out-growth of the troubled times in which we live, may seek to question employees on a private basis for a host of legitimate reasons...Or as one Bush appointee said more bluntly in a concurring decision: in the nonunion setting, and in the absence of a collective-bargaining agreement, the common-law rights of man-agement, including the right to deal with its employees on an individual basis, must prevail over an individual employee’s insistence on the presence of a coworker at a predisciplinary investigatory interview.Pay attention to that "common law right" language-- that means that traditional judicial preferences get to trump legislative rights for workers, a classic conservative trope over the years in defending "management rights" that have no legal basis in the law. And think about it, these conservatives are the ones who go on and on about "special privileges" for unions, yet they go out of their way to turn a general labor right into a narrow right for union workers. That's no accident, but a strategy. By isolating rights for union members, they then can feed resentment of non-union workers with their rhetoric, acting as if its the unions, not the rightwing, that denied those rights to the general population. All part of the anti-labor attack that will only get more vicious in a second Bush term, if it happens. Posted by Nathan at June 21, 2004 08:36 AM Related posts:
Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsI don't know why people buy into the phony line that unions only help their own members; it's clear that a strong labor movement helps just about all workers. Posted by: Vardibidian at June 21, 2004 09:02 AM Ugh. The concurring opinion's appeal to the "common law" rights of management is really brazen and dumb. The "common law" is *supposed* to be the set of default rules that exists in the absence of express legislation. So when you've got a piece of legislation like the NLRA, which was meant to *displace* the common law, it's just asinine to say that the common law "prevails" over statutory rights. What's going on, of course, is that these people want to elevate the common law (under which it was a criminal consipiracy to organize a union) to the status of constitutional protections for employers. With the help of the Supreme Court, they've already been successful in using this tactic to exclude union organizers from the workplace (and thereby neutering organizing drives) by elevating the employer's common-law property rights to a near-constitutional status. Posted by: JD at June 21, 2004 02:12 PM OK, so for security reasons (e.g. terrorism), employers have the right to "question employees on a private basis." In other words, because of 9/11, non-union employees must give up their right to be accompanied by a co-worker. How far is it from there to denying that right (and many others) to organized workers? In fact, it's not large step to deciding that unions themselves are a threat to national security. Oops, the Bush administration has already decided this for many government agencies. What's good for the (federal) goose, may also be good for the (private sector) gander. The terrorists have won. Posted by: Jordan Barab at June 21, 2004 06:09 PM I wonder how the Board decision might hold up on appeal. Dotson Days are back. Posted by: Trapper John at June 23, 2004 05:19 PM My dad made a comment that the people he works for all want to know what a union can do for them but never what they can do for the union. It’s a bit like how people seem to feel about government anymore. That government is the “other,” the “they” instead of us, We the People. Of course our library got zero support from unions we contacted when we were trying to organize a few years back on the grounds that we were "too small" to bother with. The majority of employees (and management) supported a union but the fact that we are a “right to work state” coupled with the fact that as (technically) government employees our employer did not have to recognize us the opportunity passed. I still think labor is missing a GOLDEN opportunity in not organizing library workers along the lines of the national teacher’s union. It’s a highly educated, grossly underpaid, female dominated profession with a history of vocal patriotism as in the case of the Patriot Act. Posted by: Laura Wilkerson at June 29, 2004 02:55 PM It's sociology. The end of the 20th century saw a worldwide migration from rural to urban and from blue collar to office work. Secretaries and lower salaried staff don't identify with those sweaty, smelly blue collar people. They're working in the big office! (But they aren't any freer and they aren't getting compensated. If the end of the 19th century through about 1930 demonstrates anything, I figure it will take about another 30 years for the majority of pink and lower-white collar workers to figure that out.) Posted by: Steven Christenson at June 30, 2004 11:00 AM Post a comment
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