The following has been posted at AFL-CIO Now:
Free and democratic elections? You won’t find them in the U.S. workplace. In fact, a new report shows that when U.S. workers try to form a union under the rules of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they are operating under a system that more closely resembles the phony “free elections” in authoritarian regimes -- those the U.S. government traditionally has condemned.
Gordon Lafer, Ph.D., a University of Oregon political scientist and author of Neither Free Nor Fair: The Subversion of Democracy Under National Labor Relations Board Elections, says:
Anti-union employers are making a mockery of the principle governing American elections. Weak labor laws allow anti-union employers to manipulate the outcome of union elections in a manner that is inherently unfair and undemocratic.
Union-busting activity in the weeks leading up to union elections resembles practices that our government routinely denounces when performed by rouge regimes abroad
He says passage of the Employee Free Choice Act is “critical” to ensuring America’s workers have a truly democratic process in choosing to join a union.
The report, released today by American Rights at Work, comes just weeks after obstructionist Republican senators blocked a vote on the Employee Free Choice Act. Echoing the multimillion dollar corporate propaganda campaign that sought to undermine support for the bill, anti-worker lawmakers claimed the bill would take away workers’ rights to secret ballot elections if employees are allowed to choose to join a union when a majority signed union authorization cards.
That argument, no matter how often it is repeated, is wrong on two fronts. First, the Employee Free Choice Act does not eliminate secret ballot elections. Secondly, under the current NLRB, government-run election process, the report points out there are a
myriad ways in which workers are denied the most basic tenets of democracy…
and in fact, Neither Free Nor Fair
addresses head-on the claim that the NLRB election process guarantees workers a truly secret ballot -- the central claim of anti-union advocates who seek to keep the current NLRB system in place….
Instead, the report shows
NLRB elections fail to safeguard workers’ right to keep their opinions private; and that, on the contrary, the NLRB system results in workers being forced to reveal their political preferences long before they step into the voting booth -- thus turning the “secret ballot” into a mockery of democratic process.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says Lafer’s report
comes at a time when working families are at the tipping point. Unions are the best anti-poverty, middle-class supporting program in our nation, and are a key to turning around the growing gap between the haves and have-nots. The anti-democratic and skewed system detailed in Lafer’s study clearly does not give workers a free and fair chance to improve their lives by forming unions.
During Senate debate on the Employee Free Choice Act, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) stressed the connection between strong unions and a strong middle class. Clinton pointed out the advantages of belonging to a union:
Union workers earn, on average, 30 percent more than nonunion workers.
Union workers are much more likely to receive employer-paid health insurance and participate in an employer-provided retirement plan.
Union women earn $179 more a week than nonunion women; African Americans $187 more a week; and Latinos $217 more a week. (Get more on the union difference here.)
The report documents how employers:
Deny workers free speech -- Although management is permitted to plaster the workplace with anti-union posters, leaflets and banners, pro-union employees are prohibited from doing likewise. Union organizers are banned from entering the workplace—or entering publicly used but company-owned spaces such as parking lots—at any time, for any reason. Employees of the company are banned from talking about forming a union while they are on work time and are banned from distributing pro-union information except when they are both on break time and in a break room.
Use economic coercion and intimidation -- When employers speak out, employees always listen carefully for even the subtlest hints as to what kind of behavior will be rewarded or punished. This is all the more true in an economy where so many Americans feel insecure about their economic future.
However, under standard “union avoidance” strategy, supervisors are forced, on pain of termination, to engage each of the people under them in intimidating one-on-one anti-union conversations. Workers commonly report illegal threats being made in these meetings, since there are no witnesses present.
Even without illegal threats, supervisor one-on-one meetings undermine democracy. In these conversations, the person who has the most immediate control over your hiring and firing, promotion or demotion, scheduling, duties, hours and all other aspects of your work life explains why they believe so strongly that a union would be destructive to the workplace.
Ostracize and defame union supporters -- The NLRB allows employers to make nearly any type of threatening or derogatory statement to employees, as long as it doesn’t contain an explicit quid pro quo threat. Workers who have earned their way to good standing with the company are often ostracized and belittled by management after publicly asserting their support for the union. In one example, a worker was followed to restaurants on days off by security guards with walkie-talkies. A member of management was assigned to work with her eight hours a day, five days a week, and was told he was there solely to work on her to change her ideas about unions.
Lafer thoroughly deconstructs the so-called “secret ballot” argument employers and anti–worker lawmakers incessantly flog whenever the Employer Free Choice Act is mentioned.
Much has been made about the importance of the secret ballot in NLRB elections. But, as this report documents, the NLRB safeguards the secret ballot in name only.
But this principle has been eviscerated by the NLRB. Federal law allows anti-union managers to force individual employees into repeated, intimidating one-on-one conversations with their personal supervisors that are designed to make employees reveal their political leanings long before election day. “Union avoidance” consultants typically script supervisors’ conversations, train them how to read employees verbal and non-verbal reactions, and have them ask indirect questions without explicitly asking employees how they will vote.
Supervisors often adopt a sophisticated grading system to mark the political tendencies of each of their subordinates; for those whose leanings are unclear, consultants require that supervisors go back for repeated conversations until employees’ political sentiments have been flushed to the surface. Unlike political elections, employee voters have no right to walk away from such conversations or to insist that they don’t want to discuss union-related issues with their supervisor. They can be forced to engage in such conversations daily, or multiple times a day, in an atmosphere of dramatically increasing pressure.
Click here to download a copy of Neither Free Nor Fair.
If you have news items regarding unions or workplace issues in Washington state that you would like to see posted here, please submit them via e-mail to David Groves or via fax to 206-285-5805.
Copyright © 2007 Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO
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