Employee Free Choice Act

Harry Alford's Condescension

Isaiah J. Poole — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:49:08 -0700

The right-wing blogosphere is abuzz over the supposed smackdown between Sen. Barbara Boxer and Harry C. Alford, who portrays himself as an "African American and a veteran" who is insulted at Boxer's alleged racism and calls her on it.

Well, as an African American I don't know what the hell Alford was upset about — other than the fact that Alford was shown that his shilling for the right is not appreciated in much of the community he claims to represent.

Alford is the president of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, an outfit he and his wife, Kay Debow Alford, run out of a small office in Washington. The Chamber took in about $880,000 in 2006, according to the most recent publicly available Form 990 filed with the IRS, most from membership dues and a $90,000 grant from AT&T (which may have something to do with Alford's opposition to "net neutrality," the idea that broadband providers such as AT&T should not have to right to limit what content people can receive via the Internet).

But what was at the core of Alford's outburst was the reason he was on Capitol Hill testifying before Boxer's Environment and Public Works committee to begin with: to oppose climate change legislation.

Alford's organization had already joined forces with carbon-based fuel interests and conservatives to torpedo the Waxman-Markey climate change bill in the House. It released a study in May from CRA International that asserted that by 2030 Waxman-Markey would cost the economy $350 billion in lost gross domestic product and 2.5 million jobs. The National Resources Defense Council has a detailed dissection of the study's flaws and the disclosure that the NBCC has received $275,000 from ExxonMobil.

In fact, Greenpeace has a page of global-warming-denial comments that Alford has made over the years, which is why ExxonMobil has been so generous with its funding of this relatively obscure organization.

Alford is also an ardent opponent of the Employee Free Choice Act—no surprise, since he also sits on the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a leading EFCA opponent. He's been claiming that EFCA would harm African-American-owned businesses. His April op-ed for Roll Call on the issue of enabling workers to form unions is an example of how he is willing to use race to push an anti-labor agenda:

The Employee Free Choice Act would eliminate one of the most fundamental tenets of our democracy: the secret ballot. By eliminating the right to vote in private, workers would not only be deprived of the right to vote their conscience, but would also be more vulnerable to the intimidation and coercion tactics known to be used by
union organizers. ... African-Americans, in particular, have bitter memories of voter intimidation and have a responsibility to stand up against any proposition that will take away their democratic voting rights.

For a man who compares seeking to organize a union through a person-to-person card-check drive to the efforts of Southern segregationists to violently suppress the black vote, a complaint that Boxer citing a resolution by the NAACP on climate change in a climate change hearing is somehow "racial" and something that would "explode" is certainly audacious. Condescending, though, is more apt.

So let's be clear: Harry Alford does not speak for the African-American community. He does not speak for me. He speaks for a cabal of conservative obstructionists who are hell-bent on protecting the old order of oil companies being unaccountable to the environment, employers being unaccountable to their workers—and of African Americans who won't pimp for the interests of corporate America being kept in their place.

Chamber's Paid Expert: No Unions, No Minimum Wage Law Needed

Isaiah J. Poole — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:12:49 -0700

Restore the Middle Class with Employee Free Choice

Isaiah J. Poole — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:47:48 -0700

Kate Thomas

Kate Thomas2 — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:45:05 -0700

Freedom Of Association

Isaiah J. Poole — Sun, 31 May 2009 20:03:27 -0700

Economic Terrorism

Tula Connell — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 07:23:23 -0700

Corporate opponents of workers' freedom to form unions repeatedly have shown they are not interested in the welfare of their employees or any of the pseudo-lofty ideals they cite while fighting the Employee Free Choice Act.

Now, they've made clear they will do anything--even destroy jobs, communities and harm the U.S. economy--to ensure that more American workers do not have a voice on the job. (And this just in--they're now using Joe the Plumber as an anti-Employee Free Choice Act spokes-idiot. That guy can't seem to keep a job.)

In Wisconsin, a local economic development official in Eau Claire County said a project was derailed because of the proposed Employee Free Choice Act. According to today's Eau Claire Leader-Telegram, the unnamed project would have brought a

$50 million investment to Eau Claire County in the next five years, along with creating up to 800 full-time jobs, Brian Doudna, executive director of the Eau Claire Area Economic Development Corp., said in a news release Wednesday evening. Construction was expected to begin this year. The first employees were to begin work in early 2010, with about 100 new jobs being created. [snip]

'Proposed federal and state legislation, as shown by this company's decision, can impact location decisions and limit the private sector's ability to create quality jobs for Eau Claire area residents. This is especially disappointing given the condition of our current national, regional and local economies.'

Yo, Brian: What's 'disappointing' is the blackmail screaming out here. The threat by employers to destroy the community they theoretically are invested in just so those employers don't have to actually talk with workers across a bargaining table about what might make for a safe workplace, what they need to support their families and retire without working until they die.

That's bad enough. But here's the kicker:

Doudna said if the bill is approved, the project will not occur--at least not in the U.S.

Blackmail, big time. In short, U.S. corporations are saying: Give us unlimited control over the lives of our workers, or we'll go to another nation where 'human rights' is a dirty phrase and 'workers' rights' even worse.

The local Chamber of Commerce's response is to attack government.

Bob McCoy, president of the Eau Claire Area Chamber of Commerce, said the government essentially is stopping growth in the Chippewa Valley.

'I think it's one of those situations when the state starts trying to generate additional revenue or put certain criteria on business, it can reverse itself,' he said. 'There's a potential for the Employee Free Choice Act, and (businesses) can't afford those types of consequences.

Because the Wall Street way worked so well for us, huh, Bob?

There's a lot to be said about corporate greed fueling the opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act. But as the nation's $4 billion annual union-busting industry shows, more than money is involved. When corporations are willing to spend far more to fight unionization than they would spend on a unionized workforce, when they are willing to rip out the economic guts of the community--then something seriously is wrong with the culture of those who call the economic shots in this nation. Because the corporate threat screaming from Eau Claire is not just blackmail. It's anti-worker. Anti-you. Anti-me. Anti-American.

This is a crosspost from Firedoglake.

AIG Shows Why We Need the Employee Free Choice Act

Mike Elk — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 08:34:12 -0700

At first, it might seem a bit odd that Bank of America and Citigroup paid for a conference call to coordinate a campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act. Why would Bank of America and Citigroup be so interested in hosting efforts against a measure that would allow workers to more easily join unions, since unionization has traditionally had little appeal for financial service workers? As a union organizer, I've never heard of stockbrokers wanting to unionize.

The real interest big banks have in opposing unions and the Employee Free Choice Act lies in the unions' role in preventing corporate greed.

Unions are a countervailing force against corporate greed in a market that has proven incapable of regulating itself. One example is the 2003 dismissal of New York Stock Exchange Chairman Dick Grasso. CalPERS—the California Public Employees' Retirement System, the nation's largest pension fund with assets of over $200 billion dollars—raised red flags when it discovered that Grasso was going to receive a compensation package of nearly $140 million. The compensation package was designed for him by a board of representatives from NYSE-listed companies. Since Grasso was charged with regulating these companies, such a large compensation package represented a clear conflict of interest. Under the threat of pulling their investment out of NYSE-listed companies, CalPERS and other worker-run pension funds forced Grasso to step down as NYSE chairman. That was a major victory for workers and for market accountability.

Corporate greed has gone unchecked recently in part due to the decline of the labor movement. Is it a coincidence that union membership declined dramatically from 20 percent of the private sector workforce in 1980 to just over 7 percent in 2006 while CEO pay has increased from 42 times what the average worker made in 1980 to 364 in 2006? Unions demand an economy that works for all, not just those at the top, such as AIG executives. As William Greider, author of the Soul of Capitalism, told me, "Unions are an honest broker in the economy.”

Through pension and retirement funds, workers can fund companies that invest in communities and in green jobs, promote workers' rights and operate in a transparent manner; and penalize companies that don't. With over $6 trillion of workers' money in retirement plans, pension funds, profit-sharing and stock plans and union reserve funds, the money of workers' plays a large role in fueling the global economy. Through putting workers' representatives on the board of these funds, unions can make sure that "worker investments are managed in workers' best financial interests." By investing in transparent, open and financially healthy companies, unions through stockholder activism can lead the way in ending the culture of reckless corporate short-term profit-seeking, which led to the rise of subprime mortgages and credit-derivative swaps.

Unions have long sought ways to make corporate profits sustainable in the long run in order to both retain and create jobs. It is ironic that the United Auto Workers (UAW) has been unfairly scapegoated as the cause of the demise of the auto industry since, as early as 1949, they have called for the Big Three to make small, more fuel-efficient cars. In 1949, in a pamphlet entitled "A Small Car Named Desire," the UAW cautioned automakers against investing solely in big cars since some consumers would ultimately be interested in cheaper smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. In short, unions have also sought was is best for all— not just for workers, but creating the economic conditions that will allow their companies to thrive.

As President Obama stated, "We know that strong, vibrant, growing unions can exist side by side with strong, vibrant and growing businesses. This isn't a either/or proposition between the interests of workers and the interests of shareholders. That's the old argument. The new argument is that the American economy is not and has never been a zero-sum game. When workers are prospering, they buy products that make businesses prosper."

Indeed, passing the Wagner Act, which allowed unions to collectively bargain for higher wages, in 1935— during the middle of the Great Depression—was crucial to getting the economy going again.

The recent AIG scandal shows why we need an active force to protect us against the greed of Wall Street CEOs. Unions, representing the combined interests of everyday Americans, can be a valuable instrument in fighting for the interests of all, not just those at the top. By passing the Employee Free Choice Act, we would make it easier for workers to advocate for a union without facing the kind of employer intimidation that currently results in one of five workers who attempt to organize a union being fired from their job. The Employee Free Choice Act would not just protect the right of workers to join a union, but would protect us all from the corporate greed of AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup and the rest of their partners in crime.

Scare Tactic Recycled: Unionizing Kills Jobs

Isaiah J. Poole — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 07:27:05 -0800

Anti-labor forces this week are reprising an old argument about the Employee Free Choice Act: Making it easier for employees to join unions will cost employees their jobs.

The latest entry in this fusillade of propaganda comes from something called the Alliance to Save Main Street Jobs—an alliance that happens to include that bastion of "Main Street," the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The author, Anne Layne-Farrar of the consulting firm LECG, writes that "if EFCA passed today and resulted in an increase in unionization from the current rate of about 12% to 15% ... unemployment a year from now would rise by 1.5 million, to 10.4 million."

The report relies on conservative zero-sum logic. If you pay workers higher wages, as Layne-Farrar concedes will happen as unionization increases, employers will respond by displacing workers from the labor force. The author concludes this even though, on page 13 of her report, she also writes, "the literature offers conflicting results with respect to the impact of union density on inflation, employment and unemployment."

Nonetheless, Layne-Farrar won't let conflicting data get in the way of a good right-wing trope. So she wades into Canadian labor data from the 1980s and 1990s, where provinces have used both the card-check system sought in EFCA and the secret ballot that EFCA opponents say they support. She flatly concludes that the provinces where card-check campaigns successfully increased union membership saw higher unemployment.

Economics and statistics students, repeat after me: Correlation is not causation.

There is no evidence in her statistical romp through Canada of any analysis of disparate economic conditions across the provinces, or disparate mixes of types of industries, that would explain rises or falls in unemployment. Without that, an assessment of the impact of the effect of unionization on employment is meaningless.

We do know, however, one way in which unionization costs jobs: Employers firing workers who attempt to lead unionization campaigns.

That's illegal, but that has not stopped the number of union organizers who lost their jobs from increasing since 2000, according to a study released this week by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "The likelihood that a pro-union worker would be fired in a union-election campaign has jumped sharply—to about 1 in every 52 pro-union workers," the study said.

That estimate is drawn from National Labor Relations Board data on "discriminatory discharges." As the report notes:

While the NLRA makes it illegal for employers to fire workers involved in union-organizing campaigns, the penalties associated with “discriminatory discharges” are small: back pay for illegally fired workers minus any earnings that workers had after they were fired. Given these small penalties for illegal firings, the NLRA, in practice, has given employers a powerful anti-union strategy: fire one or more prominent pro-union employees—typically those most involved in organizing the union—with the hope of disrupting the internal workings of the union’s campaign, while intimidating the rest of the potential bargaining unit in advance of the NLRB-supervised election.

Here's the real battle. On one side is real workers on Main Street who are being fired for leading an effort to organize a union, and the millions of other workers who are being denied a chance to decide on their own whether they want the rights that a union would grant them. On the other side, employers who are making the usual threats that if they are compelled to bargain with employees over the terms of their employment, they will pack up their investment capital and take it elsewhere.

Many of these employers have proven their bad faith by bullying employees, and only now are they likely to be called into account now that the Bush Labor Department's wide, bend-over-for-business stance is being wiped aside. You can understand that they would be mad that their free ride on the backs of workers is coming close to an end, and so we need to recognize "studies" like the Layne-Farrar work for what they are—the angry lashing-out of a petulant business community whose anti-union toys are about to be taken away.

My First Week in Washington DC with SEIU

SEIU Member Voices — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 16:44:50 -0800

Note: Mike Kingsbury is a Grassroots Lobbyist through SEIU's Change That Works campaign. You can read more about the program here. Video included below.

I've always been impressed with our nation's capitol. The huge buildings, sweeping landscapes, and grand stone staircases - it's all so big, it makes me a little disoriented and, gulp, small.

But all those buildings are filled with people. And if there's anything I've learned as a nurse - people are people. We all eat and sleep and want to make the world a better place.

Still, it was good to show up at the SEIU building the first morning and feel like we belonged there - like we had a home base in DC. When you look at us, you know we are all workers: the real people who get the jobs done that make this country what it is. We are "regular" people.

That's why we're here - to be the kind of lobbyists and representatives who can cut through the BS and remind our elected senators and representatives that the decisions they make have consequences for hundreds of millions of "regular" people.

The first congressperson I visited was Betsy Markey, a newly elected representative from my home state of Colorado. About 14 workers from SEIU and the AFL-CIO went to talk with her about the Employee Free Choice Act. She was really happy to have us.

The part I loved, though, was when I talked about trying to organize and some of the struggles we had at our hospital. I shared stories I had heard from a couple other health care workers that'd tried to organize. Here was this very important person in this huge fancy office in WASHINGTON DC - and she was obviously swayed but what I said. When I finished, she was even trying to figure how she could co-sponsor the Employee Free Choice Act.

This week, I passed Betsy Markey in the hallway when I was back on Capitol Hill. She immediately recognized me and ran over to tell me some exciting news - she signed on as a co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act.

These experiences, and the excitement of a new president, inspire me. I see the window we have open for tilting things back towards workers and getting a better health care system rolling. I am here to push as far as we can for working people, and to meet and connect with people who are interested in doing that, too. I think this project will be longer and deeper than we can see now. Being with other people and knowing we aren't alone will be what keeps us all going.

From the nation's capitol,
Mike Kingsbury, RN

Mike Kingsbury is an RN hailing from Denver, Colorado. He is passionate about fighting for better patient care and healthcare reform, and believes the best way to face challenges is together--united--and not alone. Mike has been an active member of the Nurse Alliance of Colorado for many years and also worked with SEIU on the Obama campaign.

Left Behind: Employees of Small Employers and the Right to Unionize

Dmitri Iglitzin — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 08:21:47 -0800

Non-unionized musicians at a small Seattle-area symphony orchestra, the Bellevue Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO), have grown deeply dissatisfied with the way management treats them. Eighty percent signed a petition asserting their desire to join the Musicians' Association of Seattle, an affiliate of the American Federation of Musicians. As is typical of employers throughout the country, even when confronted with evidence of the overwhelming desire of their employees for union representation, the BPO has refused to agree to this request.

Under the proposed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), employers covered by federal law would be forced to recognize their employees’ preference to be represented by union based upon this type of written showing. The business community is adamantly opposed to this measure, considering it, as President-elect Barack Obama stated on January 15 of this year, “the devil incarnate.”

Ironically, because the BPO musicians work for an orchestra too small to be covered by federal labor law, they will be left without any protections even if EFCA passes. This is because workers who work for companies that are too small to meet a certain monetary threshold typically have no rights at all when it comes to seeking the right to select or create a union to represent them in negotiations with their employer.

In 1999, example, the 50 or so musicians who made up the orchestra portion of Seattle's Civic Light Opera (CLO), a musical theater company, also decided that they wanted to join the Musicians' Association. More than 80 percent of those musicians also signed authorization cards stating that desire.

They never got their union, however. Nor did they get to vote in an election on the issue. Because the primary federal labor law, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) excludes theater orchestras that have an annual revenue of less than $500,000, as well as symphony orchestras with an annual revenue of less than one million dollars, these employees had no legal right to either form or join a union.

So when the musicians of the CLO did what workers have always done when they have no other recourse—strike—they did so without any of the protections they would have had were they deemed employees protected by the NLRA. Their employer responded to this job action by firing all of the striking musicians, which was completely legal under both state and federal law. Not only did the musicians end up with no union—they ended up with no jobs.

This story is repeated daily in this state and country. It is not merely relatively small orchestras which avoid the obligations of the NLRA, but all small employers. According to a 2002 report from the United States General Accounting Office (GAO), about 5.5 million employees nationwide are excluded from the protections of the NLRA as a result of the “small employer” exception.

It's too soon to tell whether the BPO musicians, despite their lack of legal protections, will succeed in their efforts to be represented by the Musicians' Association. A bill has been introduced into the Washington State Legislature that would grant employees of symphony orchestras, operas, and performing arts theaters the rights they currently lack. Among other things, this bill would (like EFCA) require employers to grant union recognition to their employees based on “majority sign-up.” Again like EFCA, this bill’s future is uncertain.

Among the most important features of EFCA are its provisions that impose financial penalties on employers for firing pro-union employees, penalties that currently do not exist. Unless the proposed Washington law passes, however, the BPO musicians would not benefit from these protections. Even if the musicians were fired en masse for their efforts to form a union, as happened to their colleagues at the CLO, there would be no federal remedy for them.

Should that occur, it would undoubtedly be a disaster for the musicians, the orchestra, and the community. Beyond that, it would be yet another illustration of the abysmal state of labor law in this country, one which needs to be rectified through legislative changes at not only the federal level, through EFCA, but often at the state level, as well.