President Biden in April signed an executive order creating a task force to examine existing policies regarding labor unions and issue a series of recommendations within 180 days on how they can be leveraged to promote worker organizing and collective bargaining in the federal government and recommend what new policies should be created.
In the wake of the defeat of the drive to unionize Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, many theories are being advanced on why the union lost and what labor’s strategy should be in the future. One such theory appeared recently in The American Prospect by its editor at large, Harold Meyerson.
Meyerson contends that there has been a shift in the composition of the American working class. The ability of unionize workers, he says, depends upon their applicability.
“Blue-collar and low-paid service sector workers fear being discharged, harassed, or downgraded by management, or even having their workplace closed, for supporting unionization,” writes Meyerson, “even though many such management threats violate federal labor law. (The penalties for such violations, however, are altogether negligible.) Professionals, by contrast, usually know that management would have trouble finding and training their replacements, and that they have a decent chance of finding comparable jobs elsewhere.
He points to recent events at The New York Times where a majority of the 650 tech workers had formed a union under the aegis of the News Guild of New York, an affiliate of the Communications Workers of America. Times reporters, editors, photographers are already unionized. These tech workers include engineers, project managers, designers, quality assurance staffers, and data scientists and analysts.
On the other hand, “successful unionization campaigns among blue-collar workers have been few and far between” although they have suffered the most exploitation and the ones who need the protection of unions the most.
Meyerson points to one remedy – passage of the PRO Act which would deter management from retaliating against blue collar workers who try to form unions.
When a big company wants to get rid of a union or prevent one from organizing, they don’t often do it by themselves. They hire a specialist. Law firms and consulting firms that earn fancy fees for skirting around the weak labor laws are readily available and they’ve been doing a great job at union busting. In large measure, they have been instrumental in the decline of labor unions over the past several decades. Aided by weak requirements for federal reporting, data on this service is spotty but researchers at Cornell University estimate that some 75 percent of US employers are paying in the neighborhood of $340 million annually for their services.
Three of the biggest law firms that do this work are Littler Mendelson, Ogletree Deakins and Jackson Lewis. Consultants such as IRI Consultants and the Labor Relations Institute are also very skilled at union avoidance. IRI even used to offer a “money-back guarantee” if its efforts were unsuccessful.
IKEA, the furniture manufacturer, hired Ogletree Deakins to help it crush unionization efforts in Stoughton, Massachusetts, in 2016. Google hired IRI Consultants, to deal with attempts to organize its work force.
The pockets of these firms are jingling from the work they do in keeping workers from organizing for better pay and working conditions
— The Conversation (8/24/20)
LABOR DEMANDS: PASS THE PRO ACT
A number of labor leaders, in a call to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, have made it clear to the party’s US Senators that their support of the PREO Act is crucial to union support and financial contributions to their campaigns for re-election. The act, passed by the House of Representatives, currently has 47 sponsors in the Senate, all Democrats. There are only three Democratic holdouts, Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Mark Warner of Virginia. Of the three, only Kelly is up or re-election in 2020. A fourth, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, is not a sponsor, but has indicated he supports the bill.
The Protecting the Right to Organize Act has long been a goal of organized labor. It overhauls current labor laws by, among other things:
The Pro Act was a key provision on President Biden’s agenda in his campaign for president last year.
In other actions, members of the building trades unions rallied in front of Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer’s Manhattan offices on Saturday, May 1, part of a week of more than 700 events calling on the Senate to pass the bill. “This is not a rally against Schumer. It’s in support of the PRO Act,” said Freddy Bastone of Building Trades for Workers Democracy. “Schumer says he’s going to push this. We want to make sure it happens.” And the AFL-CIO reported that it was spending an amount in the seven figures on TV and media ads targeting senators in states with significant union memberships to support the bill.
— Dave Jamieson in Huffington Post (4/28/21), Eleanor Mueller & Holly Otterbein in Politico, (4/22/21)
