[Peace-discuss] right to association, right to a union
E. Wayne Johnson
ewj at pigs.ag
Sat Oct 25 00:37:35 CDT 2008
Ricky,
I don't have any workers. Its just my wife and I, but if I were
employing someone I would want them to wear the sort of
socks that I told them to, and I would like to be able to fire them
simply because I didnt like their attitude, and I would not
desire the hassle of being second-guessed by some 3rd party for my
management decision.
If they work for me, they are there to do a job and if they wont or cant
do it then I don't need them around.
It sounds like to me that this law you favour aims at putting the
workers in charge of the production. That might
be ok provided that its their business to begin with, meaning that they
provided the innovation, management and
sweat to get the thing going. Quite frankly most of the workers are
incapable of doing that, otherwise they would be
working for themselves in their own shop rather than punching the clock
for someone else. I don't mean that
to sound belittling or deprecating of others.
I have been self employed most but not all of my adult life. I started
driving a tractor on the farm at age 9. I worked in
the oil field as a roughneck beginning at age 13. It was dangerous work
but it paid good and I made enough
money to buy some cows that along with working oil field in summers I
was able to get through college and get
a DVM degree in 1980. After that I had my own business in the
countryside for fifteen years. I have had an
few employees in the office at times. It's a hassle having employees.
I went to China in 1996 and worked a few years for the Chinese
government for $250 (two hundred and fifty dollars) per month. It cost
me about half of that
for my housing. I lived exactly as the Chinese live, ate what they eat,
did what they did, washed my clothes by hand. We worked 7 days a week
most of the time,
we worked on Christmas day like it was just another day (but I met my
wife the first time working on one Christmas day)
and we frequently worked through the night. No one ever complained
about work. No one ever complained that they were cold.
Nobody complained that they didnt have any money. Lots of times I had
to dig through my desk to find enough money
to buy breakfast (it cost about a quarter). We did have some fun
describing in eloquent terms how hot it was. It got up to 45C (113F) in
the summer of 1997. Nobody
laid down their work and went home. We were excited about the work that
we were doing and that was enough most of the
time. If you got sick, you went to the hospital and they gave you a
combination of herbal and Western medicine
and you got over it. I had a root canal without anaesthesia. The pain
was brief but very intense.
After I got married, I did need a better job so I quit the ministry of
agriculture and got a consulting job.
I do understand hard work and labour and poverty, and although at times
my poverty might have been
somewhat voluntary, there were times when it most certainly was not.
The coal mines in southern Illinois were unionized. The workers were on
strike almost more often
than they were employed. Finally the coal mines were shut down and the
workers either moved away
or got jobs in the prisons.
I really dont know anything much else about unions or union workers
except when I worked for the
University of Illinois in 2001 to 2004 and the farms were unionized.
The university farms had cows dying because
the workers didnt know what the they were doing, er...they needed more
training, and they didnt care and the department heads at the university
didnt
dare fire them. From what I have seen it doesnt appear that unions are
compatible with agriculture.
From my perspective it looks like excessive regulation and excessive
pressure from unions is driving business out of Illinois
and out of the United States. I have visited Canada. It's a real nice
place except that there are so many Canadians there.
If employers are good, they will take good care of their workers. I
work for some farms who have had the same workers employed there
for more than 20 years. The manager of the farms treat them like they
are members of the family.
On the other hand, I have worked for people who are abusive of workers
and they typically don't get very good results.
I do have sympathy for everyone in those situations.
I do think that all workers are employed by will, and that it is the
right of the worker to quit and the right of the employer to fire.
If your proposed law is aimed at destroying that relationship, you will
just export more jobs to places where a more satisfactory
production environment exists and further damage the US economy.
Please explain the law you propose more clearly if I have missed something.
It looks like to me from the research I have done that this bill has
passed the House but got hung up in
the Senate.
Ricky Baldwin wrote:
>
> Hey folks,
>
>
> Not sure who’s doing AWARE’s agenda for Sunday meetings these days,
> but I’d like to put an endorsement request out for discussion. It’s
> from Jobs With Justice, to which AWARE belongs, and which was
> instrumental in starting US Labor Against the War.
>
>
>
> Jobs With Justice and many other organizations are currently pushing –
> and trying to collect a million postcards in support of – national
> legislation to protect an important right of association that has
> been under severe assault because it threatens the steep American
> gradient of power between employer and employee: a workers’ right to
> join with his or her co-workers in a union. The bill is called the
> “Employee Free Choice Act,” and it’s nothing to sneeze at.
>
>
>
> Since 1935, in response to mass uprisings of workers – many of them
> thrown out of work in the Great Depression – the US Congress enacted
> and the President signed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), also
> known as the “Wagner Act,” establishing the right to form, join and
> participate in unions as the official policy of the US government. It
> was a compromise, enacted to stave off a feared revolution of the type
> that other countries had experienced, notably in 1848 and 1917-1925.
> It did not cover everyone. It specifically excluded large classes of
> workers – agricultural and domestic workers, both much more numerous
> than today – mainly as a means of cutting out Southern blacks and poor
> whites from the New Deal.
>
>
>
> But in the wake of passage, union membership increased in the US to
> over 30 percent, raising the overall standards of wages, safety on the
> job, etc., even for non-union workers. Union-sponsored legislation,
> like the OSHA Act in 1970 – which has saved thousands of workers’
> lives even with its faults, began improving the lives of all workers.
> But it was no panacea, and it was certainly not invulnerable to attack
> from anti-worker forces.
>
>
>
> The Wagner Act and its many “reforms” added afterwards, when the
> threat of revolution had cooled, also took the US down a different
> path than other industrialized nations have taken. There are two
> legal doctrines concerning workers that most Americans have never
> heard of, and not because they slept through high school social
> studies classes. One is called the “master-servant” relationship,
> which basically says if your employer orders you to do something, you
> have to do it (with some minor limitations, obviously, for illegal
> activity, etc.) or you could be disciplined or fired – there are few
> exceptions, including civil service regulations for some public
> employees, and union contracts.
>
>
>
> Second, workers who are unrepresented by a union are “employed at
> will,” meaning they can be fired “at any time for any reason or no
> reason.” Obviously there are a few legal restrictions there, too:
> racial, sexual or religious discrimination, etc. Can you be fired
> even if you did nothing wrong? Absolutely. For voting Democrat or
> Republican or Green? If you’re not a public employee and you don’t
> have a union, absolutely. You can be fired because you wear socks the
> boss doesn’t like. You can be fired just because. Does this really
> happen? Yep - the relative operation of the employers' "economic
> interest" can be debated, but it happens - and there is nothing
> illegal about it – at least not in this country.
>
>
>
> Workers in the US who are eligible for union rights and who wish to
> take full advantage of union protections can’t just sign up and BANG
> they get union rights. No, workers in the US have to win an election
> process – one in which workers could be prohibited from union
> organizing on the job, union organizers could be barred from the
> premises entirely, and employers and managers were permitted to hold
> “captive audience” meetings to slander the union and threaten mass
> layoffs or plant closings. Employers and managers also frequently
> call individuals into the office for a nice, quiet, intimidating
> “chat,” one on one. Employers frequently fire the ringleaders if they
> can identify them, even though this is illegal (it’s hard to prove),
> and hire union-busting law firms to run intimidation campaigns, spy on
> workers, spread rumors and sew any kind of dissent they can think of.
>
>
>
> Employers may also hire new employees – such as family members – who
> they know to oppose unionization, or to whom they can promise the
> moon, and thus dilute the vote. They may also declare that certain
> employees are “supervisors” and thus ineligible to vote, and so on.
>
>
>
> Penalties for employer misbehavior are woefully inadequate: often the
> sentence is posting a notice in the workplace stating that the
> employer has violated such and such provision, blah, blah, blah.
> Penalties for the workers and their unions who violate guidelines, on
> the other hand, can amount to one of the worst things that can happen,
> besides being fired and having a pay cut: they lose their right to a
> union.
>
>
>
> Even if the workers win a union election, employers may keep them tied
> up in court for years afterwards or may refuse to bargain a fair
> contract. According to the law, if the union cannot win a contract
> with the employer there could be another election to get rid of
> unionization, and under the oppressive circumstances that prevail the
> disgruntled employees may change their votes (if they are even the
> same workers – employers often use this time to drive off the strong
> union supporters).
>
>
>
> So what does the Employee Free Choice Act do about all this? It
> doesn’t address all of it. There are a lot of things I’d like to see
> fixed in labor law, primarily who’s eligible. But one thing it does
> establish is a right that Canadians, for example, take for granted.
> If more than half the workers at a workplace want a union, they get
> it. Period. They sign a card or petition and it’s done. If they
> don’t want a long drawn-out expensive election, rife with intimidation
> and legal battles, they don’t have to have to do it that way.
>
>
>
> The bill would also strengthen penalties on employers who coerce their
> employees or otherwise violate their right to join a union. And it
> establishes a mediation and arbitration if workers and their employer
> cannot agree on a first contract. But the main provision is
> establishing the much beleaguered right to unionization in the first
> place, and employers are already fighting tooth and nail to block this
> bill. That says something, right there.
>
>
>
> AWARE can help by endorsing this campaign. It costs no money, just a
> decision. And I’ll bring postcards for anyone who’d like to sign
> one. Thanks.
>
>
>
> Ricky
>
>
>
>
>
> "Only those who do nothing make no mistakes." - Peter Kropotkin
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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>
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