[Peace-discuss] right to association, right to a union

[Marti Wilkinson]

My father used to be a union representative when he worked for the State of
Illinois and some of the grievances brought before him often had to do with
petty behavior from managers,supervisors, and other employees.  My mother
helped unionize employees at Parkland College several years ago and
participated in contract negotiations.

In many organizations office politics are an unavoidable part of the
professional landscape and unions are able to protect individuals who are
unfairly targeted. A well run union structure does not prevent a bad
employee from getting fired, but does allow the individual due process.
Often what gets negotiated are things such as pay scales, benefits, and
eliminating health and safety risks to employees in contract procedures.
This is in addition to the due process I mentioned.

For instance, my father handled a grievance from a woman who was being
harassed by her co-workers. When he investigated the people who were bugging
this woman claimed that she was not getting her work done and her
performance was dismal. So he calculated the caseloads being handled by the
complaining employee and her accusers and found that she actually had a
higher level of productivity than the individuals who were attempting to
create trouble for her. Needless to say when he presented his findings it
shut a few people up.

It's interesting that the example of coal minors are brought up here.  One
of the reasons why unions formed for coal minors was to force industry to do
a better job of safeguarding the well being of employees. How many coal
minors have died due to the mine caving in or from poor air quality?  One of
my uncles worked in the coal mines in Southern Illinois and, amongst his
list of health problems, he suffers from black lung as a direct result of
his work in the mines.

The unfortunate truth is that employers cannot be counted on to provide safe
working conditions, fair wages, and reasonable benefits simply out of the
kindness of their heart. Even though research can be presented to them which
shows a correlation between productivity and working conditions - the truth
is many employers only pay lip service to the research.  Their goal is to
get the maximum profit with the least amount of effort.

Employee welfare often does not become a concern until it hits the employer
in the pocketbook. For instance Mitsubishi had to pay 34 million in damages
after a class action lawsuit was brought against them due to sexual
harassment.  More recently Starbucks has faced lawsuits due to their
practice of having  baristas share tips with shift supervisors. A well
organized union not only protects employees, but it can also save the
employers millions of dollars in legal fees.

Marti



On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 12:37 AM, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag> wrote:

>  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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