[Peace-discuss] right to association, right to a union
E. Wayne Johnson
ewj at pigs.ag
Sat Oct 25 01:55:53 CDT 2008
I have seen people who suffer from black lung and it's a tragic situation.
It's also tragic that the workers have had to organize themselves in an
antagonistic relationship
in order to accomplish change.
I am most certainly not anti-union but how far does pendulum need to
swing before its enough?
Marti Wilkinson wrote:
> 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
> <mailto: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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