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

[Robert Naiman]

I find it kind of bizarre that because I want to guarantee the rights
of workers to organize you basically call me un-American and tell me
to leave the country. It's not unprecedented, but I didn't expect it
on this list.



On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 8:37 AM, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag> wrote:
> It's pretty easy to get Canadian citizenship, Bob.
>
> One thing a person can always do it vote with their feet.  I
> did that in '96 and it was the right thing to do.  One can always
> question why it was that I came back here, though.  :-)
> But the reasons seem to have been valid for returning to the US.
>
> It is not desirable to have a culturally uniform world or even a culturally
> uniform USA
> or even a culturally uniform Illinois, Champaign County, or Urbana for that
> matter.
>
> The United States are sovereign states.  Remember the 10th amendment.
>
> Of course Canada is going to be a lot more like Europe than we are  here and
> that is a good thing.
> The canadians still have the Queen on their money.  Canada is a much
> different country
> than we are and comparing us to Canada and saying that they are right and we
> are wrong
> ought to be pretty damn offensive to any American.
>
> Under our constitution if the people in Massachusetts want to smoke Catalpa
> beans and
> barbecue guinea pigs, tom cats and canaries, thats cool with me and they
> have every right to do so, and
> we ought not be pushing the federal government to stop them from it if we
> dont like it.
>
> If Venezuela chooses to be governed by a wise and benevolent dictator that
> is no concern of mine.
>
> It's the whole idea of one group trying to impose their will by force upon
> another, when that group is in a
> sovereign state that is fundamentally wrong.  It's the thing that MLK warned
> America about in regard
> to being arrogant.
> *
> We do need to return to the rule of law and enforce the laws that we have
> within our borders
> rather than trying to police the world.
>
>
>
> Robert Naiman wrote:
>
> The relationship is already antagonistic, in the sense that the two
> groups have different interests; what's tragic is that one side has
> almost all the power, which is a recipe for abuse. Having a union
> helps equalize things a little.
>
> The most straightforward way to measure the pendulum is to compare the
> U.S. to Canada and Western Europe. The U.S. is the outlier in terms of
> its labor relations, its fundamental failure to respect workers basic
> rights.
>
> Speaking about miners: remember recent U.S. mine "accidents", and the
> workers who died, and of course it was revealed in each case that
> there were massive safety violations. Around the same time, there was
> a mining accident in Canada. Only, in Canada, they have the safety
> features that the US owners are too cheap to comply with: a sealed
> room with oxygen, etc, and the oxygen is actually there. So they bring
> out the Canadian miners a day later, and they're joking about how they
> had the day off and played cards; they were never in any danger.
> That's what being a worker in an industrialized democracy is like,
> when you have strong unions.
>
> On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 1:55 AM, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag> wrote:
>
>
> 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> 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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-- 
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org

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