 Strikers face off against cops protecting bosses’ property. Here, San Francisco hotel workers, 2004. Photo: Bill Hackwell |
let me tell you what to do;
You got to talk to the workers
in the shop with you;
You got to build you a union,
got to make it strong,
But if you all stick together,
no ‘twont be long …”
-Talking Union by Pete Seeger (1941)
Folk singer Pete Seeger’s lyrics provided inspiration to thousands of workers who wanted to join unions in the 1940s and 1950s. Union organizing has always been a difficult task. Owners are spending billions to smash organizing drives and keep unions out. Although organized labor has channeled more money than ever into organizing, union membership is lower than it has been for more than 50 years.
The difficulties of union organizing are emblematic of the challenges facing the labor movement today. These troubles are exacerbated by other capitalist-induced economic and anti-union political pressures. Workers’ wages are declining and unemployment is increasing while corporate profits skyrocket.
Both Wall Street and the U.S. government tell us that the economy is in recovery, yet more than 3.4 million jobs have disappeared in the past four years alone. Many of these jobs have been rendered obsolete by technological advances. Others, mostly manufacturing jobs, have been outsourced to countries where wages are lower and labor laws more permissive.
The few jobs created have been primarily low wage, temporary or part-time. The success of Manpower, Inc., one of the largest employers in the nation, is a prime example. Manpower reaps some $2.1 billion in gross profits each year by providing hundreds of thousands of temporary employees to companies in the U.S. and 66 other countries.
Employers are on the offensive against workers in the U.S. Unions at the bargaining table are threatened with plant closures or outsourcing or subcontracting work unless they take deep concessions on wages and badly needed benefits. Non-union workers fare worse. They are often fired and replaced by temporary workers or have their health care, pensions and other benefits eliminated by the owners.
Toothless and unenforced labor laws provide few means to help workers fight back using the courts. Government-directed anti-worker campaigns, like Reagan’s 1981 crushing of the PATCO strike and the NAFTA treaty pushed through Congress by Clinton, further fuel the concerted assault on worker’s rights.
The right of workers to organize a union is under severe attack and has been for decades. The percent of workers in unions reached its height in 1953 at 32.5 percent of the workforce; by the fall of 2004, unions represented only 12 percent of the non-farm labor force and 8 percent of workers in the private sector. Labor’s power has been eroded by plant closings in once powerful union states like Ohio and Michigan and by mass downsizing throughout the country.
Workers want unions, face barriers
These statistics do not signal that workers are unwilling to join unions. Organized labor currently provides the only class-wide organization for the working class within U.S. capitalist society. It was built up by the blood and sacrifice of generations of workers.
Despite its numerical decline in recent years, organized labor still represents more than 13 million members, many of whom are recent immigrants and women. A recent poll found that more than 42 million nonunion workers in the U.S. want to join a union. (IBEW, “Union Busting Business is Booming,” Nov. 7, 2003) If the labor movement wants to step up organizing efforts and millions of workers want union representation, why aren’t more workers joining unions?
When workers in the U.S. try to organize unions, they face systematic employer opposition, both legal and illegal, to intimidate pro-union workers. Corporations routinely coerce, manipulate, harass, threaten and abuse workers once an organizing campaign begins. One-fourth of private-sector employers illegally fire at least one worker for union activity to set an example for other union supporters. (Kate Bronfenbrenner, “Uneasy Terrain: The Impact of Capital Mobility on Workers, Wages and Union Organizing,” U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission, 2000) Those fired are usually militant pro-union activists and leaders in the campaign.
Employers spend millions of dollars to wage these vicious anti-union campaigns. They force employees to attend anti-union meetings where bosses argue against the union-both plant wide and one-on-one meetings in 92 percent of organizing campaigns. In 51 percent of organizing drives, employers threaten to close the plant if the union wins. That figure jumps to 71 percent in organizing manufacturing plants. They call in federal immigration agents in 52 percent of campaigns involving undocumented workers. They hire union busting firms and lawyers for up to $1,500 per day in 75 percent of union drives. (America@Work, Jan. 7)
Union busting is big business
The union busting business is booming. Professional union busters are paid by owners to prevent employees from forming a union or, if a union already exists, to make it impossible for the union to negotiate a contract by creating a climate of fear and intimidation.
Anti-union firms, lawyers and consultants work with corporations to break the law and intimidate workers to kill union organizing campaigns. “This is a billion dollar a year industry that just preys on employees. Companies are willing to do anything it takes to suppress organizing campaigns,” said electrical worker union representative Steve Moulin.
Some union busters resort to violence or threats to derail union organizing efforts with tactics like those used by the infamous Pinkerton Agency during the early days of industrial capitalism. Pinkerton, founded in 1850, provided 300 scabs for steel magnate Andrew Carnegie to break the Homestead strike of 1892.
Rueben Cepeda, a worker fired in 2003 for union organizing at a company called Chef Solutions (owned by Lufthansa), was set to testify against the company when a man appeared at his home, brandished a gun, and threatened him and his family. “He said that if I wanted to keep living and if I loved my daughter and my wife, I better control myself. Because if you don’t you’re gonna die,” he recalls. (Jonathan Tasini, TomPaine.com, Oct. 10, 2003) Threats of violence are illegal, but the law does little to punish companies that engage in this behavior.
Nowadays, union busters mostly inflict pain with psychological warfare aimed at creating a chaotic workplace atmosphere and dragging out conflict as long as possible. The rallying cry of union busters is “delay, deceive, divide.” (Martin Levitt, Confessions of a Union Buster, 1993)
Firms like the Labor Relations Institute, Wackenhut, the Kullman Firm, the Fishman Group, Seyfarth Shaw, and Littler Mendelson are hired guns for corporate interests. They are paid handsomely to wage war on workers and keep unions out at all costs. Though their tactics are not always violent, they are just as repugnant and anti-worker.
Fred’s Inc., a company that runs 500 low-cost department stores, hired the Kullman Firm to defeat workers at its distribution center in Memphis. Shortly thereafter, the women’s bathrooms were not properly stocked; workers were barred from using the company dining area and prohibited from drinking water at their workstations; and they were forced to watch an anti-union video.
At the Mandarin-language Chinese Daily News in Los Angeles, 95 percent of the employees supported joining CWA, the communication workers union, in 2000 when the owners threatened wage freezes on the mostly Asian and Pacific Islander workforce. Management, guided by union-busting consultants, then launched a fierce anti-union campaign, interrogating workers one-on-one in the middle of the night and red-baiting the union.
Sometimes the government busts the union without private assistance. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 stripped 170,000 federal workers of union rights and Civil Service protections. Owners and the government share common interests in keeping the working class weak and divided.
 Photo: Bill Hackwell |
The workers at Fred’s Inc. and Chinese Daily News ultimately beat back the union busters by overwhelmingly voting to join a union. Since then, however, the owners have tied up union certification for years by objecting to the National Labor Relations Board, the U.S. government agency charged with enforcing labor laws.
Congress passed the Wagner Act in 1935 (also known as the National Labor Relations Act). It created the NLRB and established a set of federal labor laws to ensure the right of private sector workers to unionize and to regulate a comprehensive collective bargaining system between owners and the workers. The Wagner Act also made illegal as “unfair labor practices” most activities of violent union busters like Pinkerton.
The Wagner Act was not the first labor legislation addressing union rights passed in the U.S. The Clayton Act of 1914 said labor unions did not violate antitrust laws. But it wasn’t until the Great Depression and the corresponding upsurge of the 1930s that workers were able to win the protections of the Norris-LaGuardia Act (1932, signed by Herbert Hoover), which gave unions the right to organize and strike without fear of injunction.
In 1933, Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act declared the right of employees to form unions and bargain collectively without employer interference. The Wagner Act was signed on July 5, 1935, after the NRA was declared unconstitutional. It passed in the wake of three massive general strikes across the U.S. in 1934: in San Francisco, Toledo and Minneapolis. Then-president Roosevelt and the bourgeoisie saw the Act as necessary to quell a potential revolutionary upsurge in the working class and preserve U.S. capitalism.
Although the Wagner Act promised more workers’ rights, it also diffused the struggle by shifting union power from strikes to elections and collective bargaining negotiations. The Wagner Act’s policy of collective bargaining for labor contracts does not compel employers to reach an agreement with unions. It only requires them to bargain in “good faith” with union officials. Thus, economically dominant owners can derail negotiations or leverage unions into accepting bad contracts as long as they bargain in “good faith.”
Union organizing, however, did improve for a time after the implementation of the Wagner Act. Workers took advantage of their codified right to organize and started industrial organizing drives that unionized millions of workers in the late 1930s.
Since the organizing wave of the 1930s, workers rights have been steadily rolled back, most of the damage coming at the hands of the NLRB and the courts. Labor laws are not enforced and are manipulated by owners. The law contains no meaningful remedies or penalties to stop employers from breaking the laws, which they do on a regular basis.
For example, when workers are fired during a union organizing campaign, their only remedy is to file an unfair labor practice with the NLRB. The most they can hope to achieve by this is reinstatement and back pay (that is, payment for the time they would have worked had they not been fired illegally) and nothing more. Even if they ultimately prevail, the appeals process can take years, giving the owners ample time to fire each pro-union worker and effectively kill the organizing campaign.
The current NLRB follows the rules created by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Labor Act, which further limited unions’ power by limiting the right to strike or carry out boycotts.
The complicated scheme of labor laws gives owners the opportunity to delay the certification of a union as the workers’ representative after the workers vote for the union. This happened in the Fred’s Inc. and Chinese Daily News campaigns, which are only two of many where owners used the legal mechanisms to turn the process into a “meat grinder” for workers who want a union.
Action, not reform
Most progressives agree that U.S. labor laws are unfairly stacked against workers. Many propose to reform current labor laws to make them fairer for workers. But this obscures the fact that in capitalist society, laws are designed to protect corporate property and the right to earn profits. The bosses never let workers organize freely unless the workers demand it through action as they did in the 1930s. Laws that are more favorable to workers have only been won through job actions and strikes.
Unions strike less frequently than they have in the past. The strength of transnational corporations, combined with the erosion of labor laws and the declining percentage of workers in unions, has had an effect on union action. Yet, workers have shown time and time again that they are not afraid to fight capitalist greed.
Four thousand hotel workers in San Francisco initiated a two-week strike in September 2004 against transnational hotel chains to save health care and other benefits. After the strike, the hotels locked them out and kept them from returning to work. The response of the workers was swift and strong. The workers represented by UNITE HERE Local 2 have kept 24-hour picket lines outside of 14 of San Francisco’s high-end hotels.
Hotel workers in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., are also fighting for a decent contract. They have held militant rallies and engaged in mass civil disobedience to display their strength to the hotel owners.
Unions like UNITE HERE, the Service Employees and others are fighting to increase labor’s power. The workers they represent are primarily service sector employees, mostly immigrants-a reflection of the changing character of the U.S. working class. They are on the front lines of strikes and organizing campaigns across the country.
Winning the hotel workers’ struggles will be difficult. But a victory will give encouragement to millions of workers-organized and unorganized-and prepare them for tough labor battles that are sure to come.
