The strange thing is how many workers implicitly side with management in their thinking. Do junior lawyers think they aren't employees just because they make a lot of money? Do they think that working 80 hours a week is something they should submit to and thus they don't need the power of organization to deal with such abuses? How about health care workers or IT workers?

The greatest con job over the past 50 years was to get white collar professionals to think of themselves as above it all in labor issues. Funny that college professors, sports and entertainment figures aren't so misguided.

Unions need to find a new mode of support so that they provide people who have a degree of independence in their jobs with services. We have moved beyond the concerns of the assembly line worker and unions have yet to adapt.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

Nathan, your singling out Howards story as delusional is offensive. When we meander struggle through the workplace and a group of people gang up on you to intimidate you, whether its management or a Union, its uncomfortable. It doesn't help to have someone like you come along and belittle it.

Sure, Unions intimidation has no equivelence. Right.

So my boss asked me out to lunch the other day,...

You wrote: "...One-on-one meetings with management where attendance is mandatory UNDER THREAT OF BEING FIRED;..."

OOOOHHH NOOOO!!!

Unions have never threatened anybody. Thats a nice little house you got there Howard, I'd hate for something to happen to it. Howard slipped in the warehouse and broke both kneecaps. Howard hasn't shown up for work for a few days, no one knows where he is, but he was seen down by the cement plant.

Unions have not been the angels you point them out to be. Belittling Howards personal experience, is an attempt at intmidation by you, and I think it is offensive.

Here's the difference-- an NLRB election is a target date around which the employer plans its terrorism, knowing that the election date is an all-or-nothing decision time, so it can strategically fire people or make threats just before the election date, knowing the union will have no time to recover by the date of the election.  Once an NLRB election happens, you don't get another shot for another year. 

Cards recognizing a union can be collected over a period of time.  Conversations can happen, fears addressed and a terrorism campaign by an employer can set back organizing for a few weeks, but there is no final election date that shuts down the process.  Since unions have such limited access to employees, it gives them the chance to build support person-by-person, which makes all the difference in the world.

As for union threats of retaliation, there are industries where the unions have some influence of individual workers advancement (some building trades for example), but not very many at all.   This is my point-- unions don't really have real control over individual union members lives, so all they have to offer is the positive gain from group advancement through collective bargaining.  Which often fails in the face of the individual threats made by employers under the NLRB process.

If your experience was in public employment situations, civil service protections often prevent much of the worst employer behavior that private employees suffer.  Which is one reason public employees are organized at such a higher percentage rate.

You make good points. In my case, I don't think it was a total sellout, as a civil servant, to want to get my job done. The threat of making my work more difficult probably was the most counterproductive that could have been made, as opposed to, say, better recognition and compensation for projects that really did take long hours. In my case, there just wasn't much getting around the issue that I had to meet with users, to determine their needs, during regular hours, but had to test the solutions when the users weren't on the computers.

At the time, the usual IT person in the organization was, for a comparable level of experience, two grades higher than a professional librarian. Was that a market issue, or was it partially a means of compensating longer hours? That would have been a legitimate issue, I believe, for the union to discuss.

Since the librarians and the IT people were in the same bargaining unit, creative organization could have improved a sense of fairness, and also made our daily work easier and more flexible. I remember a time when I utterly shocked some of the librarians by asking to learn about some specialized cataloging techniques. They had assumed that IT people were simply contemptuous of their work, and that attitude had fed back, badly. Could a union have helped us talk to one another?

TJ, yes, I don't see how Nathan is answering questions by calling them delusional. Perhaps I missed his training in mental health? It doesn't seem to be in his bio. If calling questions delusions is organizing, I'd hate to see chaos.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

I'm not belittling Howard but condemning his use of language as delusional

Just as the whole unions as breaking knees stereotype is largely delusional, but incredibly uncommon.  Show me the list of indictments?  There are documented cases of 20,000 workers a year being illegally punished by employers for union activity at the NLRB EACH YEAR.    Not fantasy, not stereotype, but legally documented cases of employer abuse.

On the union side, you have a few examples of real abuses, mostly in industries that are already mired in deep illegal activity already, so any abuses by union members is just part of a broader pattern of illegal activity.   But that's a miniscule part of unionized industries.  And you can't point to any serious number of them to match the 20,000 cases of employer abuse and intimidation every year.

Most union members are teachers or autoworkers or janitors or nurses-- and you just don't have many examples of them physically threatening anyone to get a union card.

Have I disagreed that management abuses take place? No.

To take your example of Connie McMillan, could you clarify what you mean by "union cards"? Are these different than "checkoff cards"? If not, how does banning secret ballots and allowing checkoff cards help union-busting, since this seems to be anti-union action where checkoff cards are used?

People have every right to belong to a union. I'm just mystified about the checkoff card being used as a mantra, when it appears the problem is more intimidation that the NLRB doesn't stop.

Again, I am hearing problems that were quite different than mine. Was the union, thus irrelevant to my working environment?
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Just to provide equal opportunity offense, I've had very different experience with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) when it came to flexibility. My closest CWA association was before and during the Bell System breakup.

I was involved in building a network control center, ironically at the US Department of Labor, which was the first non-national-security user facility that could test the telephone-line side of Bell modems. When we started planning, we had both engineering and craft involvement from C&P Telephone (now Verizon). The shop steward told me he regarded it as a training opportunity, and assigned two very good technicians, who we treated as part of the team. I was fairly sure we had "arrived" when I was given the direct number in dispatch of the shop steward. I was sure the day that I told him a problem, gave him a diagnosis based on tools that only craft was officially supposed to use, and he told me that he didn't have a technician available for a while, but if he sent a courier with the part, would I mind replacing it?

In contrast, when I was giving networking seminars in New York hotels, and was involved in network trade shows in a number of major city convention centers, it was more the rule than the exception that we fought with the electricians. They would literally come in and disconnect power strips they had not installed, often damaging equipment. They sometimes ripped out our LAN cabling, claiming installing it was their work, but they wouldn't take any input on how to do it, even when it was brand-new technology we were first exhibiting, and they couldn't possibly know how to set up. More often than not, even fairly routine cabling, when they did do it, didn't work.

One colleague did get cooperation when he set up a formal race, with prizes, before one of the shows. The deal was that if the engineers could get their side working faster, the union would still get paid, but wouldn't interfere and would watch with the intention of learning.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

As noted, the law covering government employees is completely different from NLRA rules covering private employees.  So EFCA is by definition not trying to address issues faced by public employees, which are different.  In some case, public employees have fewer labor rights, often lacking the right to strike -- which is why you may have people threatening work-to-rule actions as their only legal resource.  But since they usually have civil service protections, they don't usually face the same kind of employer terrorism and threats.

EFCA is designed to deal with the 20,000 private sector employees fired or otherwise retaliated against for exercising their rights under the law.  Card check agreements have a documented history of lessening those abuses and increasing labor rights in the private sector. 

Okay-- with some clarification, I still don't see that as a personal threat on the same order as firing, cutting someone's pay and everything else EFCA is designed to deal with.  As I said, I'm not sure your argument from a public sector workplace makes much sense in analyzing why EFCA might or might not be a problem. 

Let me try this yet again. So far, you have presented EFCA as a bill to use checkoff cards rather than secret ballots. aMike presented a nursing example where it appeared checkoff cards were used, and there were firings.

Are there additional protections in EFCA that are not associated with checkoff cards? So far, I don't see that as a magic wand.

my clarification of the antecedent

I still don't see that [being told all your information requests and directions would be handled as slowly as possible ]as a personal threat on the same order as firing, cutting someone's pay and everything else EFCA is designed to deal with.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Who are you, Terry Malloy? You've been watching too many movies.

And, if someone honestly thinks that unions exert the same level of intimidation on workers that management does, then delusional is a fair description of their thinking.

********************************************

Anyone who has ever had to work in a situation where a union was on strike knows that union intimidation isn't delusional. I was a non-union white collar worker in a facility where the UAW went out on a wildcat strike in response to a work rules change that was explicitly allowed by their contract. They were out six weeks before throwing in the towel and it was not fun. A number of people were hurt, I know of a least one person's house that was burned down, and a number of people's vehicles were vandalized. I was lucky, my car already had so many dings they didn't bother vandalizing it and the worst thing that happened was getting spit on while driving through the picket line.

It could be worse. I've been unscrambling cat 5 that appears to have become an object of interest to a 0.5 Cat kitten. He now has become distracted, having found the hole in the cat food back chewed by a 1.2 large cat, and disappearing into the bag up to his tail circuit.

Meanwhile, I must go out and get more Fat Cat Food for my beloved Mr. Clark, whose tummy and robe color makes him look like a Buddhist abbot. Any bowl is a begging bowl if food might be put in it. Surely some TPMcafe denizens know about things good for fat cats?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Who the hell is Terry Malloy? All I know is I have had the heart to heart talk after the talk. I had the talk in the building, then on my way to the car, the same guys came out from behind the dumpster (at night) and said they wanted to clarify the benefits of the Union.

I found another job where I didn't have to deal with those thugs and later that year when I saw one of them at a bar, I told him I wanted to clarify my point of view. He was a coward without his other Union bullies there to back him up.

I don't know who Terry Malloy is, but if he is a Union Bully like the ones I have met first hand, I'm sure he was not the protagonist of the story.

I agree that conflict during a strike is quite distinct from what I thought we were discussing: most specifically how checkoff cards, rather than secret ballots, solve the problem of union-busting by management. I asked a broader question, which I believe you tried to propaganda switch your term away from the reality that organizers can pressure potential bargaining unit members whether or not the workers are civil service. You dismissed as "short-term" a threat that was decidedly not described as such, but rather as a technique to force people who would not join the union to perform poorly or leave.

So, I agree. Strikes are irrelevant to this discussion. Let's stay with organizing.

Not being a movie buff, I had to look up Terry Malloy. Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront.

Incidentally, I do feel that my tradition of equal opportunity offense is being validated here, since, not long ago, I kept questioning a poster who claimed today's "militarized police" are the most chilling in history. He never would respond if Harry Bennett's thugs at the Battle of the Overpass were sweetness and light. I am very aware of how Ford fought unionization. I am also very aware that industry changes, and so may the services provided by unions -- and the pressures that can be applied both by union and corporate leadership.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Terry Malloy was the boxer/longshoreman who lost a childhood friend to the corrupt unions in On the Waterfront, played by Marlon Brando.

Since your comments against unions were mostly based on a stereotype that could only come from popular entertainment, I assumed you would know who Terry Malloy was.

Although the comments of yours I quoted in my earlier post are more reminiscent of the Monty Python sketch where mobsters offer the British Army protection ("nice Army y'ave there, Guvnor. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it.")

A wee clarification of my own. . .

Each of the bold faced, italicized bullets in my original comment is a link to a story or web page.  The first provides a quick summary of one of the ways in which Walmart acted in a manner designed to intimidate those who would unionize its employees.  There are many more examples.

In the case of the second, there were a number of anecdotal incidents illustrating the author's primary assertion.  I chose the nurses incident as a "teaser" to get persons to click on the link and visit the page in question to read all the examples listed.  I was trying to strike a balance between providing too much or too little information.

The third was a link to a small section on Union Busting management activities provided by the Labor Research Association.  On that page are many different examples. 

I put all three links up primarily because I thought Nathan Newman's assertions would be enhanced by documentation, which the original article didn't provide, and because I like to document things. 

I chose one company notorious for its anti-union policies, one article which related specific anti-union activities to a general lack of protection of union rights, and one page provided by an organization which specializes in all sorts of research concerning labor and labor conditions in America.  The home page would show a variety of other issues discussed beyond simply union busting.

I had not even read Mr. Berkowitz's comment at the time, and did not intend my post to be a reply to him...which is why I placed my comment directly in the context of Mr. Newman's original article.   

aMike

I acknowledged that some unions have some influence on fellow workers, but even your example is one of a little intermural bureucratic pressure-- not the firings of organizers that is the common tactic of employers.  

20,000 documented illegal actions by employers every year-- that's the record of employers violating the law in our country, even under a weak-ass anti-union Bush NLRB doing the investigations.  Unions can and are found guilty of illegal actions and harassment of the workplace, but the numbers are miniscule compared to employer violations.

But that's the media spin-- the handful of bad actions by union members are blown into the norm, while the norm of employer terrorism is barely mentioned.

First, I mentioned why card check is better than elections at this link:

http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/mar/06/union_harassment_and_employer_intimidation#comment-216407

EFCA actually has additional penalties built in for violations of the law under the traditional NLRB system and employees are free to use the NLRB under EFCA.  Remember, if a majority of employees don't want to use card check, they don't have to-- it's up to the workers to decide which system they want to use.

Let's see..."the election date is an all-or-nothing decision time, so it can strategically fire people or make threats just before the election date, knowing the other political party union will have no time to recover by the date of the election. Once a presidential election an NLRB election happens, you don't get another shot for another four years year."

I take it, then, that you advocate converting the US political system to a parliamentary one? I wouldn't necessarily reject that idea out of hand, although I doubt it ever could get passed.

"Cards building a coalition recognizing a union can be collected over a period of time. Conversations can happen, fears addressed..."

and a terrorism campaign by an employer

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Your perception of the obvious is less than it might be. A case of legal malpractice left me without income, home, or health coverage; I had to move to Massachusetts to stay with friends, as I literally had to choose between life-sustaining medication and food. How often, in the last year or so, were you wondering if you were going to live -- or, quite possibly, didn't necessarily care if you did? No, I suspect your self-righteousness protected you from such. Terrorism, indeed.

Your comparison of a union election to a Presidential election just illustrates one of the many problems with your thinking, since Bush is still in power and the Democrats are, perhaps only with impeachment or constitutional crisis, able to ask the Bush government to change policy.

I'm starting to rebuild, but I certainly don't see unions helping with job opportunities. That rebuilding is coming from entepreneurial colleagues and close friends.

You know, you might be a more effective organizer if you worked a bit on the sweeping generalizations, condescension, and general air of knowing what is best for all.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

I'm just mystified about the checkoff card being used as a mantra, when it appears the problem is more intimidation that the NLRB doesn't stop.

The last thing management wants is an "intrusive" NLRB.  An NLRB devoted running clean elections with no intimidation on either side and the teeth to stop such intimidation might be a good thing.  The reason unions have settled of EFCA is because they they know that such an NLRB is so good a thing as to be utopian - we'll never see it in our lifetime.  The NLRB has proven itself incapable of being such an impartial agent.  It's vigor in enforcement is too subject to the whims of politics which, can influence funding, etc.  

Since the workplace environment is inevitably fraught with coercion, EFCA may indeed be the closest you can come to determining what the workers actually want.  It isn't perfect, but nothing is. 

Yours is a reduction ad absurdum, as "off-in-the-corner meetings with foremen" can't be distinguished between anti-union and simple workplace communication on something as simple as tool usage.

As you point out, neither side is pure. There is a body that is supposed to ensure fairness, the NLRB. By all accounts, it does a terrible job.

If a checkoff card program had a sunset clause, specifically tied to a bipartisan investigation of the NLRB's viability and with a charge to improve both labor relations and productivity, I could see that as less one-sided. I am totally in favor of things that deal with better productivity and working conditions for the nation, not as a battle between labor and management.

If the issue is job security, benefits, and indeed national productivity and competitiveness, I can think of quite a few initiatives that I'd prioritize above making it easier, or harder, to get union representation. Some of these issues keep coming up on other threads about international trade agreements, such as not generalized protective tariffs, but import taxes offsetting the cost of labor in countries with few or no worker safety provisions and social services. A tough area but one worthy of crash study is getting stock valuation back to fundamental business values, not the crapshoot of arbitrage, derivatives, and other high-risk instruments that do little to increase capital formation. Tax-deductible executive compensation needs to tie to demonstrable increase in long-term value, including intellectual property and investment, not just short-term stock price.

Other areas would require offshored service operations to be demonstrably compliant with US data privacy laws. H1B visa approvals are far too easily gamed, creating artificially low prevailing wages where near indentured servants can be brought in and displace underemployed citizens. A portion of the revenue produced by H1B workers needs to be directed to efforts to recruit/train citizens with the required skills.

Let me ask you a serious question where you may have thought about the answer. Now, I have no argument that workers have all the freedom of speech of any citizen, outside the workplace. What is the law governing freedom of speech in the workplace? There may be some specifically related to union matters, but I've certainly never thought that was a general privilege. While the First Amendment reads

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

That's about what I thought. You do remind me of a tale from a Navy facility at which I worked in 1970, in which there were threatened drastic sanctions on personal habit..."termination with extreme prejudice" was mentioned...but the culprit was never caught.

It was summer in DC, and, in the almost all-windowless Building 196 of the Navy Yard, all high-security computing, but some computing pigs were more equal than others...or something like that. I worked in the Ocean Systems Branch, which kept track of the locations of almost all US Navy ships and some others. Literally no one ashore knew where the missile subs were once on patrol.

Down the hall was the Strategic Systems Branch, which knew which subs were to attack which targets. They did their work inside our tightly secured building, inside a separate guarded area, inside vaults, and kept their targeting information, classified TOP SECRET/SINGLE INTEGRATED OPERATING PLAN-EXTREMELY SENSITIVE INFORMATION in safes inside the vaults.

Some of the safes had automatic tear gas dispensers that went off if they were jarred after hours, and we were used to seeing gasping people choking their way into the hall.

Nevertheless, all were a little stunned when we got a memo from the commanding officer, stating that food was no longer to be treated as more highly classified than SECRET. This got attention, and it wasn't long before the story came out.

TS/SIOP-ESI material was printed on individually numbered sheets. While classified trash went into a burn bag kept inside a safe, two officers, one who had to be armed, had to witness the destruction of each sheet. This duty usually went to the two most junior ensigns with the appropriate clearance. The regulation about their being armed was a problem; few knew handle a firearm and there were some literal shootings in the foot. Eventually, with shades of Barney Fife, an intelligent officer said they were "armed" if they had the pistol, but sent a qualified guard with them. The guard had his own loaded gun, and kept the ensigns' magazine, to be given to them in emergency.

It was summer, and the ventilation in the vaults never worked well. The ensigns took out the burn bag for the trip to the incinerator, nicely turned out in their summer white uniforms. They mentioned, as they left, that something smelled odd.

When they got to the incinerator, opened the bag, and breathed in, their uniforms quickly looked almost like camouflage, with all the green and brown stains. Apparently, someone had been eating lunch in the vault. Forensic analysis suggested it was a sardine sandwich, the remnants of which were thrown into the SIOP burn bag to ferment.

On their return, the ensigns were screaming at the guard to give them the magazine, so they could shoot the person they thought had discarded the sardines.

Classified trash at SECRET and below didn't need to be individually verified, so castoff food could still go into burn bags at that level.

And THAT is a limit on speech in the workplace...or something along those lines.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]