Lobbying not to change the rules
Finally, opponents claim to be concerned that the privacy interests of workers would be compromised if a union had access to the email addresses and telephone numbers of the workers. Reporters might question the sincerity of the concern about privacy in view of employers’ insistence on being able to look at any email sent by an employee while at work (or to be able to monitor every keystroke made by an employee on a computer). Leaving that aside, is it really unreasonable for a prospective union to have the same email and telephone access as an employer? Isn’t the issue the fact that employers know that having to rely on communications — either in person or by postal mail — to a worker’s home is distinctly more cumbersome and less effective than using nearly ubiquitous modern methods for instantaneous communication?
On the union side, the AFL-CIO said in its reply statement that there is no evidence of abuse of current voter lists. Nevertheless, unions should be asked if they acknowledge that safeguards would need to be taken to ensure that email and telephone data secured through the process is not misused in the future.
Additional food for thought: especially at the beginning of the comment period, those opposing the rules had a more robust response than did unions. Did that reflect an accurate assessment that defense of the NLRB legitimately required less concentrated firepower than that needed to be mustered by business interests trying to derail the NLRB proposal? Or was that an illustration of unions doing less than they would have liked because of the problem of limited resources?
All original reporting on which this Leads piece was based was contributed by Alyssa Ratledge. Questions suggested as follow-up for our colleagues at other media outlets were developed by the editors. The last paragraph of the article was edited subsequent to original publication.
Delay, delay, delay
Remapping Debate found several examples of extensive delay in the unionization process. One was related by Joseph Cohen, an attorney with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. According to Cohen, his union sought to organize about 400 workers in an aluminum casting company in Wisconsin. Despite filing the petition to organize in 1993, the election date is still in limbo as of 2011 — 17 years later.
The employer used numerous tactics to delay the election, including extensive litigation challenging who qualified to organize in the unit. After several months, an election was held, but the employer quickly petitioned to have those results overturned because there had been a minor translation error on a notice provided to Hmong-speaking workers. Before a second election could be held, the employer withheld a wage increase from the workers in retaliation for the organizing effort. The NLRB ultimately found that the employer’s action was, in fact, illegal under federal labor law, and a federal appeals court upheld that determination, Cohen said.
Yet, Cohen continued, workers were frustrated with both their workplace and with the union after years of litigation and delay. By the time the federal appeals court had issued its decision in favor of the workers, the company had new ownership, many workers employed at the time of the original petition had left, and the total number of employees in the plant had decreased dramatically. Now, as the union prepares to hold an election some time this year, only a small fraction of the 400 original workers still work in the plant.
Lowell Peterson, the executive director of the Writers Guild of America, also had a story to tell:
“We have several NLRB election cases, and in a couple of the cases, the employers have used every trick in the book to delay the process — the kinds of things that are addressed in the proposed rules. Endless challenges to ballots, objections to the election process, delayed hearings, requests for adjournment, requests for extensions of time, playing games with subpoenas, just over-lawyering these things, which costs the employer a lot of money, but apparently it’s worth it to them economically to keep the union out…”
“We have two more employers that [are] still spending money on lawyers [after many years] and we’re still not certified, and in both cases the majority of employees have voted for union representation, and in both cases ultimately we will get an order directing the employer to negotiate, but that could be up to a year after we started the process. In that period of time, employee turnover is huge. And even if it’s not huge, what employees see is a process that simply doesn’t work. So they go into the election process knowing that they’re risking their jobs. They’re subjecting themselves to all kinds of meetings and propaganda about how awful it would be to ‘be union,’ even though they look around and see that unionized employees are doing okay…”
“We are on month eight with one of the cases. The hearings have not concluded yet, and probably won’t conclude for a couple of weeks. Then there’s briefing. Then there will be a decision at the region level. Presumably there will be some sort of appeal to Washington. Especially with what’s going on right now, at the Board level in D.C., that could add another year, easily. It could be that it will take two years to get a ruling that says, ‘The majority has spoken. Bargain with the union.’ Then what do we do? It’s two years after, easily two years after the election. We go in. Most of the employees who were there at the time of the election will be gone, and the remaining employees will look around and say, ‘What am I getting myself into? These guys can’t even do the simplest thing,’ which is to sit down at the bargaining table…They look at the federal government and think, ‘These guys don’t know what they’re doing…’”
“This is what organizing is like in the real world now. People talk about how the union share of the labor market is plummeted, and it’s true. But what do we do when the federal agency that’s supposed to be enforcing the law has become so toothless?”