NEWS & LETTERS, February - March 2009
Labor targeted as UFCW wins in N.C.
Detroit--A national propaganda campaign is underway by the Republican Party and business interests to defeat the proposed Employee Free Choice Act. This would give employees the right to union recognition if a majority of workers at a workplace signed a card indicating they wanted to join a union. Called card check, this could eliminate roadblocks to the unionization of employees.
This legislation, supported by President Obama and his Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, is a key demand of organized labor, which had thrown its support to Obama's presidential campaign. While many expect the legislation to be passed, it is anything but a done deal.
WAR CHEST TO DESTROY LABOR
The forces opposed are formidable and well-financed, including the Center for Union Facts, and other groups with misleading names like the Workforce Fairness Institute and the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, which is a federation of 500 business groups. They have millions of dollars at their disposal and have launched media attack ads aimed at Congress, other businesses and the public to block the legislation.
They hope to maintain present employee-employer relationships that allow employers to require elections for union recognition. While this sounds reasonable, in practice it is heavily skewed in favor of management. Corporations can prevent union representatives from being at the workplace to talk to workers, can harass, intimidate or fire union sympathizers (some have even been murdered), can hold compulsory employee meetings where unions are falsely attacked, and can threaten to close the plant if a union is approved.
If workers do vote in a union, companies can refuse to recognize it and delay union representation for years through legal maneuvers. These practices were often ignored by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), staffed by corporate-friendly administrators in the Bush Administration. The NLRB, an agency designed to support unionization, became a powerful arm to attack and defeat the formation of unions.
A case in point is the history of the largest hog slaughterhouse in the nation, the Smithfield plant in Tar Heel, N.C., with about 5,000 workers. For 16 years efforts have been underway by the United Food and Commercial Workers union to gain recognition, including two elections that failed in 1994 and 1997. The company's violations of labor election laws were so blatant, including spying on and firing workers and beating union sympathizers on election day, that the NLRB was forced to bring charges against Smithfield.
It was not until 2006 that an appeals court upheld the charges and fined Smithfield $1.5 million for its violations. The union recognition election, however, was not held until last December. Its success marked a milestone in labor organization in the notoriously anti-union South and will inspire further union organizing efforts in Southern states.
This success might not have been possible without heavy constraints imposed on the company because of past violations. Union organizers were free to talk to workers in the plant and a monitor could check every piece of campaign literature to guard against false claims. A coalition of the union, Jobs for Justice, and community groups launched a campaign that included boycotts of Smithfield products, demonstrations at shareholders' meetings and daily leafleting at the plant.
WORKERS GAIN CONFIDENCE
Many Latino workers were no longer in the plant. They had undoubtedly been intimidated by company threats to expose those illegally in the U.S. -- especially if they supported the union -- or had left in fear because of increasing immigrant raids by the government. Obama's win in North Carolina gave the workers, two-thirds of whom are Black, the conviction that they could change their exploitative conditions at Smithfield.
Card check organizing did not play a role in the Smithfield union victory. Data from the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Quebec, where they do have card check approval, indicates that the success rate is limited, since employers there have learned union-blocking tactics from U.S. employers who have permitted card check organizing.
The limited experience in the U.S. discloses that the union organizing success rate with card check is 70%, compared with 55-60% with NLRB elections. If the card check legislation is approved by Congress, corporate lawyers will be working overtime to find loopholes to block or delay unionization of workers.
--Andy Phillips
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