Restoring the Right to Organize

by Larry Cohen

The Jobs With Justice campaign grew out of the crisis of workers' rights in the United States. The falling rate of unionization here has been well documented, and there are as many theories about it as there are theorists. But conventional analyses typically minimize one of the most important factors: that workers who attempt to organize have been subjected to unprecedented attacks from employers, attacks aided by the lack of organizing rights for workers in the United States compared to workers in Canada, Germany, Japan, and other industrialized nations.

Turning Back the Clock

In the past year alone, approximately 10,000 workers have been discharged from their jobs while attempting to organize in the private sector. Anti-union campaigns are now accepted as a matter of course by virtually every private sector employer in our nation. They spend huge sums of money, retaining specialist firms at $300 per hour to prevent their employees from exercising their basic right to form organizations that represent their interests. Moreover, current estimates indicate that some 25 million workers ‹ more than 25% of our private sector workforce ‹ are hired as temporaries or self-employed contractors, thereby effectively denying their right to organize. With employer resistance to unionization at an all time high, the workers' rights ³clock² has been turned back nearly 60 years.

During the early days of the Great Depression, there was no national legislation protecting the right to organize. Wage cuts and increasing unemployment generated a huge organizational effort in mass production industries led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In 1935, as part of a package of social legislation that included minimum wage regulations, food stamps, and unemployment insurance, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) encouraged workers to organize unions to restore some balance in the economy and the workplace. In each of the succeeding ten years, more than a million workers joined unions. Organized workers became a major force for social change at both the national and local level.

After World War II, organizing rights continued to expand for public workers, first locally and then state by state. And over the past 50 years, union membership in the public sector has increased by more than five million. But the private sector tells a different story; the principal difference is 50 years of increasing employer interference in organizing campaigns. With the role of national government ranging from relative indifference to active opposition (under Reagan and Bush), and the NLRB increasingly unwilling and unable to provide any effective protection for workers trying to organize, workers have been left to fight on their own ‹ with predictable results.

The Employer Offensive

This past year, organizers from our union ‹ the Communications Workers of America (CWA) ‹ have supported more than 50,000 workers interested in building unions at their workplaces. Because of employer abuse and interference, only about 16,000 were successful. Consider some examples of employer resistance.

Gina Hyams was a leader of the CWA Organizing Committee at HarperCollins Publishers in San Francisco, part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire. Last fall, more than 50 of the 81 eligible office, marketing, and professional employees signed an open petition supporting CWA Local 9410 as their collective bargaining representative. HarperCollins immediately hired a high-priced corporate law firm to run an all-out anti-union campaign. Six key organizing committee members ‹ including Gina ‹ were either laid off or ³promoted² out of the bargaining unit.

Gina has now been out of work for more than five months and the NLRB has yet to begin a hearing on her discharge. They did find time for nine days of hearings on company arguments that the bargaining unit was inappropriate. Those hearings produced a seven month delay in a union representation election. By the time the election was held, more than a third of the employees had either quit out of disgust with company behavior or been unjustly fired.

In the middle of the delay, HarperCollins's CEO George Craig flew out from New York to hold a company-wide ³captive audience meeting.² In front of all the employees, he stated that the company considered organizing nothing short of war and would fight it at every level. According to Gina, ³he called the employee organizers disloyal, said he would never negotiate with CWA, and if there was ever a strike, they would just move out of town because they didn't need the hassle of a union.² When the election was finally held, the union lost by five votes.

Our union represents about 5,000 health care workers in and around Buffalo, New York. Earlier this year, Local 1168, our largest health care local, was in the middle of an organizing drive at Sheridan Manor Nursing Home. On 19 January, 16 licensed practical nurses (LPNs) were fired without good reason. Faced with Labor Board charges, management argued that the LPNs were supervisors, and thus not protected when participating in union organizing. After three months of delay, the NLRB ruled that the nurses should be included in the bargaining unit and scheduled an August election. At the same time, the Board issued complaints on the discharges but did not schedule hearings until October 1993. Because the employer is appealing the inclusion of the LPNs, the NLRB has ordered the ballots from the representation election impounded.

The history at US Sprint is the same. Workers at many Sprint locations around the country have been trying to organize a union for more than four years. Sprint's Human Resource Department has issued an ³Anti-Union Management Guide² and systematically instructed its supervisors about the details of the guide. Sprint has also produced several anti-union videos and regularly sends top management around the country to preach the evils of unionism to captive audiences of employees. At Sprint's spring stockholder meeting, stockholders heard stories from company workers about secret monitoring of their telephone conversations and other workplace harassment. On several occasions, the NLRB has cited Sprint for interfering with employee rights. Despite these violations, Sprint continues to receive 40% of the revenues from the Federal Telephone System ‹ hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

This is a small sample of recent cases of employer interference faced by our own union. Add in similar stories from other unions, and you arrive at a safe estimate of more than 500,000 workers per year whose attempts at organization are frustrated by employer interference. Janitors and airline pilots, television news writers and textile workers all have one thing in common: they are currently trying to organize (with assistance from a variety of unions) in the face of a total war paid for by their employers.

To appreciate just how effective employer interference is, consider what happens when it is removed from an organizing campaign. Earlier this year, 271 employees of AT&T Network Systems in Cockeysville, Maryland organized and joined CWA. Their employer remained neutral and accepted, for recognition purposes, cards signed by a majority of the employees supporting CWA as their bargaining representative. Similarly, CWA Local 4603 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, organized several hundred Wisconsin Bell service representatives in an NLRB election without any employer interference.

In all of these cases, the workers were office, technical, and professional employees in high technology, high-profit industries ‹ the workers that employers and academics tell us don't need or want unions. But the real difference between workers at Sprint and workers at AT&T Network Systems is employer interference. Remove it and workers demonstrate that they would rather build and have an organization at work than face large employers on their own.

Public sector organizing provides the most compelling demonstration of the effectiveness of employer opposition. In the last year, more than 900 office workers at the Port Authority in New York and New Jersey organized with assistance from CWA Local 1032. The employer remained neutral throughout the campaign. CWA won the election overwhelmingly and has recently negotiated a contract, ratified overwhelmingly by the members. In New Jersey alone, in the past 12 years, our union has organized more than 60,000 public workers with little employer interference. Yet when similar workers in New Jersey's private sector have tried to organize, employers have done everything possible to prevent it.

A Program for Change

Understanding the role of employer interference is the beginning of a solution to the organizing crisis. But overcoming this crisis requires a program and a campaign to implement it. At our convention in early August, CWA delegates adopted a major resolution on Workplace Organizational Rights aimed at ending employer interference in organizing. The resolution included the following provisions:

1. Union Representation through Demonstration of Majority Support. The single most important factor in explaining higher union density in Canada than the United States is union recognition based on majority support on signed cards.

2. Increased Protection Against Employer Coercion. In order to address employer abuse, we need protection that will ensure discharge hearings and determination within 30 days of dismissal, disqualification of offending employers from all government contracts, and stiffer sanctions such as triple damages when employers violate the law.

3. Workplace Restructuring Should Not Require the Workers to Reorganize. The constant restructuring of enterprises has been a major factor in the decline of union representation. Employees are turned into independent contractors, and as a result, they lose everything from health care and pensions to coverage under the NLRA. The use of temporary or agency workers produces the same result. And many employers are moving work to their non-union companies and subsidiaries. To protect workers, their organizations must be permitted to survive such restructuring.

4. Continue the Ban on Company Unions. Section 8(a)(2) of the NLRA prohibits employers from establishing or dominating labor organizations. This ban on company unions must be strictly enforced; employee organizations must remain totally independent of management.

From Program to Action

To implement this program, we need an effective campaign of education and action. Protests at regional NLRB offices on 27 May marked the beginning of such an effort. At least 15 locally and regionally based Jobs With Justice coalitions have pledged to continue this effort for at least one year. Their focus will shift to education on the need for legal reforms, and direct actions aimed at employers who abuse their workers and interfere in the organizing process.

In early August, for example, the Jobs With Justice coalition held a third action at the Sheridan Manor Nursing Home in support of the 16 fired LPNs and other workers who are organizing. This type of community support will be crucial if employees are to have the courage to continue organizing in the face of employer interference.

Our union's Education Department is currently preparing a publication detailing 20 case studies documenting employer interference and worker abuse in a wide variety of organizing campaigns. Separately, a video will be made in which workers themselves, abused by their employers, will speak about their experience and their determination to organize.

The Vermont Jobs With Justice coalition has established a Workers' Rights Board, made up of political, community and religious leaders in Vermont who support workers when they attempt to organize. The Workers' Rights Board contacts abusive employers to assert the community's support for the unions, and intolerance for employer abuse. Other Jobs With Justice coalitions hope to set up similar Workers' Rights Boards in the coming year.

After more than five decades of widespread and growing employer abuse, we should not expect to fix this problem quickly. Reversing current trends will take years of resistance by union members, workers who are organizing, and allies in their communities. Employers are more determined than ever to lower their labor costs by any and all means. To protect the right to organize and bring our country into the international mainstream of workers' rights, we need to combat their efforts. And that requires a rebirth of the workers' rights coalitions that emerged in the mid-1930s. At the heart of that rebirth is a simple idea: We want jobs. But not only jobs. Slaves had jobs. We want jobs with justice.