WAKE UP PEOPLE - American Workers Could Lose the Right to Organize Jan 1, 2012

It is said that soon after his enlightenment the Buddha passed a man on the road who was struck by the Buddha's extraordinary radiance and peaceful presence. The man stopped and asked,

"My friend, what are you?Are you a celestial being or a god?"
"No", said the Buddha.
"Well, then, are you some kind of magician or wizard?"
again the Buddha answered.
"No."
"Are you a man?"
"No."
"Well, my friend, then what are you?"
The Buddha replied,

"I am awake."

Sorry friends for the introduction, but when I read the article below describing the crucial moment which American workers face, and decided I wanted to share it with you, this story I learned almost 40 years ago came to mind.

Just think, wouldn't it be nice if American companies no longer had to send their businesses and factories overseas to get the cheapest labor possible? Yea, I mean, if they could only pay the same wages as they do overseas, and loose all the restrictions and benefits they have to shell out...corporate America and multinationals could keep their business right here in America and use American workers!

When are the people here in America going to wake up? Where's the Occupy Movement when you need it?!? Efforts to diminish the importance of the Occupy Movement always bring up the fact that the Movement doesn't focus on a particular issue. Well here's one ready for them to confront that could also bring more American workers into action.

By the way, the most beautiful sights in Oakland at Frank Ogawa City Hall Plaza, on the day of the Nov. 2nd Occupy Oakland General Strike were the groups feeding the people. This was led by the SEIU Local 1021 workers providing free food (hamburgers and hotdogs), and distributing water to the thousands gathered to march that day. Their particpation, leadership and acts of generosity were stunning and inspiring demonstrations of true solidarity.

Next to their tables, lines formed to receive free plates of delicious chicken and rice and Afghani naan from Kamdesh, a downtown Middle Eastern restaurant.

This is how we must move forward. With everyone contributing from their gifts, freely sharing our abilities and talent, we become an unbeatable force.

A luta Continua~
The Struggle Continues
Kentke

Crippling the Right to Organize

By WILLIAM B. GOULD IV
Stanford, Calif.


UNLESS something changes in Washington, American workers will, on New Year’s Day, effectively lose their right to be represented by a union. Two of the five seats on the National Labor Relations Board, which protects collective bargaining, are vacant, and on Dec. 31, the term of Craig Becker, a labor lawyer whom President Obama named to the board last year through a recess appointment, will expire. Without a quorum, the Supreme Court ruled last year, the board cannot decide cases.

What would this mean?
Workers illegally fired for union organizing won’t be reinstated with back pay. Employers will be able to get away with interfering with union elections. Perhaps most important, employers won’t have to recognize unions despite a majority vote by workers. Without the board to enforce labor law, most companies will not voluntarily deal with unions.

If this nightmare comes to pass, it will represent the culmination of three decades of Republican resistance to the board — an unwillingness to recognize the fundamental right of workers to band together, if they wish, to seek better pay and working conditions. But Mr. Obama is also partly to blame; in trying to install partisan stalwarts on the board, as his predecessors did, he is all but guaranteeing that the impasse will continue. On Wednesday, he announced his intention to nominate two pro-union lawyers to the board, though there is no realistic chance that either can gain Senate confirmation anytime soon.

For decades after its creation in 1935, the board was a relatively fair arbiter between labor and capital. It has protected workers’ right to organize by, among other things, overseeing elections that decide on union representation. Employers may not engage in unfair labor practices, like intimidating organizers and discriminating against union members. Unions are prohibited, too, from doing things like improperly pressuring workers to join.

The system began to run into trouble in the 1970s. Employers found loopholes that enabled them to delay the board’s administrative proceedings, sometimes for years. Reforms intended to speed up the board’s resolution of disputes have repeatedly foundered in Congress.

The precipitous decline of organized labor — principally a result of economic forces, not legal ones — cemented unions’ dependence on the board, despite its imperfections. Meanwhile, business interests, represented by an increasingly conservative Republican Party, became more assertive in fighting unions.

The board became dysfunctional. Traditionally, members were career civil servants or distinguished lawyers and academics from across the country. But starting in the Reagan era, the board’s composition began to tilt toward Washington insiders like former Congressional staff members and former lobbyists.

Starting with a compromise that allowed my confirmation in 1994, the board’s members and general counsel have been nominated in groups. In contrast to the old system, the new “batching” meant that nominees were named as a package acceptable to both parties. As a result, the board came to be filled with rigid ideologues. Some didn’t even have a background in labor law.

Under President George W. Bush, the board all but stopped using its discretion to obtain court orders against employers before the board’s own, convoluted, administrative process was completed — a power that, used fairly, is a crucial protection for workers. In 2007, in what has been called the September Massacre, the board issued rulings that made it easier for employers to block union organizing and harder for illegally fired employees to collect back pay. Democratic senators then blocked Mr. Bush from making recess appointments to the board, as President Bill Clinton had done. For 27 months, until March 2010, the board operated with only two members; in June 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that it needed at least three to issue decisions.

Under Mr. Obama, the board has begun to take enforcement more seriously, by pursuing the court orders that the board under Mr. Bush had abandoned. Sadly, though, the board has also been plagued by unnecessary controversy. In April, the acting general counsel issued a complaint over Boeing’s decision to build airplanes at a nonunion plant in South Carolina, following a dispute with Boeing machinists in Washington State. Although the complaint was dropped last week after the machinists reached a new contract agreement with Boeing, the controversy reignited Republican threats to cut financing for the board.

In my view, the complaint against Boeing was legally flawed, but the threats to cut the board’s budget represent unacceptable political interference. The shenanigans continue: last month, before the board tentatively approved new proposals that would expedite unionization elections, the sole Republican member threatened to resign, which would have again deprived the board of a quorum.

Mr. Obama needs to make this an election-year issue; if the board goes dark in January, he should draw attention to Congressional obstructionism during the campaign and defend the board’s role in protecting employees and employers. A new vision for labor-management cooperation must include not only a more powerful board, but also a less partisan one, with members who are independent and neutral experts. Otherwise, the partisan morass will continue, and American workers will suffer.


William B. Gould IV, a law professor at Stanford, was chairman of the National Labor Relations Board from 1994 to 1998.

You can also click this link to read my Sept. 10, 2010 blog post, which gives some background on today's labor movement.
http://knewzfrommeroewest.blogspot.com/2010/09/after-life-in-labor-union-leader.html


Union support bolsters Occupy Oakland strike
http://www.whec.com/news/stories/s2354738.shtml

After a Life in Labor, a Union Leader Retires, Frustrated by the Movement

Anna Burger at an economic meeting during President Obama’s campaign. Ms. Burger is retiring as chairwoman of Change to Win and secretary-treasurer of the service employees’ union.

I am not familiar with Anna Burger's history, policies or style of leadership, but I offer this article because what happens within the labor movement is crucial to the expansion of prosperity within our communities, nation and the entire working world.

I appreciate the issues she raises here, and heartily agree with many of her statements. I too have long been frustrated by the inability of working people to significantly alter and direct their own destiny in the work place, as well as effect the role of business and corporations in our world.

Kentke

Anna Burger dedicated her life to building the labor movement, but it has nonetheless grown smaller, even during this time of stagnating wages.

By Steven Greenhouse
Published: September 4, 2010

WASHINGTON — After 38 years as a gung ho trade unionist, Anna Burger is retiring — with unmistakable frustration — from her post as the highest-ranking woman in American labor movement history.

Ms. Burger, 59, is frustrated because she has dedicated her adult life to building the labor movement, but it has nonetheless grown smaller and weaker. Beyond stepping down as chairwoman of Change to Win, a federation representing 5 million union members, she is also retiring from her job of 14 years as secretary-treasurer of the powerful Service Employees International Union, representing nearly 2 million janitors, hospital employees and others workers.

Ms. Burger said many women still had far too hard a time balancing job and family. She is also frustrated that union membership continues to shrink even when workers should in theory be flocking into unions during this time of stagnating wages. And the labor-friendly Democratic majorities that unions fought so hard to elect in the House and the Senate could disappear in this November’s elections.

“The labor movement gave me a chance for a better life,” said Ms. Burger, the daughter of a Teamsters truck driver. “I worry whether the labor movement will continue to be able do that for a lot of people.”

Within labor, many critics say that Ms. Burger, like Andy Stern, the former service employees’ president, was a divisive figure. She, like Mr. Stern, is often faulted for fomenting the schism in the A.F.L.-C.I.O. five years ago and for often bragging that the S.E.I.U. is the fastest-growing union with the biggest political war chest.

Ms. Burger, who first joined a union as a social worker in Pennsylvania, boasted, for instance, that were it not for the service employees’ multiyear push, the health care overhaul would never have been enacted.

“We’re the most successful union out there,” she said. “There are times people resent us for that.”

Ms. Burger had campaigned to succeed Mr. Stern after he announced his retirement in April. Viewing Ms. Burger as too top-down, many S.E.I.U. officials rallied behind a union executive vice president and the eventual winner, Mary Kay Henry. Ms. Burger quit the race, but stayed on as No. 2, although it seemed only a matter of time before she stepped down.

Ms. Burger was hazy about her future. She dropped hints that she hoped to land a job that brought unions together with other groups to build a progressive political majority — a vision that clashes with the nation’s recent rightward shift.

“For me,” she said, “there’s an urgency to try to make sure we take advantage of having the best president we’ve had in my lifetime to make this country and make the world work best for everyone.”

Randel K. Johnson, senior vice president for labor policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce, said that Ms. Burger was not going to get her progressive majority, and that it was partly labor’s fault.

“They certainly were successful in electing a more pro-union House and Senate,” Mr. Johnson said. “But their advocacy of the unpopular health care bill will mean losses this November for many House and Senate members who have traditionally supported unions.”

Ms. Burger has been an outspoken member of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. She has urged President Obama to appoint a jobs czar “who would focus on jobs, jobs, jobs” and to adopt an industrial policy to rebuild America’s sagging manufacturing base. She supports establishing a federal infrastructure bank that would spend hugely over the next decade to build roads, bridges and mass transit, creating millions of jobs.

Ms. Burger offered an explanation of why American workers were not rushing to embrace unions despite the tough economic times.

“They’ll flock to unions when they don’t feel so intimidated about supporting a union,” she said. “There’s still a total assault by corporations to stop workers from having unions.”
Many union officials remain bitter that Ms. Burger helped lead the 2005 split in the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which many say embarrassed and weakened labor.

Ms. Burger is unrepentant. “I don’t have any second thoughts,” she said, asserting that the A.F.L.-C.I.O. had lacked energy and vision.

She said that forming the breakaway federation fueled more union organizing by the Teamsters, for instance, among port truck drivers in Los Angeles. She also said that without the creation of Change to Win, Mr. Obama would never have won the presidency. She said that federation’s endorsement of Mr. Obama in April 2008 was pivotal to his defeating Hillary Clinton in several crucial primaries.

Change to Win has fallen far short of its proclaimed goal of organizing 750,000 workers annually. “There hasn’t been the big increase in union membership that they had called for,” said Peter Dreier, a labor expert at Occidental College.

Ms. Burger has often championed women’s causes. She noted that while women were half the work force, they did far more than half the work because they not only work on the job, but do most of the cooking, cleaning and child-rearing at home.

“We have not developed public policies that support working women the way we should,” she said. “When women can be forced to work mandatory overtime when they have children at home and don’t have access to child care, that’s a huge problem.

“We’re still lacking a lot of support mechanisms for women,” she added. “We’re the only industrial nation that doesn’t have paid maternity leave. Many businesses haven’t stepped up, so the government needs to.”