The Labor Movement

The signing of the FAA bill ends a long-running legislative fight.  It began with something President Obama did right: He appointed members to the National Mediation Board who, in 2010, adopted a new rule governing elections for railroad and airline workers seeking to unionize.  Such workers are covered by the 1935 Railway Labor Act, rather than the National Labor Relations Act that covers most American workers.

For decades, one downside of the RLA regime was the requirement that, in order to succeed in an election, a union had to win a majority of all potential voters in a bargaining unit, rather than just a majority of all voters. (Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker imposed a similar requirement on public workers as part of his anti-union bill last year.)  If political elections were counted the same way – with all non-voters counted as “no” votes — very few of our current members of Congress would be in office.

The new rule from Obama’s appointees changed that.  Now, votes are counted in RLA elections the way they are in other union elections, or in presidential elections: Whichever side gets the most votes wins.  Predictably, Republicans were furious.  In a series of showdowns over the past year, the GOP insisted that the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization, which funds FAA functions like air traffic control, be amended to include language overriding the National Mediation Board’s new rule.  Democrats resisted, and President Obama threatened to veto any FAA bill with such a provision.  The short-term politics of these showdowns – one of which included a 13-day FAA shutdown last summer — were never great for the GOP, and each one ended with a short-term extension.

On Jan. 20, with both parties saying it was time to resolve the issue once and for all, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced a compromise with the GOP: The FAA bill would stay silent on how union election votes are counted – meaning the NMB rule stays in place until future NMB appointees reverse it.  But labor will face a steeper obstacle earlier in the process.  Rather than being required to submit signatures from 35 percent of workers in a bargaining unit to trigger an election (as had been required), unions would have to submit signatures from a majority just for a vote to be held.  It wasn’t immediately obvious what was so bad about this; in most cases, filing for a union election without a strong majority committed to vote yes is organizing malpractice.  Many unions were slow to issue reactions, and a few voiced support.

But the devil was in the details.  In a Jan. 30 letter, 18 international unions called on the House and Senate to reject the deal, writing that otherwise “Airline and rail workers would suffer significant losses as contracts are jettisoned, collective bargaining rights are cut and legal hurdles will be placed in the way of gaining a voice at work.” (Full disclosure: I used to work at UNITE HERE, one of the signing organizations.)

“This is our Wisconsin,” Association of Flight Attendants-CWA President Veda Shook told a Communications Workers of America crowd before Congress voted on the deal.  Shook said that while “Reid and Republicans are falsely claiming” the compromise would only require unions to win majority support, its effect would be much worse than advertised: By packing an employee list with ex-workers or challenging voter eligibility, management would have new opportunities to delay or avert an election despite majority support.  By legislating election rules, the bill would enable management to call workers who signed cards to be questioned as part of discovery in an anti-union lawsuit.  When a larger non-union company merged with a smaller unionized company, the bill would make it possible for management to cease recognizing the union, with no election at all.

In a furious speech, CWA International president Larry Cohen charged that Democratic leaders had refused past requests to attach pro-union provisions to appropriations bills, but were allowing Republicans to use the FAA appropriation to force an anti-union change.

“The leadership in the Senate didn’t even see fit to include [the pro-labor NMB rule] in this gutting of the statute …” yelled Cohen.  “Our little crumb of an advancement is left as a rule, so the day that there’s ever a Republican president elected … they’re going to strip the rule.  The statute will remain.  It’s worse than it’s ever been.”

The Democrats passed the bill and the president signed it.

A White House official defended the deal, via email, saying, “While it is unfortunate that Republicans in Congress have injected extraneous ideological measures into this important legislation that will create jobs and improve air traffic safety, the provision referenced in our veto threat has been removed and the President will sign the compromise bill.”

The White House is unlikely to expect tremendous blowback from the bill, given that the AFL-CIO took no public stance on the FAA deal.  An AFL-CIO spokesperson declined to comment, but the federation’s silence may be related to the lack of unanimity among the 22 unions in its Transportation Division: While most were opposed, a few came out in support of the bill.

In a statement following its Senate passage, Air Line Pilots Association president Lee Moak said the bill “could have been improved by omitting provisions unrelated to aviation safety, but that compromise was necessary … to garner the very real benefits” of a reauthorization.

Unions’ division on this question illustrates U.S. labor’s political predicament as compared with Europe. Labor’s political influence over either major party is “180 degrees opposite from Germany, where both parties have a connection to the labor movement,” author and labor attorney Tom Geoghegan says. “It’s a very sad and dangerous thing.”

Even with a presidential election looming, historian Steve Fraser says the Democratic Party understandably takes labor’s support for granted, because “the labor movement sees it has no other option, so its loyalty can be counted on.”

Indeed, the Republican primary campaign provides daily reminders of how much worse the political leadership in Washington could be: stacking the National Labor Relations Board with professional union-busters, refusing to bargain with public workers, reviving child labor.

The decline in union density, argues Fraser, creates a vicious cycle of decreasing power and increasing dependence. “A big part of the picture is the sense that there’s no exit from this strategy … The weaker they get, the more that they feel boxed in.”

On Feb. 2, four days before the FAA deal passed the Senate, CWA officially endorsed Obama’s re-lection.

There are many factors that explain the willingness of prominent Democrats to back a deal that makes union organizing harder: the broken Senate; the influence of big money; questionable tactics from all sides.  But the most fundamental one is the half-century decline in unionization, and with it, in labor’s role in American life.  Episodes like this one offer a stark challenge to those still hoping that transformed political fortunes will be the cause – rather than the consequence – of the labor movement’s revival.

Though the welfare comment is particularly insulting – to welfare recipients and labor alike – all of these arguments invoke the same analogy: that a union is a business that provides a service for a fee.  There’s an undeniable point to be made here. Unions are legally required to equally represent all employees covered by a contract, whether or not they pay a cent in union fees.  That representation includes contract negotiations and arbitration over grievances (in fact, unions sometimes go out of their way to pursue cases on behalf of critics, lest they file charges against the union).  Barring unions from requiring employees to pay these costs is an effective way to defund them.  That’s why right-wingers love “Right to Work” so much.  And it’s why, like professor Gordon Lafer, I found the irony instructive when a chapter of the pro-“Right to Work” Chamber of Commerce rebuffed a local business seeking to receive the benefits of Chamber membership without paying any dues.

But a union isn’t a Chamber of Commerce, and it certainly isn’t a sports agent.  And when labor’s defenders say a union is a business, I wince because of where I heard that argument all too often in my organizing days: from dues-paying union members I was pushing to take action.  When declining to join a picket line, or come to a meeting, or talk to a co-worker, some would defend their inaction with a simple, “That’s what I pay dues for.”  Or “What am I paying you for if I have to do all the work?”  Sometimes we’d wield dueling metaphors: They’d compare my role as a union staffer to a lawyer hired to fight on their behalf; I’d compare expecting to get a strong union just by paying dues to trying to build muscle just by paying for a gym membership (these were not my proudest moments as a union organizer).

What allows some unions to thrive in “Right to Work” states matches what brings success in the rest of the country: building a movement driven by rank and file leaders with a sense of ownership of the union and responsibility to do far more than just pay dues.  That includes organizing at work and outside of it, and confronting both difficult co-workers and disrespectful managers.  The largest local of UNITE HERE (the international union I worked for in California and Pennsylvania) is Las Vegas’ Local 226, in “Right to Work” Nevada.  The vast majority of Local 226’s 55,000 members voluntarily pay union dues.  More important, in some of 226’s recent campaigns to organize non-union casinos, most of the work has been done by union members, working full-time shifts in their unionized casinos and then volunteering after hours as unpaid organizers with the union.

Clocking out of work and spending a few hours working unpaid for your insurance agent every day would be a sign of madness – even if it didn’t involve risking the wrath of your boss.  Doing it for a union, on the other hand, is a sign of hope.  But most union locals don’t look like that, in UNITE HERE or in the United States.

Too often, unions do sell themselves as businesses or service providers: sign a card, pay dues, and sit back and enjoy our protection and benefits.  At best, that’s a false promise.  At worst, it’s a recipe for extinction.  That’s because a union contract, or a law, is just a piece of paper unless workers are prepared to defend it.  Where companies follow the rules, either it’s a reversible act of forbearance, or it’s because workers have found the leverage to make them.

When workers seek to organize a union, companies often get away with campaigns to terrorize them out of it.  When workers try to negotiate a contract for the first time, the odds are high that their employer will sabotage negotiations so they never reach a contract.  Even where workers have had a union for years, companies are increasingly locking them out at contract time – that is, forcing them out of work and not letting them come back to work until they agree to major concessions.

All over the country, there are unions beating back these attacks.  But it doesn’t happen through the efforts of union staff alone.  It takes smart strategy combined with a movement of workers to make it happen.  That’s why the complaint that “Right to Work” allows free-riding, while accurate and perhaps politically smart, is nonetheless somewhat ironic.  In any union that’s effective, there’ll be some workers who free-ride, dues or not, on their co-workers that do what it really takes to win: tracking down clients and turning them against their boss, visiting non-union workers at home, marching on their managers, picketing their company.

There’s a lot to hate about “Right to Work.”  But what’s worst about it isn’t that it lets some people get union representation for free.  It’s that it makes the difficult work of building a true workers’ organization that much harder.  First, because sapping resources hurts staffing, and can lure unions into the trap of focusing on selling the value of paying dues rather than pushing workers to do much more.  And second, because making fee-paying optional gives bosses another opportunity to campaign against the union.

Every union local, and every union member, faces a choice between unionism that acts and is treated like a business, and unionism that acts like a social movement.  To survive after losing the fight in the statehouse, Indiana labor needs to win the fight in a thousand break rooms and living rooms – not just over whether it’s worth paying dues, but whether it’s worth joining the struggle.