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Cards Stacked against Labor
Source Carl Finamore, IAM/ATE 1781 (ret)
Date 09/08/21/02:27

Cards Stacked against Labor
By Carl Finamore

ALL KINDS OF techniques are used to reverse losing streaks in Las Vegas or Atlantic City. Switching decks, tables or croupiers is one way. Another is to walk out of the casino and take your action somewhere else. It’s still a gamble but maybe with better odds.

The problem with the labor movement is that they never leave the table or take their action elsewhere. Predictably, labor's latest major legislative goals in Congress have been pushed aside. There seems little chance now for either a viable government alternative to private health insurance or of suggested democratic reforms of the National Labor Relations Act.

Of course, the house odds in Congress always strongly favor big business and unions are seldom able to gain an edge. That's the record and everyone knows it. But unions keep laying down more sucker bets than a depressed and down on his luck Tony Soprano.

Yet, unions can still recoup their losses by putting aside their skittish “friends” in Congress for a moment and returning to what originally made them so strong – active members and hard bargaining.

It is time to focus on organizing the already organized union members to prepare for tough contract negotiations, the only time powerful threats of strike action hang ominously in the air. But with union numbers in serious decline, there is no time to waste.

Private sector membership is now below eight percent. A steady, unnerving decline as the non-union sector continues to expand. Labor’s share of the auto industry, for example, shrank from roughly 60 percent of the workforce in the early 1980s to about 30 percent in 2006 with even less representation for hundreds of thousands of parts workers as Chrysler, Ford and GM spun off these divisions.1

There are three issues which, I believe, can begin to galvanize the membership to retake valuable territory previously ceded without much of a fight.

One Union, One Standard
One benefit of the Railway Labor Act (RLA) is that it stipulates national contracts. Airline and rail workers from the same carrier and in the same bargaining class and craft, north and south, east and west, all enjoy the same wages, benefits and working conditions.

This is a powerful unifying factor and should be the example for all negotiations. The other major national labor law, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), applies to most other union employees outside of airlines and rail. It does not have this national requirement. Each local employee unit fends for itself. It is, therefore, each union’s choice whether to take a firm stand defending industry and trade standards across the board.

UNITE-HERE international union operates under the NLRA and has successfully incorporated this effective strategy several years ago. The national headquarters fully supported its San Francisco Local 2 in 2004-2006 during an employer three-day lock-out, a strike and a two-year boycott. Local 2 ultimately won demands to have the same contract standards throughout the city regardless of how large or how small the hotel.

But most major unions have long abandoned such an approach. One example is the United Steelworkers union (USWA) who decided to go “along with a decidedly less adversarial tone [when] the 1986 bargaining round produced separate agreements with LTV, National, Bethlehem, Inland, Armco and US Steel, which cut the standard.... In abandoning uniform industry wage rates…”2 the union allowed each Steel company to cut its own deal according to how many crocodile tears shed over their individual economic problems.

This approach accelerated the decline of the USWA and of its members’ standard of living. It also divided steelworkers doing the same work into different wage categories, thus hindering their solidarity. As an alternative, national industry bargaining for common standards would challenge employer attempts to use economic formulas to divide workers according to region and company and would retain a level playing field for all business competitors.

Common Expiration Dates, Coordinated Bargaining
About the only good that came out of airline bankruptcies the last several years is that the collective bargaining agreements were all lined up by the judge to expire around the same time. Because creditors of UAL demanded five-year contracts at the minimum, all UAL unions opted for the same shortest possible duration of the concessionary contracts. That five-year span is up at the end of 2009.

Negotiations are now being conducted with United Airlines (UAL) by all the unions representing the overwhelming majority of UAL’s 48,000 national workforce. In order of size, they are the baggage handlers and customer service employees (IAM), flight attendants (AFA), pilots (ALPA), mechanics (IBT-Teamsters) and engineers (IFPTE).

It is a good thing that all the unions are bargaining at the same time but it could even be more effective if negotiations were coordinated, which they are not.

In 1969, there was a 102-day GE strike by 150,000 workers represented by 13 international unions. It was hugely successful largely because there was a Coordinating Bargaining Committee (CBC) representing all the unions who were united on the big issue of reaching parity with workers in steel, auto and aerospace.

This powerful example of coordinated bargaining still impacts today’s GE bargaining. A United Electrical workers (UE) 2007 newsletter explains that “prior to the start of negotiations, each CBC union sends representatives to a series of CBC meetings to discuss contract proposals. Each union, in their separate negotiations with GE, is free to submit whatever proposals their members want, but through the CBC we try to achieve unity on the key bargaining issues. A union that feels strongly about a particular bargaining goal will try to convince the other unions to adopt it as a proposal so that the union will face GE as a united front on the issue.”3

This united bargaining approach is seldom adopted. In fact, labor’s decline has been accompanied recently by more bitter divisions than solidarity. Andy Stern, the leader of the 2.2 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), for example, has embarked on a strategy of raiding members of other unions rather than staying focused on the 100 million-plus unorganized.

Leaving aside these and other tragic examples of crumbling union principles, contract negotiations should establish common expiration dates throughout their particular economic sector. Different union bargaining objectives could be resolved through genuine labor coordination as past history demonstrates.

Organize to Negotiate, Negotiate to Organize
It seems Congress is not likely to pass legislation reducing employer harassment and threats aimed at union organizers. Staggering numbers of workers are terminated each day for attempting to legally organize a union. Many “estimates suggest that almost one-in-five union organizers or activists can expect to be fired as a result of their activities in a union election campaign.”4

Congressional failure to pass urgently needed democratic reforms of the NLRA such as the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is another reason labor must be more aggressive at the bargaining table.

There are currently several international unions who have successfully negotiated majority sign up at a number of locations but they are in a minority. Nonetheless, this is a huge job security issue. Union workers have seen their wages, benefit’s, pensions and working conditions steadily deteriorate because of competition from non union sectors of the economy.

We must win at the bargaining table what has been negotiated away by our “friends” in Congress. Contract negotiations should require employer neutrality and majority sign up procedures at all new expansion plants and with all contracted vendors.

This would give union organizers a fighting chance to expand the union power base and regain the footing that has slipped away over the last several decades. Had the United Auto Workers union (UAW) employed such a bargaining strategy several years ago, they could have prevented expansion of non-union auto plants throughout the south and among the essential auto-parts production sector.

Of course, all these steps are predicated on a militant and mobilized membership ready to strike. This is no easy task. It can only be accomplished through a sustained, long-term campaign to inform and interact with members. It will certainly be difficult to reverse decades of disinterest, apathy and unresponsiveness among millions of union members.

Some would consider it a long shot but it really is our best bet to improve the lives of working families in this country. Even more emphatically, I would argue, it’s our only real chance.

Carl Finamore is former President (ret), Air Transport Employees, Local Lodge 1781, IAMAW. He can be reached at Local1781@yahoo.com

1. David Moberg, In These Times, June 7, 2006
2. Robert Bruno, Associate Professor of Labor and Industrial Relations, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of Illinois [research paper was undated]
3. UE-GE 2007 Contract News & Information
4. Center for Economic & Policy Research, January 2007

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