American Workers: Shackled to Labor Law

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http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13181/american_workers_shackled_to_labor_law



Members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers protest outside a Trader Joe's grocery store in Manhattan on Feb. 28, 2011. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Republicans hate the National Labor Relations Board. But they’re not the only ones. In speeches to workers and testimony in Congress in the ’80s and ’90s, then-AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland repeatedly declared that union members would be better served by “the law of the jungle.” Some union presidents agreed, including Richard Trumka, who now heads the AFL-CIO. In 1987, Trumka called for abolishing both the law’s “provisions that hamstring labor” and “the affirmative protections of labor that it promises but does not deliver.”

In other words, it’s not just Mitt Romney who argues the National Labor Relations Board – which interprets and enforces labor law – does more harm than good.

That’s in part because the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), as amended by Congress and interpreted by the courts, bans or restricts labor’s most effective tactics. The occupations of workplaces that fueled momentum for the NLRA, passed by Congress in 1935, are now illegal under it. The aggressive strikes – shutting down workplaces or even entire cities – that forged the modern labor movement have largely been replaced with strikes that are essentially symbolic. While anti-choice groups can target Planned Parenthood by pressuring the Komen Foundation not to fund it, and progressives can hurt Rush Limbaugh by calling on advertisers to drop his show, unions face unique legal restrictions on mounting equivalent “secondary boycott” campaigns that spread a struggle throughout a supply chain.

Of course, when Republican presidential candidates bash the NLRB, it’s for restricting business, not unions. On paper, the NLRA actually commits the government “to promote collective bargaining” and requires most companies to recognize and negotiate with unions that win elections. It made it illegal for companies to spy on, threaten or retaliate against workers for union activism or other “concerted activity.”

But reality has proven to be a different story. “This labor law is a scam,” says Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America. “It is garbage. … It’s a fucking lie.”

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1. Thanks for this insight into a very interesting & important situation.