Card Check: Labor's Charlie Brown Moment?

[Omaha Steve]

http://newpolitics.mayfirst.org/fromthearchives?nid=178

About Author
Robert Fitch has worked as a union organizer; he is the author of Solidarity for Sale (NY: Public Affairs, 2006).

The Passive Revolution

Sometimes the story is just an appendage to the back-story. What it means for Sisyphus to watch his rock roll back down the hill can't be understood unless we know it was not exactly the first time. Organized labor's recent effort to move the Employee Free Choice Act -- popularly known as "card check" -- up Capitol Hill involves a similar back-story.

Jimmy Hoffa had only recently gone missing. Jimmy Carter sat in the White House. And unions still represented one of five private sector workers when the AFL-CIO began its lightning campaign to close the loopholes in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, loopholes that allowed employers to fire pro-union workers and forestall union representation by a Fabian strategy of endless legal delays.

Carter had not only pledged support, he even wrote the bill himself. His Labor Law Reform bill mandated elections in thirty days after unions obtained a majority by signing representation cards ("card check"). Yet Carter told Labor to be patient; he had other legislative priorities. (Like the Panama Canal Treaty.) And by 1978, when the bill was finally introduced, the Administration had lost its political capital. Republicans filibustered it to death.<1>

In the twelve years of Republican rule following Carter, organized labor's private sector domain shrank to one in nine workers. But the election of Bill Clinton revived hopes for labor law reform -- expectations that were only somewhat jarred when newly appointed Labor Secretary Robert Reich opined in the New York Times that "The jury is still out on whether the traditional union is necessary for the new workplace."<2> Clinton insisted that he backed labor law reform; just not right away. So he appointed a panel of experts to study it. The Dunlop Commission labored twenty months before delivering a report providing only tepid support for reform, but barren in any case because by then the Republicans had taken over Congress.<3>

Fourteen years passed. But at last, after the fall 2008 elections, labors' chiefs discerned a parting of the legislative waters. Now, for the first time in a generation, the Democrats had what was practically a filibuster proof majority. With organized labor down to just one out of 14 private sector workers, prospects for passage of what was now called the "Employee Free Choice Act" seemed brilliant. EFCA was a beefed up version of the Carter plan -- only with triple penalties for employer violations; binding arbitration after 120 days of negotiations to get a first contract; and the card check option without having to hold secret ballot elections.

FULL story at link.

[bread_and_roses]

1. just read that - pretty stunning - highly recommend to others

lots of things I didn't know ... now I have to fight the impulse to just go commit hari-kari over the hopelessness of it all...

It does go a long way toward an understanding of the intractability of suspicion and resentment of unions among non-organized workers - at least, gives one a possible theoretical framework for it - as well as the deep-seated resentment one encounters toward their own union by many members.

thanks for posting it, Omaha.

[demosincebirth]

2. The workingman has alway gotten the shaft.