Lost amidst the wall-to-wall coverage of Predatorgate last week, yet another bunch of political appointees from the Bush administration quietly destroyed a hard-won right for millions of Americans: the right to unionize. The political implications are greater still.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling should have been front-page news for days; it wasn’t. Organized labor in the U.S. has become so marginalized, and mainstream media so routinely ignores labor issues, that practically nobody noticed.
The NLRB ruling came as a long-awaited response to a series of cases, which I wrote about in July, collectively known as Kentucky River. In the cases, employers were bidding to break nursing unions by having the nurses reclassified as supervisors, which, under the notoriously anti-union 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, are legally prohibited from unionizing. The attempt came despite the fact that the nurses in question didn’t hire, fire, set policy, mete out discipline, or set schedules. The logic was that more senior workers “oversaw” the work of less senior ones and employees with less training, such as nurses’ aides.
Such a ruling, it was feared at the time, could be applied widely as precedent to almost any employee who worked with apprentices (i.e., most of the trade unions), less experienced workers, or colleagues with less training in a particular skill. AFL-CIO organizing director Stewart Acuff estimated in July that the worst possible scenario, in which the NLRB would issue the broadest possible ruling, could disenfranchise eight million American workers from the ability to organize. Organized labor in the U.S., decimated by free trade, loss of manufacturing jobs, and decades of membership erosion, these days only has 12 million members.
So how did the ruling turn out? “It’s the worst decision they could have made,” Acuff says now. “It’s the worst single labor board decision since there’s been a labor board, the single worst union decision since the Taft-Hartley Act. It confirmed all of our fears. It took eight million people who could form a union out from any possibility of forming a union.”
The AFL-CIO, of course, is planning to fight the ruling. Acuff ticks off the strategies: litigation, negotiating local contracts with specific waivers of the NLRB ruling (including job actions if necessary), and working with Congressional Democratic staff members in the hopes that more Democratic power in Congress could lead to legislation overriding the NLRB ruling. Kentucky River, says Acuff drily, “clarifies what’s at stake in the midterms.”
Ah, yes. Labor, elections, and the Democrats. For decades, organized labor in the U.S. has relied on the Democratic Party to do its legislative bidding, and the results (as with, say, free trade) have been mixed at best. Amazingly, however, Democrats on Capitol Hill were almost completely MIA in either publicizing the pending ruling, pressuring the NLRB, or reacting last week to the ruling itself.
Why is it amazing? Not because Democrats are stiff-arming organized labor; that’s old news. But this ruling both affects and is aimed at not just unions, but the Democrats themselves. “There’s no justification for this decision; it’s just a way to weaken the labor movement,” says Acuff. “These guys (the politically appointed NLRB) are actively trying to weaken worker power and worker strength and lower the standard of living for workers.”
Acuff has his turf to defend, but weakening labor is as much the means to an end as the end itself. For all the Dems’ legislative fickleness and reliance on DLC-style corporate cash, unions still contribute a lot of money to local and national races on Democrats’ behalf. Even more importantly, they’re critical to the Democratic Get Out the Vote effort, providing volunteers and shoe leather to walk precincts, doorbell, and ferry people to polling places. Destroy what’s left of organized labor in the U.S., and you also take out a big chunk of the Democrats’ electoral infrastructure.
How many employers will use this ruling to either break existing unions or forestall new ones? Hard to say. But at least 120 disputed unionization elections were put on hold in cases before the NLRB this spring and summer by employers anxious to see what the NLRB would rule, and whether they could simply render their particular dispute moot by reclassifying their employees right out of their union elections or contracts. Many of them now can.
The NLRB ruling didn’t get much media play, but union members certainly noticed. With only a month until the midterm elections, only a small sliver of the American public wasn’t already pissed off by Katrina, Iraq, or the spectacle of the entire Republican House Leadership covering up for a known pedophile colleague for at least five years (if you believe ABC news, that is, part of the evil liberal media conglomerate, Disney). For anyone not already enraged by these or dozens of other transgressions (e.g., the ongoing, direct assault on the U.S Constitution), here’s another alienated constituency to add to the list: anyone who is, has ever been, or might ever want to be a union member. The Bush administration certainly has a flair for energizing its opponents.
With these sorts of actions and trends, what is the great hope of Republican strategists in November? (Beyond outright theft, that is?) “Microtargeting.” Aptly named, because Republicans are shrinking their pool of potential supporters every day. Let’s hope the Democrats can take advantage of it this year, and then have the guts to dare George Bush to veto a bill overriding the Kentucky River ruling.
Because if they don’t, at least one or another dim bulb in the Democratic leadership must realize, Democrats will soon either have to completely reinvent themselves structurally -– something the activist base very much wants anyway –- or face such a structural and financial disadvantage that they won’t be very competitive in 2008.
Did the NLRB take such things into account in Kentucky River? This, remember, is the administration that politicizes everything. You decide.
