Yesterday, I attended a House Education and Labor HELP Subcommittee joint hearing with the Senate Employment and Workplace Safety Subcommittee focusing on the impact of recent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board and its impact on worker’s rights. The AFL-CIO paid for my travel to the hearing, but since this is an issue close to me I would have been glad to attend anyway. You see, the entire reason I ended up as an unemployed blogger more than three years ago is because a National Labor Relations board ruling in 2004 placed significant restrictions on the collective bargaining rights of graduate student employees of private universities. My previous job had been working with the AFL-CIO to organize graduate employees at the University of Illinois at Chicago, but my position was cut after new organizing possibilities dried up with that ruling.
More in the extended entry.
At the start of the hearings, straying somewhat from his official testimony, subcommittee chairman Rob Andrews stated that he sought to discover if the decisions at the NLRB in recent years were “born out of an ideological agenda.” Ninety minutes later, toward the end of the first session of the hearing, Senator Ted Kennedy asked Robert Battista, Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, what he thought the overall impact of the last five years of rulings by the NLRB had been. Battista replied that “the pendulum has moved from the left to the right.” I have to admit, I was surprised that Battista would offer such a blunt, “yes” response to Andrews’s opening question. By his own admission, Battista has engaged in an ideological agenda at the NLRB, seeking to correct what he saw as a left-wing imbalance of previous rulings. One does not swing the pendulum from “the left to the right” without intentionally pursuing an ideological agenda.
Overtly pursuing right-wing ideological agendas is nothing new to Bush administration appointees, as we have seen in countless agencies and judicial appointments. What makes the ideological agenda of the NLRB stand out is its two-pronged strategy of dismantling the purpose and function of the entire agency. Founded seventy years ago to promote collective bargaining and settle employment disputes under the National Labor Relations Act, first Battista openly declared in the hearing that the purpose of the NLRB was revised by Taft-Hartley in 1947 to ensure “employee free choice” rather than the promotion of collective bargaining. In practice, “employee free choice” means consistently favoring the employer in cases before the board to such a degree that unions and workers cease to avail themselves of the board in order to settle workplace disputes. Over the past ten years, there has been a 46% decline in cases before the board, including a 26% decline over the last two years alone. (click for source, see footnote #5, page 6). This isn’t because, as one member of the hearing joked, a wave of labor peace had broken out in America, but rather because unions no longer have confidence it will do anything except rule in favor of management. In a nutshell, that is the core ideological strategy of the current NLRB: first, change the prupose of the agency, and then consistently rule in a manner so overtly pro-employer that few people avail themselves of it.
Another witness at the nearings, NLRB member Wilma Liebman, who frequently dissents from the majority rulings of the current NLRB, described herself as a “strict constructionist, or originalist,” in her interpretation of the National Labor Relations Act. At one point in the hearings, Tom Price of Georgia asked member Liebman why she opposed freedom, and implied that she was a communist. Undaunted, she noted that even the purported ideological goal of “employee free choice” claimed by chairman Battista does not accurately describe the collective impact of the rulings of the board. For example, she noted that while employers are not required to post notices in non-unionized workplaces informing employees on how to form a union, employers in unionized workplaces are required to post notices informing employees on how to decertify unions. From her testimony, p. 8-9:
Now, when an employer agrees to voluntarily recognize a union, after the union has demonstrated majority support, it must post a notice informing employees that it has done so and telling them how they can get rid of the union. That posting opens a 45-day window period, during which employees — provided they marshal 30 per cent support among their co-workers — may petition the Board for an election to decertify the union.
When questioned about this, Battista declared it was analogous to the moment in a wedding when the person performing the wedding asks “if anyone should see why these two people should not be joined, speak now or forever hold your piece.” To the amusement of many in the room, Liebman astutely pointed out that, in a wedding, such a question was not left open for a period of 45 days.
With the tide clearly turning against the Bush National Labor Relations Board in the hearings, toward the end of the hearings, ranking Republican member John Kline lamented about the proportion of Democratic and Republican witnesses called to testify. He noted that Democrats had called three witnesses for every one witness that Republicans had called. However, he also noted that this 3-1 practice had been established during Republican control of the committee, and thought now that perhaps that imbalance was a mistake. It was yet another moment in the hearings when the overt imbalance of the previous five years was brought into the open. Perhaps his lament was sincere, and Kline will see the light not only on previous imbalances, but on future ones concerned with the NLRB, too. However, since he repeatedly claimed to the gathered audience, via prepared statements, that the hearings were “political theater,” I for one am not holding my breath. If this was merely political theater, at this point we certainly need different actors. Or, at the very least, we need actors who are willing to play their assigned roles, and promote collective bargaining rights.
Erin Johansson has more on the hearings.