There has been considerable outcry about economic apartheid in the United States. Corporate profits and CEO compensation have climbed to record highs — accompanied by rising poverty rates, 46 million Americans without health insurance, loss of pensions for an increasing number of workers, and deteriorating workplace safety standards, including more deaths in the mines.
According to the Center for Economic Policy Research, the federal minimum wage, in current dollars, is at its lowest level in 50 years. This is a major problem here in our state. The Gazette noted: “If you work in West Virginia, you’re more likely to bring home minimum wage — or less — than any other state except Oklahoma, which is tied for first.”
Furthermore, employers are squeezing even harder. Wal-Mart, according to The Wall Street Journal, is moving “1.3 million workers from predictable shifts to a system based on the number of customers in store at a given time.” In this manner, hourly low-wage workers will become subject to having their time turned on or off like water from a spigot.
This turn of events has not only shattered the national social contract, it has also seriously eroded the democratic voting process. Disengagement and disenchantment have reduced voter participation to the lowest level of any industrial nation in the world. The result has been growing control over both economic and political life by fewer and fewer people, primarily those who are affluent and privileged.
Abraham Lincoln once stated that a nation cannot endure half free and half slave. Similarly, the nation cannot survive when its people are free politically but enslaved economically.
The labor movement has proposed a modest step to help rectify the problem through the Employee Free Choice Act. The act would deal with the reality that workers find it increasingly impossible to form unions. According to an article by Sheldon Friedman in the Labor Studies Journal, “of the 60 million nonunion workers who tell pollsters that they want a union in their workplace, last year fewer than 70,000 succeeded in forming one.”
Obstacles are so major that currently only 12 percent of wage and salary U.S. workers are union members, a rate that has steadily declined from 20 percent in 1983 and over 30 percent during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The rate will undoubtedly decline sharply again in the aftermath of the National Labor Relations Board’s recent decision that anyone who supervises anyone, even with the slightest direction, is no longer eligible for union membership.
The Employee Free Choice Act would:
Provide for certification of a union as the bargaining representative if the National Labor Relations Board finds that a majority of employees in a unit has signed authorizations designating the union as their bargaining representative. This procedure, similar to what occurs in Canada, was the intent of the National Relations Act in 1935. However, NLRB decisions and Taft-Hartley amendments changed the process to permit employers to request an election. During the interval prior to the election, workers are subjected to firings, intimidation, hostility, work-place tension, surveillance and the campaigns of anti-union consultants.
According to Kate Bronfenbrenner at Cornell University, 25 percent of all employers illegally fire at least one employee during worker campaigns to form a union. Penalties for such actions are so minimal that most employers treat them as a minor cost of doing business. As a result, those who initially sign cards are often long-gone or too intimidated to vote by the time the NLRB conducts an election.
Provide that if no agreement on a first contract between an employer and a newly certified union has been reached after 90 days of bargaining, either the employer or the union may request mediation by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. If the service is unable to bring the parties to agreement after 30 days of mediation, either party may refer the dispute to binding arbitration.
Presently, the policy is that employers must simply “bargain in good faith” if the union has been certified. However, consultants are hired to ensure that the process goes nowhere, since after one year of prolonging the process, the employer can seek to decertify the union. During this time, labor turnover and employee dissatisfaction about results can take their toll. As a result, according to Bronfenbrenner, in 32 percent of the cases where workers vote for union representation, the workers are still without a contract a year later.
Provide effective remedies — including injunctive relief and monetary penalties — against employer coercion. Specifically, the bill would increase damages to three times the amount of back pay lost, if an employee is illegally discharged for union activity. In addition, the act would permit the National Labor Relations Board to obtain injunctive relief when workers are fired or other significant violations of employees’ rights occur during organizing efforts. Currently, the Taft-Hartley amendments permit the NLRB to seek only federal court orders on behalf of employers.
When America was in the midst of the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration championed the Wagner Act and similar legislation to help working people obtain higher wages and more benefits. Since the process has broken down, it is probably time to revisit that way of thinking. Society as a whole would benefit from more equality, less poverty, higher wages, better health care, improved pension coverage and greater participation in the democratic process, both politically and at the workplace. This adds up to the need to have a revitalized and invigorated labor movement in this country.
David, a WVU-Tech professor, is a Gazette contributing columnist.
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