Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » EFCA

So Long Card Check

jstuart — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:12:11 +0000

New Orleans Steven Greenhouse reported in the Times today what most in the labor movement have come to expect for quite a while: card check is not going to emerge in any final labor law reform at this time.

Card check, as many must know, is a procedure allowing for recognition of a union as the workers’ representative based on counting the workers’ voluntarily signed union authorization cards, rather than going to a government supervised election. Put politicians in the squeeze with business and add the confusion over workplace “democracy” and elections, and all of us knew this was going to be a hard, hard sell.

Quick elections would get the job done and probably make bargaining a little easier, so there’s still a heartbeat for real reform.

More troubling to me was seeing that Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania were key members of the gang of six that are pushing for this watering down of employee free choice. Senator Pryor from Arkansas is to be expected as a moderate voice, and if he can bring Senator Blanche Lincoln from Arkansas and leverage Senator Mary Landrieu from Louisiana, then we may not have to cross the street in Little Rock when we see him coming down the same side.

But, I don’t get Brown from Ohio, where unions still have some size and scale and were absolutely fundamental in his election just a few short years ago. Furthermore a key architect of his victory, as campaign manager, was John Ryan, who had been executive secretary of the Cleveland AFL-CIO. You can’t get much closer to labor than that, and Ryan was no pork chopper, but a guy who had gone from leadership of Jobs with Justice to running a big central body. How could Brown have become a “moderate” on labor law reform?

Specter is more troubling. A former Republican until months ago, he had chilled the prospects before his switch and has been looking for a compromise to get back in labor’s graces, so maybe this is a face saver for him.

But, Sherrod Brown? If this is true, we have big troubles ahead of us.

Crawfishing on Employee Choice

jstuart — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:08:27 +0000

New Orleans A full page ad ran in my local paper in New Orleans thanking Senator Mary Landrieu from SEIU. Must be reverse psychology, because Louisiana’s senior senator is just leaving workers twisting in the wind or worse. A friend in a sister local told me the other day that she had run into the Senator, and she wanted to be thanked for not having publicly said she was not committed to voting for the Employee Free Choice Act. Huh?
Landrieu is crawfishing around on EFCA so far. She was with labor in the past, but is running now, and for no reason, since he is in very beginning of a new six year term. She doesn’t have the excuses that an Arlen Specter (PA) or Blanche Lincoln (AR) might claim who are facing potentially tough elections.
Truth is that too many of our labor sisters and brothers continue to give Landrieu a pass on the hard votes like this urgent need for labor law reform. My building trades’ buddies continue to swoon as they say her name and turn a blind eye to the knife being turned in the back of workers throughout Louisiana. What’s up with that? It just makes it way too easy when labor is on the ropes anyway for Mary to take a powder when we need her the most to do right and do what she has done before and vote with us for labor law reform.
The Landrieu, Lincoln, and Pryor votes from the middle south that should be stalwarts that we can count on are killing us more than the Vitters and other haterators of workers in the Senate. Even the President knows we don’t have a vote count our way.
If I don’t smell death in the air for this measure, I sure can smell people trying to make a deal in the best way possible as soon as we can.

Employee Free Choice Compromises

jstuart — Sat, 09 May 2009 19:09:55 +0000

St. Petersburg Meeting with the WARN (Worker Action and Research Network) staff yesterday in St. Pete, we found ourselves talking about Wal-Mart and the organizing challenge represented by huge retail employers like W-M in the US and Canada. All of which brings up the daunting issue of labor law reform and the imbalance now that favors such companies over workers and unions in such a woeful fashion.

The papers were full of reports of possible compromises looking for a way to secure a vote here or there. Some of it was patently absurd. Workers just can’t seem to catch a break!

Good example: Chamber of Commerce. One story, I think by the Times’ Greenhouse said the Chamber was demanding 45 days between filing and an election – heck, the average now is less than than I think! These folks are obviously just obfuscating.

There is talk about “quick” elections in the 21 day or 3 week range, which would be about half the average now. Anything might be better than what we have, but one world of hurt can be administered to workers in 3 weeks by these lawyer and consultant goons, so it’s unclear whether that will solve the problem or any real problem at all?

Senator Diane Feinstein from California seemed to be shopping a compromise that would forego elections if a majority of workers mailed in their signed cards to the NLRB for cross checking. Frankly, that’s a hard one for me to follow. A business might want to challenge the demand for recognition if it is presented to the labor board, but would not if it were mailed to the labor board? Would the future rely on constant litigation trying to prove whether a worker personally went to the mailbox or had a friend or their local union representative go to the mailbox for them? Huh?

Why all of the grabbing at straws? This is broken. Fix it!