New Orleans

Here’s the deal on a NLRB rule-making procedure.  There are sixty days to get comments in, fourteen days for responses, and a hearing that will be held on July 18^th on the matter.  The Board (the actual NLRB commissioners) will then weigh all of the testimony, make some minor changes and perhaps report and print a final rule by the end of 2011 by my guess.  The Chamber and some business groups will sue (count on this!) both challenging the right of the NLRB to make such administrative rule changes and raising some technical issues.  Lower and appeal courts will uphold the NLRB’s authority here, but the real hope will be to get the matter to the Supreme Court and hope that the current hard right dogmatic ideology of the court gives them a “Hail Mary” here.  This is not a quick process.  Those with long memories might remember the rule making process on the number of units that would be appropriate in hospital elections.  It followed a similar timetable over several years to implementation.  The other wrinkle on this will be the likelihood of legislation being introduced in Congress to nullify any of these changes.  Loss of both Houses of Congress will guarantee passage and only a Presidential veto and tight enough margins to prevent an override will allow even these minor rule changes to endure depending on how much hullabaloo is raised on this mess.

The meat of the matter leaves less on the plate than starving unions need.  The holy grail had been 10-day elections from the date the representation petition is filed until the date of the election.  That would have been a game changer.  This is not, and in fact much of it is more a shrinking by days than weeks on the election calendar.

• Technically, more email and email filings will be allowed.  This is more convenient certainly, but faxes are already pretty standard so the calendar won’t really shorten by much here.
• Email receipt of the election voting list which is known as the Excelsior list after the Excelsior Underwear decision many decades ago guaranteeing receipt of the list within seven (7) days.  In truth the NLRB has done a better job getting the list quickly anyway, often the same day or next day after a stipulation is agreed, so the practice may be ahead of the rule.  The rule proposes to include phone numbers, which will make a difference, particularly if those are cell numbers, though the rule doesn’t specify.
• Pre-election hearings on unit issues would be after the election on issues involving less than 20% of the unit. Right now, union organizers swallow huge volumes of garbage about workers in and out of the unit in order to get a stipulated election and avoid a hearing.  This part of the rule virtually guarantees that almost all elections that are won by unions will have post-election hearings! The new strategy will be to spit out garbage on less than 20% of the unit and swallow the difference to speed the election.  Besides guaranteeing more hearings and happy lawyers on both the labor and management sides of the bar, this is actually likely to significantly slow final certifications and therefore the bargaining process to collective agreements.  Hearings take time to schedule and be heard, there are always common and customary delays for briefs, and there is no timetable for NLRB decisions on briefs, and then there will be almost guaranteed pro forma appeals from the region to the board in DC on any adverse part of the decision (unless the swallowing happens now!), all of which will delay the first meeting of the parties to try to move to an agreement.  This is a “pay me now” or “pay me later” problem.  For unions to survive winning will require a different organizing model, but that’s a subject for another day.
• The new rule would require the company to articulate a written statement of position on the outstanding issues.  This is a good thing, though case officer’s handbook currently is clear that a hearing is not warranted and should not be scheduled if there are not clear issues, which forces the agents to buck up to the companies on this issue, which many do not for fear of appeals to DC.  The new rule would make hearing such appeals discretionary which is also good, though for companies who want to drag their feet, this will only accelerate the timetable for them to seek court review.  Listen for the crying of stuck pig judges about their dockets being filled with NLRB cases in the future!  My own feeling is that this is only going to shorter most elections by a day or two though in large, bitterly contested units like hospitals and auto plants this will make a huge difference that might be measured in weeks and months.

Right now many regions on normal elections try to achieve a 21-day election by pushing both parties to stipulate and get their business done.  The rule making does not mandate any date change but the hard date on 7 days to a hearing, but once a hearing is required the clock is just going to run on anyway.  My bet is that these rule changes, if and when adopted, and if along these lines, might move a 21-day election standard in the first year or two after the rule making down to a 15-17 day practical standard with case agents pushing for 14 days, all of which would be good, but given the real problems on organizing through the NLRB, I’m not sure will fundamentally change the organizing climate.

New Orleans

John and I go back almost 40 years now to common ties with welfare rights even before ACORN and to his several weeks in Little Rock one summer helping organize unemployed workers with ACORN around 1972 or so.  It’s sometimes a rocky road but given his last 15 years as an erstwhile and sometimes controversial keeper of the keys in the “house of labor,” I see these kinds of initiatives among “informal” workers as a kind of “values” statement for John and his inside advocacy within the corridors of labor power that help justify some of the more contentious weight he has carried in various disputes.  His personal crusade as general counsel for immigration reform was one such touchstone, as well as his merging of labor law and labor organizing strategies with his efforts to support the organizing of carwashers in Los Angeles as an affiliate of the Steelworkers is another.  Not all of these efforts have worked out well, and who despite the steps forward labor made in the 2009-10 campaign for immigration reform, it’s a mixed bag as well and a conundrum still unresolved.

Nonetheless there is no questioning the sincerity with which the AFL-CIO has adopted some of the “newer” forms of organizing under a bigger tent philosophy particularly with new organizing experiments among informal workers including day laborers, domestic workers, and others.  The AFL-CIO has formally taken steps which would have been unheard of 20 years ago to come to agreement with organizations representing these groups like NDLON (the National Day Laborers’ Organizing Network), Enlace (a multi-national membership based organization of where Local 100 and ACORN International have been charter members), and the Domestic Workers Alliance, which recently won breakthrough labor standards protection in New York State and seems to have new campaigns in California and others pending in the next year in Colorado, Maryland, and Massachusetts.  They have also signed agreements with the Interfaith Worker Justice, a labor/religious support organization based in Chicago and headed by our friend, Kim Bobo, and John mentioned that the Restaurant Opportunities Council (ROC) in New York and elsewhere may be moving towards a form of affiliation as well.

I have argued in Citizen Wealth and in a coming essay in Social Policy (The Maharashtra Model v.41#1) that the future of the labor movement lies not only in the USA , but worldwide in our effectively organizing what one speaker called “excluded” workers and what I call “informal” workers.  These steps by the AFL-CIO are encouraging in that sense though they are largely symbolic unfortunately.  They are signals and placeholders of change and openness without being taken seriously as “real organizing.’  These efforts by and large are not backed by resources and organizers, but by favors and suasion or the leverage of “powerful pockets” as the DWA leader argued.  All of this that is part of a successful organizing plan and what has been proven to create victories, but that’s a lot more than a piece of paper and some good dialogue.

Saying hello to John after the plenary and before my panel, I complimented him for his remarks and the AFL-CIO’s initiatives, but he quickly interrupted me with a grin, and said, “if we could only figure out how to collect dues and bring in members!”

It’s a longer conversation and a different kind of conversion experience on the way to the “new labor movement,” but as Cesar Chavez argued 40 years ago and as I say all the time, “you can’t collect dues without asking people to pay.”

This is the future, if we can just step up to get there.

New Orleans     

Furthermore how “secret” is a tape filmed at as part of a public presentation at a panel discussion of some sort at Pace University:  answer – not a secret at all!   I’ve known and worked with Lerner for decades and his long experience with union lawyers and what used to be called “corporate campaigns,” has made him one of the more careful commentators on his work that I know.  The rest of us are verifiable flap jawed loose lips compared to Steve!

BigGovernment.com, the loud and furious factually challenged hate machine run by Andrew Brietbart, who I gather now is a journalist with the Huffington Post where he must have found a home after being blocked from Fox during the mid-term elections, while labeling Lerner an ex-SEIU official who was signaling that unions and community organizations were “dead,” also reported hook-line-and-sinker that in May, according to Lerner, there would be days of rage in ten cities around JP Morgan Chase signally the beginning of the anti-banking jihad.  Hmmm.  An ex-official issuing the call to “dead” troops to storm the barricades?  Does something not add up here?

The New American website went for the bait, but at least commented on the irony behind their uproar:

“It’s unclear exactly how much influence Lerner holds or who his fellow conspirators might be. He was reportedly fired recently from SEIU, one of America’s largest and most influential unions with around two million members, for spending vast sums of money on a plot similar to the one he described during the speech. The person who introduced him at Pace University said Lerner was working on building alliances with unions and other organizations in Europe and South America.  But regardless of Lerner’s true degree of influence, the tape has attracted considerable attention and condemnation.”

Well, yes, that seems right.  You need organization and members or someone to storm the barricades, and certainly Stephen is not airlifting boots on the ground from Europe and Latin America to do actions in the US.

In short welcome to the hate-and-scare hooey machine hard at work again.

Without talking to Stephen there are some simple facts that get in the way of this fantasy, no matter how pleasing it is to contemplate:

• Lerner has not been “fired” by SEIU as they report.  He was placed on paid leave last fall to think through his contribution to the union, but was certainly present at the recent international executive board meeting.  He’s in a curious position no doubt, but it’s something like being an “injured reserve” in the NFL and waiting for the team to find a place to bring him back on the roster.
• Lerner has written a number of well circulated papers over the last year expanding on his analysis of the impact of the recession and the need to frame larger campaigns around accountability of banks and the financial system for working Americans.  He is an avowed advocate of developing campaigns to finally bring them to account, but who among us hasn’t written something close to the same, isn’t engaged in such pursuit, and doesn’t believe this is necessary?  I’ve been on TV panels with Tea Party folks, and when we get to the subject of the banks, we all sound like we are part of the hallelujah chorus and have prayed at the same church forever.  That should really share you, Glenn Beck!
• Finally, the Wall Street Journal has already reported from unnamed sources on the SEIU IEB that the union is embarking on a major 15+ city organizing campaign with expansive plans to mobilize labor and community members on economic issues from banks to local corporations.  They are following their own, different drum and clearly have their hands tied up in what may be a $100,000,000 organizing campaign mobilizing the entire union to win “climate change” in favor of unionizations again.

The right wingers need to leave Lerner alone rather than erecting yet another statute in their wax gallery of threats to America.  Knowing Stephen, he’s having a hearty laugh at all of this.   Especially since the more the Becks and Breitbarts embrace the banks, the more they are inadvertently building a huge, peace and unity bridge that will unite all of us against the ways that Wall Street, tax evading corporations (see GE in today’s papers), and the banks have ripped us off royalty from stem to stern and coast to coast.

New Orleans

A couple of things brought this to mind.

Early this morning setting up Citizen Wealth and Social Policy at a conference being held by the Association of Labor Educators, I listened to a fellow from Stoneybrook complaining to a colleague about how union leaders themselves never referred to their members any more as workers or a part of the working class, but instead talked endlessly of losing “middle-class jobs,” assaults on the “middle class,” and so forth.

Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin seemed to make sure he was always a long way out of camera shot from the statue honoring populist politician and labor backer, Robert Follette, the legendary Wisconsin freedom fighter, during the recent evisceration of public workers rights in that state, where those same rights had been pioneered.  Now it seems there was a big controversy in Maine over a 36-foot mural in the state Department of Labor building there which depicted loggers, shoemakers, shipyard workers, and others, but also had a panel on the big Jay, Maine paper strike among other things.  The Governor Paul LePage, another newly elected Republican, has ordered it removed according to one of the last labor reporters on the newspaper beat, Steven Greenhouse.  He thought it offended some business folks, even though it has been up for 3 years with no real problems.

These are more than just canaries in the mine shaft.  The history of workers and the working class in America (and elsewhere!) has always been a behind-the-doors, back-of-the-house specialty.  Hearing how attendance has dropped among the labor educators as university programs have been pared down, unions forced to eliminate education programs, and states from California to wherever in bitter political purges of funding for such work, it is clearly a situation where there’s going to be even less and less that gets out there.  The chance that what emerges will find its way into the hands of workers themselves is even more unlikely.

The signals are clear that the right wants to bleach out the last of the blue collar as they glorify greed, bankers, and high-tech, even while we bailout them out and their secretaries print out their e-mails for them.  It feels like now that they see blood in the water and feel the whip in their hand, that the effort to make workers invisible and erase what remains of their work, honor, and tradition in our culture will build up force to try to sweep everything in the way of its rage.

No longer able to command the front page with news of strikes or settlements, it appears now we will find our place in the Arts section as more obituaries are written to mark the passing of our times.

We better stop it now, while we still can!

New Orleans

How?  We could do this by upping the ante and putting protection of collective bargaining on the 2012 ballot with the Presidential election in Ohio, perhaps still the most critical of all battleground states.

Wisconsin has the right of recall and this is being engaged currently by unions and others in reaction to Governor Scott Walker’s moves to eviscerate public sector worker collective bargaining rights.  This was the successful strategy in California several years ago fueled by Congressman Darrell Issa’s resources which dislodged Governor Gray Davis within two years of his election and then replacing him with Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Wisconsin does not have a initiative and referendum procedure at the state level, so despite positive opinion polls in the state currently to protect bargaining there is no way to get there from here.  Neither New Jersey nor Indiana allow statewide initiatives and referenda, though about 20% of New Jersey’s local jurisdictions do so depending on the map this could be an opportunity to construct a tactical and strategic bulwark against some of the more draconian measures being proposed by Governor Christie there.

Were protections for union workers on the ballot in Ohio in 2012 there is no question it would energize the low-and-moderate income base, and this was certainly in evidence several years ago when ACORN and allies moved to put an increase in the minimum wage on the ballot there.  A revitalized labor movement in Ohio aligned with Obama there could make a huge difference in securing his re-election.  Tactical protective initiatives in Missouri, Nevada, Washington, and similar states that are important in the Obama column could also be important, and in several of these states workers are desperate for more protections.

There are two problems.  First, it takes a huge effort to put a measure on the ballot, mount the campaign, and hang on for the victory more than 18 months from now with the same fervor labor is showing today, even though now is the absolute perfect time to be preparing for just such efforts.  Secondly, Ohio is one of the few states that allow off-year initiatives, and given the current assault there are undoubtedly many pushing an immediate effort to place the measure on the ballot in Ohio for the fall of 2011.

A 2011 effort – and victory – might also break well for both labor and Obama if it finally proved again that these were fighting times and we had the will and way to win.  The residue of such a struggle and success might embed deeply enough to secure deeper participation in Ohio and still put Ohio in the best place for a union future and an Obama second term.

Either way these are not times for holding your cards, but demand laying down big bets while it’s still possible and it’s we are still a player in the game.

More depressing to me was reading an Ezra Klein interview with former SEIU President Andy Stern in yesterday’s Washington Post. I wish it were a case of misunderstanding or mistaken identity, but Andy seems happy enough with how his views were presented that he linked to the interview on his twitter account, so I guess this is what he really thinks.  Long and short he seems to say, his well ran dry:

“What I would say is I felt that the next strategy of change would be different. I had tried everything I knew. I was too much of a victim of the model I created. I tried Change to Win and helping Obama, and then I just ran out of Andy Stern ideas.”

I actually don’t believe that is either true or what Andy really thinks.  The rest of the interview in fact belies that quote as does his interest in broadcasting the interview.  Andy has never been short of ideas, what he seems to have realized is two more fundamental things in leaving SEIU.  First, that he could not convince people to follow his ideas, and, secondly,  after having led people to follow him  through past ventures like Change to Win, sometimes they don’t work.  It may have been the right idea, but it was the wrong strategy or set of tactics.  The rest of the ideas in the interview are feints in different directions.  I can remember how he scoffed at the German workers’ councils a dozen years ago, so it’s a little hard to see him touting them now.  I’ll think about all of that and get back to you….

But worse in all of these comments whether high or low, Twitter or Times, is that even when expressing hope they still reflect the old post-Katrina refrigerator slogan:  Hope is Not a Plan.  There still seems to be no coherent strategy or plan that pulls labor together in a more fundamental direction to rebuild and reassert.  In some ways it is too easy to see Wisconsin as a last gasp of the old school.  I heard recently that the Madison AFL-CIO was debating calling a general strike.  If called, who would come?  If we came, what would we really stop?  I want to see this and count the feet on those streets!

In the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago a breathless story about a possible $100,000,000 organizing campaign being launched by SEIU in more than a dozen cities around the country was attributed to an anonymous SEIU board member and other sources.  Whatever the merits and truth of those reports, SEIU and every other union need to pull all of their last dollars together and figure out how to survive and turn the tide and do it now, make it real, and make it very, very different, because the bell has rung on the old school and the old ideas, as Stern acknowledges, and we are running out of time and money with the tide coming in hard against us.

Time for speeches is over.  It’s only sweat that counts now.

New Orleans

Unions know the wage and benefit train has already left the station in Wisconsin and seem to concede it.  The Times today reports as much:

“The flip has emboldened Mr. Walker, the new Republican governor who has proposed the cuts to benefits and bargaining rights, arguing that he desperately needs to bridge a deficit expected to reach $3.6 billion for the coming two-year budget.

Union leaders have said they would accept the financial terms of Mr. Walker’s proposal. The more controversial provisions, though, would strip public employees of collective-bargaining rights. (emphasis added)

In Whitewater, Ben Penwell, a lawyer whose wife is a public employee, said he saw no reason to strip away workers’ bargaining rights if they had agreed to benefit cuts.

“They’re willing to do what’s necessary fiscally without giving up rights in the future,” he said.

And Pat Wellnitz, working in his accounting office on Sunday, wondered why such bargaining provisions were needed if the real problem was simply saving money.

“That’s pretty drastic even for a staunch Republican,” he said.”

The only hope in Wisconsin seems to be that the very hard, bluntness of the power play by Governor Scott Walker is so extreme in its attack on unions that it fails in Times’ columnist David Brooks’ words the “fairness” test or the old Clinton test of “sharing the pain” by favoring small businesses and more Republican unions of police and fire, while slamming teachers and other public workers.  Furthermore as indicated above Wisconsin is not a “hater-state” of what I would call the New South yet (Arizona being the most spectacular example of this new taxonomy), so some of the citizens get the fact that this is tactical extremism.

Other states will not be so lucky.  Places like Ohio already saw 8000 plus home health care workers that were state reimbursed loss collective bargaining rights by the swipe of a Governor’s pen.  There are similar concerns in Michigan for 30 to 40,000 publicly subsidized workers there.  Reading about the spitball fights that the Republican governor of New Jersey has waged with teachers and others there, it’s clear that the strategy is clearly to “defund” the progressive movement and launch attacks on as many battlefields as possible against unions and others that might be part of such forces.  I’m worried about other Republican presidential-wannabes and what they might feel they have to do in order to stay in the game.  Will we see Louisiana’s Bobbie Jindal or Florida’s Rick Scott try to dismantle what exists of collective bargaining in these states?

Collective bargaining, independent of economics, used to be seen as a foundationally appropriate aspiration for working people connected to the freedoms of speech and assembly embedded in America’s most honored and cherished traditions.  We cannot allow a situation where the argument simply devolves to unions were “once a good thing” or that we allow unions to exist in principle but not in reality.

Wisconsin and the other states following its lead raise the specter that we are now moving past the tipping point for unions and much to quickly to the vanishing point, unless we change what we are saying and doing pretty damn quickly.

“In past economic crises, populist fervor has been for expanding the power of the national government to address America’s pressing needs. Pleas for making good the nation’s commitment to equality and welfare have been as loud as those for liberty. Now the many who are struggling have no progressive champion. The left have ceded the field to the Tea Party and, in doing so, allowed it to make history. It is building political power by selling the promise of a return to a mythic past.”

Ralph correctly lauds the work being done by so many:

“Hello!  There are plenty of distinguished progressive champions lobbying, rallying, exposing, suing and organizing at the national, state and local level.  Yet they have been mostly left out of the mass media, on television and radio and in the news, feature, style, opinion and book review pages of major newspapers, including The Times.”

In his letter he finishes (or at least this was the published version) with:

“After all, mass media coverage matters greatly for social and political movements.”

In the 70’s when we were working with Ralph, I used to comment that we had to be careful because “if you lived by the press, you died by the press,” which in the crypto speech of organizers meant that if you counted on the press to build your base, then you had to also beware that when the press tired of your act, you could lose your base as easily since they controlled the gateways.  We should never denigrate the huge value of advocacy and advocates, but this is the peril of speaking to and speaking for a base, which is unorganized and not organizational.  Frankly, it was why the right knew how important it was to kill something like ACORN as a membership organization with a clearly defined base and to weaken and destroy unions for the same reason.

And, this is where Ralph is kinda wrong and speaking to our old times 30 and 40 years ago, rather than the new times where we currently organize.  Now there are more outlets for more voices both in established and informal media including the internet, so that frankly the monolithic press is dead, drowned in thousands of voices, including advocates, though still a powerful and incoherent follower of the herd once it is stampeding.  Though Ralph is right that the media amplified a lot of small sounds from the Tea Party, he is wrong to not understand that their unquestioned ability to organize and evolve a national base with deep grassroots in lots of communities and actually contend for power is something for which progressives have no answer and no current match.  Having fought at the hustings, they also sometimes lost, but also sometimes won.

It hurts me to say that despite their rudeness and their wrongful finger pointing, the Times is right that we have failed to organize a deep, grassroots base willing and able to contend for power across the country and not simply around Pennsylvania Avenue and Congressional watering holes.  Until we are willing to organize deeply and aggressively at the local level, contend for power win-lose-or-draw, and meet and match the challenge of the Tea Party at that level, any protests about unfairness are about as powerful as writing a letter to the editor of The New York Times.

Needless to say that’s just more “speaking truth to power,” and powerless by definition.

Mumbai

Perhaps there should be more protest around the USA though that would require more solidarity. Union seem to have chosen to curb their voice nationally in favor of trying to impact the midterm elections, though no candidate anywhere to my knowledge is talking about a recovery plan for public employment or a bailout plan for city and state governments. Unions are trying to cut the best deal at the bargaining table in terrible times of

draconian budgets. The huge California State Employees Association (CSEA/SEIU) with over 100,000 members cut a deal on concessions with the long 3+ month stall on approving a budget.

The real changes are likely to be more profound and enduring. I worry that these cutbacks if they continue and deepen will also ravage cities and the low and moderate income community nationally lengthening even further any economic recovery. As the service sector has replaced manufacturing as economic drivers in the jobs sector, the best of the service jobs with decent wage standards, real benefits including insurance and pensions, and job stability have been in the public sector. If these jobs are significantly diminished and in some cases eliminated by deep tax revenue losses created by fewer jobs and less property taxes due to the housing meltdown, many cities will be especially racked in crises. At one level because many cities and districts require or incentivize public employees to live within their limits. The other level will be the damage to minority worker employment stability since the level of job discrimination in the public sector is less. In places like New Orleans, which I call home, the public sector has virtually created the black middle class. The slow recovery after Katrina, a preview to the recession, can be seen in the loss of teacher jobs by the thousand coupled with the loss of city jobs as well.

If you want to look for signs of more disaster, follow the attack and slashbacks on the public sector. If you want to look for signs of any recovery, look for whether or not public jobs begin to rebound.

I have a terrible feeling reading these numbers that we have a long way to go, and it’s a global problem.

New Orleans              

            On unions Silverstein writes:  “Labor unions are abundant, but most are funded and controlled by employers or the government, and independent activists have been fired, suspended, sued, and otherwise targeted for repression.” 

            On pay Silverstein writes two things:  first, that based on a 2008 survey pay has “stagnated…at 33 cents an hour, lower than anywhere but Bangladesh,” and, secondly, that the monthly minimum wage was $45 USD in 2000 and is now $56 while buying power has been cut by 37% due to inflation.

            On monitoring and the sham that corporate social irresponsibility is foisting off on the consumer:  “Since then, an entire monitoring industry has emerged:  a profusion of auditing firms, consulting companies, NGOs…that apparel makers pay handsomely to develop monitoring tools, offer advice, and write up countless glossy reports.  For workers at apparel plants, though, the benefits have proved elusive.  A recent study…reviewed Nike’s own data and found that conditions had ‘stagnated or deteriorated’ at 78% of company’s supplier factories between 1998 and 2005.”  He adds, “…since the apparel companies’ dues pay for the monitoring firms that inspect their plants, they tend to get the lax policing that they want.”

            The article is scathing in its criticism of the International Labor Organization and its so-called “Better Factories” program labeling it a “whitewash.”

            By the end of the article I was willing to take a vow never to read Nicholas Kristof and his neo-liberal proselytizing again, which I have largely done already, since his paternalistic, hectoring tone tends to obscure his concerns anyway.  I was also encouraged to find a lengthy quote from Jeff Ballinger as well saying that today unfortunately there is “no fundamental difference in the way factories are run, because you still have the same predatory model of outsourcing.”

            A proposal that apparel workers receive nothing less than $5 USD per day and then go up by $1 USD per day is interesting, but given that the results of a huge, powerful, and seemingly effective social movement to end sweatshops and their goods in the US market has been so compromised, diluted, and now rendered impotent, by the end of the article, that seemed only a curiosity insisted on by some Harper’s editor hoping to have something in this long piece that was marginally upbeat, rather than debilitating and depressing.