Thursday, May 6, 2021

Take American labor -- and America -- off the road to serfdom

The PRO Act would add some teeth to the toothless NLRA ($50,000-100,000 fines for retaliating against union organizers) and pull some teeth from Taft-Hartley (take down right-to-work laws).  Does anybody expect this would magically triple union density from today’s 6.5% in private (non-gov) economy to 20% — even while 50% want to join a union?  When private union density was 20%, McDonald’s, Target, Walgreen’s and Walmart were not unionized.  We want them all unionized this time around, don’t we?

Half the Prime delivery drivers whose opinion I seek about federally mandated, regularly scheduled union elections (cert/recert/decert) at every private workplace have no idea in the world what I am talking about.  I guess they are from the other 50%.  They are intelligent; it seems they live in a time and place that has largely forgotten what a labor union even looks like.

The 50% who remember would kill for regularly scheduled cert/recert/decert elections.  
https://onlabor.org/why-not-hold-union-representation-elections-on-a-regular-schedule/

Only the promise of mandated cert/recert/decert elections could claw back enough Obama/Trump voters to safely swamp any Republican efforts to steal the coming elections (by putting the dominant political party in charge of counting votes for instance: the real road to serfdom).  

New York Times numbers guru Nate Cohn:
“But pinning Mrs. Clinton’s loss on low black turnout would probably be a mistake. Mr. Obama would have easily won both his elections with this level of black turnout and support. (He would have won Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin each time even if Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee had been severed from their states and cast adrift into the Great Lakes.)”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/upshot/how-the-obama-coalition-crumbled-leaving-an-opening-for-trump.html

The PRO Act is not going to start an Obama/Trump voter stampede for Republican Party exits. But, federally obliged, labor union election cycles are just what today’s democracy deprived American workers would recognize they overwhelmingly need.
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[cut-and-paste from: Which Side Are You on?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back by Thomas Geoghegan]
First, [Taft-Hartley] ended organizing on the grand, 1930s scale. It outlawed mass picketing, secondary strikes of neutral employers, sit downs: in short, everything [Congress of Industrial Organizations founder John L.] Lewis did in the 1930s.
 
And Taft-Hartley led to the “union-busting” that started in the late 1960s and continues today. It started when a new “profession” of labor consultants began to convince employers that they could violate the Wagner Act, fire workers at will, fire them deliberately for exercising their legal rights, and nothing would happen. The Wagner Act had never had any real sanctions.  …   So why hadn’t employers been violating the Wagner Act all along? Well, at first, in the 1930s and 1940s, they tried, and they got riots in the streets: mass picketing, secondary strikes, etc. But after Taft-Hartley, unions couldn’t retaliate like this, or they would end up with penalty fines and jail sentences.
[snip]

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