[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: Audit of Unions - 'only one front in Republicans' multi-pronged attack'

Sat Mar 12 22:09:11 PST 2005

>
>In These Times
>March 8, 2005
>
>Under the Microscope
>
>An aggressive audit of labor unions is only one front
>in Republicans' multi-pronged attack.
>
>By David Moberg
>
>If union leaders are feeling a little paranoid about
>Bush's reelection, maybe it's because they really are
>being persecuted. Republicans have both ideological and
>strategic reasons for an offensive against labor.
>Attacking unions pleases both Bush's corporate friends
>and the movement's conservatives, and harasses the
>strongest grassroots political operation opposing the
>Republican right.
>
>'There's been a strategy,' says former Democratic Rep.
>David Bonior, now chairman of American Rights at Work.
>'It's not a conspiracy. They're very open. [Key
>conservative Republican strategist] Grover Norquist
>says they want to get rid of unions, to break the labor
>movement.'
>
>But the rights of all workers, not just union members
>and their organizations, are in jeopardy. Since Bush
>took office, the Labor Department has significantly
>reduced staff for enforcing employer violations of laws
>on labor standards (such as child labor, the minimum
>wage and overtime), occupational safety, and rights to
>organize-laws that are important for everyone employed
>in America.
>
>Not that increasing the staff would help much if the
>Labor Department's treatment of Wal-Mart is the
>standard. The Labor Department recently fined Wal-Mart,
>a company with $285 billion in annual sales, a paltry
>$135,540-or less than $6,000 per violation-for breaking
>child labor laws. What's more, the department promised
>that its inspectors would give the company advance
>notice of future investigations.
>
>Of course, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao may figure that
>there's no need to beef up enforcement if the laws are
>getting weaker. Republicans plan to follow up Bush's
>success last year in curtailing overtime protection
>with legislation that would make both overtime payments
>and the 40-hour week optional for employers.
>
>But while protection of children and of worker health
>is being neglected, the Office of Labor-Management
>Standards, which investigates and audits labor unions,
>is thriving. This year 48 new positions and a 15
>percent budget increase were granted to the office, and
>since Bush has been in office they have benefited from
>94 new positions and a 60 percent overall increase in
>the budget. Last year the Labor Department began
>imposing extraordinarily detailed financial reporting
>requirements for unions and related institutions, like
>credit unions. Although the AFL-CIO is still pursuing a
>legal challenge to the rules, the new
>requirements-which far exceed those placed on
>corporations-have already eaten up dues that could have
>been spent on providing members with services. In
>addition, the reports expose details about union
>strategies that could be helpful to employers and
>political opponents.
>
>'The real motivation was to saddle unions with
>expensive and time-consuming requirements to harass
>them and to provide the kind of ammunition that a Right
>to Work Committee researcher or Republican staffer
>would find very useful, but union members would find
>not useful at all,' says AFL-CIO General Counsel
>Deborah Greenfield. 'I don't think it's an accident
>that the head of the agency within the Department of
>Labor who came up with the rule, Don Todd, was head of
>research for the Republican National Committee.'
>
>While unions are harassed more systematically, there
>have been complaints that the NAACP and at least 60
>tax-exempt groups have been investigated by the
>Internal Revenue Service because of their political
>activities-though the Treasury Department inspector
>general recently found no wrongdoing. And the Los
>Angeles Times reported on February 19 that Sen. James
>Inhofe (R-Okla.), chair of the Senate Environment and
>Public Works Committee, demanded tax and financial
>records from two organizations of state and local
>government environmental officials who had criticized
>Bush's Clear Skies legislation.
>
>Of course, for workers, the threat of expensive union
>reporting requirements pales in comparison to Bush
>initiatives to privatize Social Security and make the
>federal tax system even more regressive. Also, Bush's
>proposed Medicaid cuts hit two groups of vulnerable
>workers: not only low-income individual aid recipients,
>including many employees of companies like Wal-Mart,
>but also many thousands of workers in nursing homes and
>hospitals whose pay ultimately comes from Medicaid.
>
>In addition, the federal government is attacking the
>right of hundreds of thousands of Homeland Security and
>Defense Department workers to unionize, and Republican
>governors in Indiana and Missouri are curtailing
>workers' collective bargaining rights (see 'The Midwest
>Union Rollback,' March 14). The right is renewing its
>efforts to pass state and federal right-to-work laws
>that prohibit requiring employees in a unionized
>workplace to pay dues to unions. What's more,
>conservative Republicans in Arizona, California,
>Georgia, South Carolina and Oklahoma are also pushing
>restrictions on union political spending.
>
>In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is trying to
>shift public employees' pensions from a defined benefit
>plan to a defined contribution plan similar to a
>401(k). Beyond jeopardizing public employees'
>retirement, it's a calculated attack on workers' power
>through pension funds, like CalPERS, that push for
>corporate reform. Bush's NLRB
>
>But perhaps the biggest assault on workers will be
>coming from the agency entrusted to promote collective
>bargaining, the National Labor Relations Board. After
>Bush was able to make his appointments to the
>NLRB-including its chairman, Robert Battista,
>management attorney for the union-busting Detroit
>newspapers in the '90s-the board began issuing a string
>of anti-union rulings. 'They're not just failing to
>keep up with the times, but moving in the wrong
>direction,' says Fred Feinstein, NLRB general counsel
>in the Clinton years. He argues that the Bush NLRB,
>more than past Republican boards, has adopted the
>viewpoint of the ardently anti-union National Right-to-
>Work Committee.
>
>Jonathan Hiatt and Craig Becker, respectively general
>counsel and associate general counsel for the AFL-CIO,
>recently wrote, 'The members of the board appointed by
>President Bush appear to be headed toward the most
>radical non-legislative contraction of employee rights
>in the agency's history.' While restricting the rights
>of even non-union workers to seek help from co-workers
>to protect their rights at work, the Bush board has
>overruled or restricted the rights to form a union of
>many workers whose jobs are typical of the new,
>flexible economy, such as graduate teaching assistants,
>handicapped workers, artists' models and temporary
>employees.
>
>The Bush board may also soon resolve a dispute about
>the definition of 'supervisors.' This is a critical
>question because supervisors are not eligible to join a
>union. Feinstein fears that the board will define
>supervisory positions in such an expansive way that 90
>percent of nurses working in a nursing home could be
>prevented from unionizing. Meanwhile, with no clear
>definition, the board threw out a union election
>victory because a worker the board deemed a supervisor
>had argued for unionization.
>
>Of course, having supervisors argue against a union-or
>far worse-is standard procedure. For example, in
>several recent cases where the employer threatened to
>close a factory if workers voted for the union, fired
>pro-union workers, offered bribes or selectively locked
>out pro-union workers, the board either found no
>violation by the employer or else imposed no special
>remedies. In one case, the employer did not provide the
>union the requisite full list of employees before the
>election, but the board said it was close enough and
>refused to call a new election. Adding insult to
>injury, the decision came seven years after the
>original attempt to organize.
>
>An even bigger threat looms ahead. Increasingly, unions
>organize, as they did many years ago, by getting
>employers to recognize the union when a third party
>verifies that a majority of workers have signed union
>cards-a practice known as 'card check.' The board has
>now signaled that it may make such recognition illegal
>or at least permit union decertification elections
>immediately, rather than after at least one year under
>current rules.
>
>In other cases, the board appears determined to narrow
>the scope of agreements that unions and management can
>reach before majority worker support is established. In
>February a regional NLRB director challenged an
>agreement between the Steelworkers and a manufacturing
>investment company to establish management neutrality
>during an organizing drive. Hiatt and Becker warn that
>if the board decides against neutrality agreements and
>majority card recognition, it may 'place union
>representation effectively beyond the reach of most
>American workers.'
>
>David Moberg, a senior editor of In These Times, has
>been on the staff of the magazine since it began
>publishing. Before joining In These Times, he completed
>his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University
>of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. Recently he has
>received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T.
>MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for
>research on the new global economy.
>
>http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/under_the_microscope/
>
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand