George McGovern has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal sadly informing his Democratic colleagues that he just can't get behind the Employee Free Choice Act, a union sponsored attempt to fix the broken system of how we conduct union elections in this country.
McGovern has a few facts wrong.
He implies that labor unions have always been organized by secret ballot, not true. Until the Wagner Act, most unions were organized and recognized by card check. It wasn't the best system in the world, mostly because the employer could use the Pinkertons and the state militia to break up organizing drives. The system of NLRB elections was designed to protect workers against state power.
To call the NLRB an "impartial federal board" is a joke. It is a joke on the face of it, as the Board is made up of political appointees. Moreover, it has been so severely underfunded that appeals take years and elections take months. Plus, the Board doles out "penalties" to employers that are so silly as to be meaningless. If a company fires a worker who is trying to organize a union, the penalty, after years of hearings and appeals, is usually that the company has to post a notice on the company bulletin board that they broke the law and they pledge not to do it again.
To try to imply that workers feel pressure from "all sides" is ridiculous. I hope I don't need to tell you the legal ways that employers can intimidate workers when there is union drive going on. These ways have been well documented. And, as I mentioned before, there is practically no penalty for breaking the law.
Lastly, employers hire companies that help them fend off an organizing drive. These companies specialize in the intimidation tactics, but also in making the union election take as long as possible. For unions to conduct a decent size organizing drive cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. This pretty much means that unions can't organize workers that want union because it costs too much.
Unions are pushing EFCA not because we want to intimidate workers into unions so we can collect dues, but because the system is not a "a tried and trusted method for conducting honest elections." The system is extremely broken. This is our solution for fixing it.
Friday, August 8, 2008
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5 comments:
et tu, mcgovern?
You know, the more I think about this, the more pissed off I get. First of all, to go to the Wall Street Journal of all places??? I'm sure the editors could barely contain their glee. What is his motivation here? I love this idea that it's unions that are stripping workers of their rights or failing to protect the interests of the working class. WTF? Forgive me if I am not buying this idea that he has a moral obligation to "tell his friends [sic--make that former friends] in union leadership no" when they press for a course of action that will "weaken labor." But best of all is the idea that by opposing EFCA he's a maverick and ahead of his time...just like he was with Vietnam. You have got to be fucking kidding me. Fuck McGovern.
I don't know my history of 1972 very well, but my impression is that is when the labor wing of the democratic party and anti-war wing really split. Wouldn't surprise me if McGovern never really had too many friends in labor in the first place. I got the sense that this was jab at a long-time adversary.
He's just old, and is applying lenses from the Vietname era to problems that have changed. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but we shouldn't let such people have a prominent voice in the national conversation.
George McGovern has never been a friend of labor. The former Senator and Presidential nominee played a major role in breaking up the New Deal Coalition in 1972. McGovern is not concerned at all about the many workers who have been fired for trying organize unions or intimidated from joining them.
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