WSLC Reports Today
Updated DAILY... Almost Every Day™ by 9 a.m.

Links are functional at date of posting, but sometimes expire. Some links require free registration.  WSLC Reports Today links to stories of interest to organized labor; some positive, some negative.  The intention is to inform.

National news:
▪  In today's Washington Post -- China's trade surplus sets record, nearly doubles from year ago 
▪  In today's NY Times -- A good, if not great, deal (editorial) -- The Democrats (who oppose the South Korea trade deal) may well win more votes in Detroit -- and beyond -- by opposing this and other trade deals. But they would do a lot more for American workers and the economy if they instead focused their energy on broadening the safety net to deal with the dislocations wrought by trade.
▪  In today's Boston Globe -- H-1B visas: Do the math (AFL-CIO Letter) -- Allowing more H-1B workers is not necessary to meet businesses' needs, it will only help companies keep tech salaries flat.
▪  In today's NY Times -- A floral protest over job-based visas -- H-1B workers send flowers to an immigration official after his agency withdraws tens of thousands of job-based visas.
▪  In today's LA Times -- Study shows decline in job-based health benefits in California -- Job-based insurance drops from 56.4% in 2001 to 54.3% in 2005; 678,000 fewer workers had coverage.
▪  From Bloomberg -- Tax hike for corporate buyout firms wouldn't hurt workers, pension funds say 

Tale of Two Nations:
▪  In today's Washington Post -- Ex-Surgeon General says White House hushed him -- He says the Bush administration muzzled him on sensitive public health issues, becoming the most prominent voice among several federal science officials who complaining of political interference.
▪  In today's Washington Post -- China executes for head of food, drug safety -- Accused of accepting bribes in exchange for approving substandard medicines, he had brought "shame" to the agency and caused serious problems. So they killed him. (As opposed to, say, giving him a seven-figure lobbying job for the pharmaceutical industry.)

Last Throes update:
▪  From AP -- Bush threatens to veto any troop pullout bill -- This despite bipartisan calls in Congress for an end to U.S. participation in the war and sharp criticism of the Iraqi government.
▪  Of the 3,609 U.S. troops killed in Iraq; 3,470 of them have died since Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" and an end to major combat operations in May 2003; 3,148 have died since the capture of Saddam; and 2,750 have died since the government was handed over to the Iraqis.
▪  The WSLC's affiliated unions have called for an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 11, 2007
NLRB's union election process: "Neither Free Nor Fair"

The following has been posted at AFL-CIO Now:

Free and democratic elections? You won’t find them in the U.S. workplace. In fact, a new report shows that when U.S. workers try to form a union under the rules of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they are operating under a system that more closely resembles the phony “free elections” in authoritarian regimes -- those the U.S. government traditionally has condemned.

Gordon Lafer, Ph.D., a University of Oregon political scientist and author of Neither Free Nor Fair: The Subversion of Democracy Under National Labor Relations Board Elections, says:

Anti-union employers are making a mockery of the principle governing American elections. Weak labor laws allow anti-union employers to manipulate the outcome of union elections in a manner that is inherently unfair and undemocratic.

Union-busting activity in the weeks leading up to union elections resembles practices that our government routinely denounces when performed by rouge regimes abroad

He says passage of the Employee Free Choice Act is “critical” to ensuring America’s workers have a truly democratic process in choosing to join a union.

The report, released today by American Rights at Work, comes just weeks after obstructionist Republican senators blocked a vote on the Employee Free Choice Act. Echoing the multimillion dollar corporate propaganda campaign that sought to undermine support for the bill, anti-worker lawmakers claimed the bill would take away workers’ rights to secret ballot elections if employees are allowed to choose to join a union when a majority signed union authorization cards.

That argument, no matter how often it is repeated, is wrong on two fronts. First, the Employee Free Choice Act does not eliminate secret ballot elections. Secondly, under the current NLRB, government-run election process, the report points out there are a

myriad ways in which workers are denied the most basic tenets of democracy…

and in fact, Neither Free Nor Fair

addresses head-on the claim that the NLRB election process guarantees workers a truly secret ballot -- the central claim of anti-union advocates who seek to keep the current NLRB system in place….

Instead, the report shows

NLRB elections fail to safeguard workers’ right to keep their opinions private; and that, on the contrary, the NLRB system results in workers being forced to reveal their political preferences long before they step into the voting booth -- thus turning the “secret ballot” into a mockery of democratic process.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says Lafer’s report

comes at a time when working families are at the tipping point. Unions are the best anti-poverty, middle-class supporting program in our nation, and are a key to turning around the growing gap between the haves and have-nots. The anti-democratic and skewed system detailed in Lafer’s study clearly does not give workers a free and fair chance to improve their lives by forming unions.

During Senate debate on the Employee Free Choice Act, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) stressed the connection between strong unions and a strong middle class. Clinton pointed out the advantages of belonging to a union:

• Union workers earn, on average, 30 percent more than nonunion workers.

• Union workers are much more likely to receive employer-paid health insurance and participate in an employer-provided retirement plan.

• Union women earn $179 more a week than nonunion women; African Americans $187 more a week; and Latinos $217 more a week. (Get more on the union difference here.)

The report documents how employers:

Deny workers free speech -- Although management is permitted to plaster the workplace with anti-union posters, leaflets and banners, pro-union employees are prohibited from doing likewise. Union organizers are banned from entering the workplace—or entering publicly used but company-owned spaces such as parking lots—at any time, for any reason. Employees of the company are banned from talking about forming a union while they are on work time and are banned from distributing pro-union information except when they are both on break time and in a break room.

Use economic coercion and intimidation -- When employers speak out, employees always listen carefully for even the subtlest hints as to what kind of behavior will be rewarded or punished. This is all the more true in an economy where so many Americans feel insecure about their economic future.

However, under standard “union avoidance” strategy, supervisors are forced, on pain of termination, to engage each of the people under them in intimidating one-on-one anti-union conversations. Workers commonly report illegal threats being made in these meetings, since there are no witnesses present.

Even without illegal threats, supervisor one-on-one meetings undermine democracy. In these conversations, the person who has the most immediate control over your hiring and firing, promotion or demotion, scheduling, duties, hours and all other aspects of your work life explains why they believe so strongly that a union would be destructive to the workplace.

Ostracize and defame union supporters -- The NLRB allows employers to make nearly any type of threatening or derogatory statement to employees, as long as it doesn’t contain an explicit quid pro quo threat. Workers who have earned their way to good standing with the company are often ostracized and belittled by management after publicly asserting their support for the union. In one example, a worker was followed to restaurants on days off by security guards with walkie-talkies. A member of management was assigned to work with her eight hours a day, five days a week, and was told he was there solely to work on her to change her ideas about unions.

Lafer thoroughly deconstructs the so-called “secret ballot” argument employers and anti–worker lawmakers incessantly flog whenever the Employer Free Choice Act is mentioned.

Much has been made about the importance of the secret ballot in NLRB elections. But, as this report documents, the NLRB safeguards the secret ballot in name only.

But this principle has been eviscerated by the NLRB. Federal law allows anti-union managers to force individual employees into repeated, intimidating one-on-one conversations with their personal supervisors that are designed to make employees reveal their political leanings long before election day. “Union avoidance” consultants typically script supervisors’ conversations, train them how to read employees verbal and non-verbal reactions, and have them ask indirect questions without explicitly asking employees how they will vote.

Supervisors often adopt a sophisticated grading system to mark the political tendencies of each of their subordinates; for those whose leanings are unclear, consultants require that supervisors go back for repeated conversations until employees’ political sentiments have been flushed to the surface. Unlike political elections, employee voters have no right to walk away from such conversations or to insist that they don’t want to discuss union-related issues with their supervisor. They can be forced to engage in such conversations daily, or multiple times a day, in an atmosphere of dramatically increasing pressure.

Click here to download a copy of Neither Free Nor Fair.