Taft-Hartley: The Law That Made Union-Busting ‘Official’ Policy

Very few people are still around who remember the year 1947 when the US labor movement  represented one out three American workers. It came after a decade in the thirties when union organizing hit its peak with the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The CIO provided the militant push that organized the millions of workers in the mass industries – workers who had been ignored by the AFL’s concentration only on skilled craft workers.

And all workers, from skilled to unskilled in one union, provided the worker unity that sustained sit-down strikes in Flint, Michigan, that unionized General Motors and built the United Auto Workers (UAW), strikes in the giant  electrical industry that unionized General Electric and Westinghouse and built the United Electrical, Radio and  Machine Workers Union (UE), and strikes in the steel industry that unionized US Steel and built the United Steelworkers union (USW). Labor was flexing its muscles as it entered the post-World War II years and began to take action to improve wages and working conditions of millions of workers.

But the giant companies would have it no longer. Sparked by the developing cold war abroad and the beginnings of the shameful McCarthy era at home, Republicans began a counterattack. Well financed by big money and actively pushing the growing anti-communist scare, they gained control of Congress in 1946. A year later, they enacted what became the centerpiece of the attack on labor with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, overriding he veto by President Harry Truman. The act, passed mainly by Republicans but with the support of a substantial number of Democrats, was the opening gun in the war against unions that has continued to this day and was accelerated after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. It was the beginning of the policy that revived union-busting as the norm among America’s corporations.

What was the Taft-Hartley Act and how did it provide the fertile ground for the decline of the union movement? For a detailed description of  the role this law played in the decline of the union movement over the past 75 years, we highly recommend you click on this link to an article in the June 23 issue of UE News, organ of the United Electrical Workers. It conveys some great lessons for working people today who are fighting to organize unions and rebuild a movement for a more fair and just America.

 UE News. 6/23

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4,000 Unionists Plan New Organizing Steps at National Meeting

In what is reported to have been an inspiring weekend conference of labor union activists, opening speeches by those involved in current organizing drives drove home the picture of  working people building unions and fighting for their rights around the country.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EI4x90xk2U[/embedyt]Highlighting the picture of the power and greed of giant corporations and the rising movement of workers, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders gave a rousing keynote speech to the Chicago gathering of some 4,000 unionists. What followed was two days of panels over the June 17-19 weekend in which the people involved in front line unionizing exchanged experiences and views to help push the nationwide upsurge further along. Among those participating in the conference were leaders and rank-and-file members from the unions that won election at the large Amazon warehouse in New York and  numerous Starbucks stores across the country.

The conference was sponsored by Labor Notes, a website publication that has been a long advocate for labor. Below, we are linking to the Labor Notes website, that is worth looking into for developments in the field of labor. Our website, SpotlightOnLabor.com is happy to associate with their continuing fight on behalf of America’s working people.

Labor Notes held a followup 0nline Zoom meeting on June 30 in which participants applauded and critiqued the conference and talked about future organizing and union building in its aftermath,

 Labor Notes Website, Further reports on Union Activities – Who Gets the Bird, June 18-25; Also, courtesy Locker Associates, New York

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APPLE WORKERS REGISTER UNION BREAKTHROUGH AT MARYLAND STORE

In another breakthrough on the labor front, 100 workers at an Apple store in Towson, Maryland, voted by a two-to-one margin to unionize. The victory represents a big step for union activists who have been trying for years to make inroads into the retail outlets of the computer corporate behemoth.

The union, the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees, is affiliated with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). The union it is eager “to get Apple to the table and talk to them about who we are and what we want for out union members,” declared IAM vice president David Sullivan. He said he was getting phone calls from all over the country an the groundbreaking union victory in Maryland.

Union activists are hoping that it is just the beginning of a nationwide push by Apple workers in much the same way that a union victory at a Buffalo, NY, Starbucks store sparked a drive that so far has seen union wins at over 100 Starbucks stores across the country.

Labor Start, 6/21

 

 

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NEW UNIONS PRESENT CHALLENGE TO THE ESTABLISHED ONES

“For decades, the labor movement’s efforts to halt its long slide have been – to speak plainly – an utter failure” writes Steven Greenhouse in The American Prospect (6/13). “The U.S. has gone from having 35 percent of its workforce unionized in the 1950s to 20 percent in the 1980s to just 10 percent today. But now, finally, comes a burst of unexpected hope” in the wake of union organizing across the country.

But this has created a challenge for established labor unions as so much of then union activity is coming from independent unions formed outside the traditional labor organizations. The challenge is similar to the 1930’s when the drive to organize the workers in mass production industries was scorned  by the AFL, representing skilled trades workers. They looked down upon workers in steel mills and auto plants and shunned the idea of organizing thousands of factory workers into one union rather than organizing separate unions by their particular crafts. It was union leaders like United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis, Amalgamated Clothing Workers President Sidney Hillman and others who saw the future in the new wave of organization and formed the CIO that welcomed the new unions into its ranks.

Greenhouse writes that although the AFL-CIO’s President Liz Shuler, who is slated to be elected to a full-four year term, wants the nation’s unions to do considerably more to help today’s surge of unionization grow, “many unions in the federation feel little urge or compulsion to help.” In particular, although the biggest unions in the federation are saying all the right things, they “haven’t yet stepped up to provide the money, lawyers, and other resources that are required to turn the current burst of unionization into a far larger, more lasting wave.”

Today’s labor leaders and their unions have a crucial decision to make, he declares. “Will they remain mere spectators to these efforts, thereby increasing the chances that this very promising moment will peter out? Or will they heed the example of John L. Lewis, and join in solidarity with the most pro-union generation this nation has seen in 80 years? Will they put up the money and resources required to turn this into a watershed moment for labor?

“If not now, when?”

The American Prospect, 6/13

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Starbucks Organizing Drive Gaining Steam

Efforts to unionize the giant Starbucks chain that began with two stores in Buffalo a few months ago is picking up momentum even though there is still a long way to go. As of mid-May, 78 Starbucks stores around the country have voted to unionize.

And Starbucks is not the only one. The drive of workers to unionize is moving into high gear as about a half-dozen Apple stores, Amazon, REI, and scores of other American workplaces that have never seen a union are facing union organizing drives. And this is taking place even in the face of desperate union-busting tactics by management.

These tactics include the illegal firing of union activists and pouring out millions of dollars in hiring anti-labor law firms and “consultants”.

Workers have a lot to be sore about. According to Robert Reich, the secretary of labor in the Clinton administration and now Professor of Public Policy at the University of California Berkeley, despite the recent uptick in wages, workers are still lagging far behind their real earnings 30 or 40 years ago with corporate CEOs averaging 351 times the typical worker’s salary.

In addition, more than half of  Americans work overtime averaging nine hours of overtime work each week but only 15 percent of them are eligible to receive overtime pay,. Reich figures that the total amount of wage theft from unpaid overtime comes to $35,451 for the average family each year.

But there’s more. The American workplace has become a hazardous place. An example of this was the Amazon workplace in Illinois where six workers lost their lives in a tornado after being told by the company that they couldn’t leave, even though they were warned about the deadly storm hours in advance. The AFL-CIO’s figures put the numbers at an average of 340 workers who died each day because of hazardous working conditions with 4,764 workers killed on the job in 2020.

Robert Reich newsletter, 5/20; Portside, 5/19

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Pass Laws to Protect Amazon Workers, NY Teamsters Tell State Legislators

All Three Joint Councils of the Teamsters Union  in New York State have urged the state legislature to pass two laws aimed at protecting workers in warehouse industries like Amazon from some of the notorious corporate abuses they have suffered.

In letters to the legislature and in a rally and two press conferences at the Albany state capital, they urged the adoption of the Warehouse Worker Protection Act and the 21st Century Antitrust Act. The first would create a plan to reduce injuries at

Teamsters rally in Albany for warehouse worker protection

large warehouses that result from repetitive movements and unsafe practices, empowering  the state Department of Labor to enforce worker safety regulations more effectively. It also protects workers from firing or disciplinary measures based on secret or unfair production quotas.

“Amazon’s growth in New York is endangering workers,” the Teamster statement said. “The rate of serious injuries at Amazon warehouses in New York was six injuries per 100 full-time employees, 50 percent higher than New York’s warehouses overall.”

The 21st Century Antitrust Act is intended to update New York’s antitrust laws to meet the growing concentration of some giant corporations in the state. As one example, the Teamster statement said, since Amazon opened its first facility eight years ago, it has expanded to 78 facilities statewide, a situation that is endangering workers, given its poor record on worker safety. The proposed act would lower the very high threshold that now exists for proving that a company has monopoly power over the labor market and empowers the state Attorney General to review potentially harmful consolidations and mergers that affect labor markets.

“Amazon has undercut good jobs by paying half the union rate and lengthening the workweek,” the Teamster letter declared. “When a company is this big, and it is non-union, then the employer can dictate wages and working conditions unilaterally for its own workers, and those bad conditions trickle down to the rest of the industry as well.”

Teamsters.org/Amazon

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Union Shops More Likely to Enforce Laws Protecting Workers

One of the many problems facing American workers in recent years has been the lax enforcement of laws and rules meant to protect them. A very interesting April 29 article on the website of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and reproduced on LaborStart.org details how at union-organized shops these rules are more likely to be enforced than at places where there are no unions. Aside from the usual collective bargaining issues like wages and working conditions, the unions at these shops often take pains to ensure that labor laws and regulations like safety and health issues are realities, not just paper rules that are ignored. For access to the article, click on the link below.

Washington Center for Equitable Growth, 4/29

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Indiana U. Grad Workers Strike for Recognition

Photo: Jacobin

Graduate school workers at Indiana University went on strike April 13 demanding recognition of their union in the face of the university’s refusal to recognize it.

The walkout came after the union, the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition, a unit of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (IGWC-UE) obtained a strike authorization vote by a margin of 1,008 to 23, or 97.8 percent of the ballots cast. The walkout is intended to demonstrate that the union has, in fact, the support of a majority of the 2,500 graduate workers and a majority who will participate in collective action.

They were joined on the picket line the first day by undergraduate students who walked out at noon in solidarity with the graduate workers. A number of faculty members also are backing their demand for recognition and bargaining rights.

Graduate school workers perform various duties like rating student exams and papers, aiding in research of faculty members and sometimes teaching classes. They are, most often, vastly underpaid.

Workers in the state of Indiana have few rights to organize unions in the private or public sectors since the state is one with the so-called “right-to-work” laws.

The UE has become one of the leading forces in the drive to organize these workers, recently organizing a large unit at MIT in Boston (see item on this website’s Labor News page)  and others in universities around the country. While UE has been doing this for a number of years, the number of grad workers in its membership has soared in the past year.

UE Website,  Jacobin, 4/13; Who Gets the Bird, 4/16

 

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MIT Grad Workers Latest to Vote Union

Graduate student workers at MIT have now become the latest to vote for a union in a rank-and-file organizing drive. Last week, they voted 1,785 to 912 to be represented by the MIT Graduate Student Union, a local of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE). The union will become the bargaining agent for nearly 4,000 graduate workers at the school.

The issues in the union organizing drive included supervisor harassment, insufficient access to medical care, and housing insecurity (in Cambridge, Mass., where the school is located, MIT is one of thee largest landlords and charges exorbitant rents

Graduate workers at MIT work primarily as research assistants, in addition to teaching undergraduate classes, and many cited being able to carry out their research free from harassment, unreasonable work expectations, and financial insecurity as a major reason to support the union. Collective bargaining will “make a better MIT for us as scientists,” union member Adam Trebach declared after the victory.

In another grad school action, the Indiana University Graduate Workers Coalition-UE is holding a strike authorization vote after the university refused to recognize and bargain with their union. The union submitted over 1,500 union cards to the school administration in December requesting Indiana University to hold a union election, but the request has been ignored.

UE News, 4/9

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IN LANDMARK WIN, AMAZON NY WORKERS VOTE UNION

Amazon employees waiting to vote in the parking lot of the JFK8 fulfillment center last week., DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times

In a huge win for union organizing, workers at Amazon’s Staten Island, NY warehouse voted by a large margin to be represented by the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), the first victory for a union at the mammoth company.

Hailing the workers victory, ALU President Christian Smalls said: “We want to thank Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s anti-union chief) for going to space because when he was up there, we were signing people up.”

Biggest Union Win on a Generation

Amazon is the nation’s second largest company, employing about 1.1 million workers in the U.S. and a half-million more around the world, and one of the fiercest union-busters in the country. It is second in size only to Walmart, also a fight-to-the-death foe of unions. The Amazon vote was 2,654 for the union to 2,131 against it, a winning margin of better than 10 percent. The union will represent over 8,300 workers at the New York facility, the biggest union win in a generation.

Although Amazon widely heralded the minimum wage of $15-an-hour it paid, workers called the pay highly insufficient for the heavy work they do. They cited a culture of fear with intense monitoring of their productivity – another name for speedup – that sparked their need for a union.

The victory came in the face of a full scale attack on the unionization effort by the company. It mandated attendance at anti-union meetings, repeatedly texted employees with anti-union messages, and spent some $4.3 million nationwide, including at the Staten Island facility (known as JFK8), on anti-union consultants to help plan their strategy.

Grass Roots Organizing Paid Off

The effort appeared to pay off for a different organizing strategy. Instead of the traditional method where a national union sent in professional organizers, the ALU organized workers from the ground up, with workers on the job starting the drive by talking to other workers and forming their own union. The grass roots worker-to-worker effort built confidence that they were joining with others who worked alongside them, instead of some outside entity. After enough of the had signed up, they started wearing shirts and masks with the union’s logo in the warehouse and even set up a working shop outside with a barbecue grill to pass out meals to workers.

A big question for the labor movement now is the extent to which they will help the independent ALU fight potential challenges to the result and negotiate a first contract by providing resources and legal talent.

“The company will appeal, drag it out — it’s going to be an ongoing fight,” said Gene Bruskin, a longtime organizer who helped notch one of labor’s last victories on this scale, at a Smithfield meat-processing plant in 2008, and has informally advised the Staten Island workers.

For Amazon, the stakes are high. Like Starbucks, a successful union effort at one workplace tends to stimulate similar unionizing efforts at others and other Amazon facilities are also starting to organize.

Sean O’Brien, the new president of the 1.3 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said in an interview on Thursday that the union was prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars unionizing Amazon and to collaborate with a variety of other unions and progressive groups.

“We’ve got a lot of partners in labor,” Mr. O’Brien said. “We’ve got community groups. It’s going to be a large coalition.”

Krugman: “Maybe a Turning Point”  

In his New York Times column April 6  Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman dealt with the significance of the union victory at Sraren Island.

Linking the decline in the standard to living  of most  workers and the subsequent growth of economic inequality to the decline in the power of labor unions, he writes that the union win at Amazon could have very significant positive consequences for other American workers and for the economy as a whole.

“Maybe, just maybe, it represents a turning point,” he declares hopefully. “If America manages to steer itself toward becoming a more equal, less insane polity, future historians may say that the turn began on Staten Island.”

NY Times, 4/1; Paul Krugman, NY Times, 4/6

 

 

 

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