Senate, Bush and judiciary gouge unions

Americans boast about their purported democracy. President Bush fatuously tries to bring democracy to Iraq. But America itself is not a democracy.

Time and again senators representing just 18 percent of the population thwart the will of the majority. And so it was that a long overdue labor measure met its demise in the Senate recently.

The bill had passed the House of Representatives, the “peoples’ ” house, 241-185. A majority in the Senate agreed to the Employee Free Choice Act, 51-48. But it takes 60 votes to allow debate and vote. The malapportioned Senate barons thwarted democracy.

The bill would have allowed employees of a company to form a union by having a majority sign cards. (Canada has long used card-check authorization.)

Opponents railed about the “sacredness” of a secret ballot, calling the card-check recognition “completely un-American.” They righteously raised the phony shibboleth of “free elections.” But the truth is otherwise. The rhetoric cloaks a system heavily weighted on the side of employers.

Companies intimidate, threaten, coerce and harass workers into voting against unionism. They fire and demote workers instrumental in union drives. They threaten to close plants if the union wins elections.

They force workers to sit through anti-union seminars, bombarding them with propaganda. Firms can legally force attendance by all workers eligible to vote at these sessions while no union representatives are allowed. Companies often spy on pro-union workers. They hire anti-union consultants.

All these tactics are illegal. It is workplace terrorism.

James Gross, Cornell labor professor, is right: “The sophistication and unlawfulness of many employer campaigns has made the secret-ballot election a sick joke. It’s not a free choice anymore.”

Even if unions “win” they lose because companies procrastinate and appeal endlessly. For example, a federal appeals court ruled, after nine years of litigation, that the Smithfield Packing Co. of North Carolina repeatedly broke the law to defeat unionization at its huge pork-processing plant.

If labor does score a rare win before the National Labor Relations Board, the punishment of companies is so minimal as to be meaningless. Firms can bust unions with impunity. Union-busting pays off in swollen bottom lines.

The NLRB ruled last fall that registered nurses who merely assigned others to shifts or duties were supervisors and not eligible to join unions. This despite the fact that they are ersatz “supervisors” without management roles.

The NLRB, stacked with Bush appointees, is a union-buster too. The Nation magazine reports that the NLRB has “restricted the right to organize of graduate student employees, temporary workers and the disabled.”

Anti-unionism is virulent in America, virulence led by Bush. He revoked Clinton-era rules that required the government to favor unionized firms with federal contracts. He rolled back overtime pay rights for six million workers. He abolished collective bargaining for federal workers in Homeland Security Department and the Transportation Security Administration.

This was all done under the fraudulent aegis of national security.

(Incidentally: the one Saddam Hussein-era law that Bush maintained in Iraq is the ban on unions.)

Bush also tried to do away with unions in the Defense Department but was slapped down by a federal district court. Unfortunately, an appellate panel reversed the decision, eviscerating collective bargaining rights set by the Wagner Act of 1935.

The reversal was unsurprising. Except for the House, many senators, Bush and the judiciary are hostile to unions.

The Bush minions are even more frenzied. The education secretary labels one union a terrorist organization. A former House minority calls unions “a clear and present danger” to national security. And a congressional troglodyte from Georgia denounces unions as “enemies of freedom and democracy.”

David Sirota, reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, rightly wrote in a Truthout online essay: “Union officials get labeled as ‘bosses’ while executives who slash corporate payrolls or dump employees pension plans get celebrated as ’cost cutters’ and ‘down-sizers.’ ”

He adds: “The more corporations and politicians crush unions, the more all workers suffer. It is no coincidence that as union membership and power have declined under withering anti-union attacks, workers have seen their wages stagnate, pensions slashed and share of national income hit a 60-year low.”

It is obvious that unions produce higher pay, better benefits and longer vacations. They give workers more power in setting working conditions and safety standards. And they benefit workers nationwide even if they are not union members.

Workers wanted a return to New Deal days when they could organize through card checks alone. But ever since the reactionary Taft-Hartley law in 1947, labor unions have seen a steady erosion of their rights.

Sixty million Americans say they would join unions if given a free choice to do so. They are not given that choice. Let’s hear no more talk about U.S. democracy.