Professors, Authors, Civil Rights, Human Rights, and Faith Leaders Urge Senate to Confirm NLRB Nominees

Letters signed by nearly 400 professors and 125 leaders nationwide argues for swift action on NLRB to ensure workplace rights 

 

Washington, D.C. – In two official letters last week, a diverse, prominent chorus of voices called for senators to swiftly confirm the full package of nominees submitted by President Obama for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a step necessary to free the agency from its current limbo status and allow it to function in its role protecting workers’ rights in the United States.

The first letter, signed by nearly 400 notable professors from colleges and universities across the country, states:

We are Worth More

by Jack Metzgar

Jack Metzgar

Last month a few hundred retail and fast-food workers, from places like Sears, Dunkin’ Donuts, and McDonald’s, walked off their jobs for a rally in downtown Chicago.   Carrying signs saying “Fight for 15” (or “Lucha Por 15”) and “We Are Worth More,” these workers make $9 or $10 an hour, at best, and they figure they’re worth at least $15.

A one-shift walk-out and protest by a few hundred out of the thousands of such workers in the Chicago Loop and along Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile cannot have the economic impact of a traditional strike – one that shuts down an entire workplace or industry for an extended period of time and, therefore, can bend an employer’s will.   And these workers’ chances of getting $15 an hour any time soon are worse than slim.   This “job action,” bolstered by community supporters organized by Action Now and with help from Service Employees International Union organizers, is more in the nature of a public protest than a “real strike.”   You could even call it “a public relations stunt,” but you’d be wrong to dismiss it as inconsequential.

Cablevision CEO’s Threats Prompt NLRB Complaint

By Mike Elk

The NLRB says Cablevision violated the National Labor Relations Act in its attempts to deter its Bronx workers from joining the Communications Workers of America. (CWABrooklynVision )

The NLRB says Cablevision violated the National Labor Relations Act in its attempts to deter its Bronx workers from joining the Communications Workers of America. (CWABrooklynVision )

Last June, Cablevision workers in the Bronx voted against joining the Communications Workers of America by a landslide, with 43 workers voting in favor of unionization and 121 workers voting against it. Now, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) says that it plans to file a complaint against Cablevision, accusing the company of engaging in illegal conduct in the lead-up to the election.

Labor’s Turnaround: The AFL-CIO has a plan to save the movement

by  David Moberg

(March 3 2013)The mood at the meeting, one AFL-CIO top staffer said, was that the future of the labor movement was at risk if they continued “business as usual.”

As I waited outside the AFL-CIO’s closed-door executive council meeting on Tuesday at a hotel near Disney World, I recalled a conversation at another AFL-CIO meeting some 35 years ago. The Democratic Socialist leader of the machinists union, William “Wimpy” Winpisinger, had called for retirement of the AFL-CIO’s aging, conservative president, George Meany, saying that labor was in crisis and needed to head in a new direction. I approached the teachers union president, Albert Shanker, known as a feisty Cold War liberal, to get his reaction. Wimpy was too impatient, Shanker said. The labor movement was like a battleship. It takes time to turn it around.

Who knew how long?

Trumka Calls Court Ruling on NLRB Appointments ‘Radical and Unprecedented’

by Mike Hall

Richard Trumka

(Jan 25, 2013) A panel of Republican-appointed judges, including one who has, according to Think Progress, previously suggested that all business, labor and Wall Street regulation is constitutionally suspect, ruled that President Obama’s 2012 recess appointments of three members to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) are invalid. Senate Republicans had been blocking confirmation votes on the three before the president’s action.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called the ruling “shocking.”

NLRB Backs Hyatt Workers Fired During Union Campaign

by Bruce Vail

Fired hotel worker Mike Jones speaks out against the managers of the Hyatt Regency Baltimore at a Nov. 13 press conference. Also shown are NAACP representative Tessa Hill-Aston (center) and UNITE HERE Local 7 President Roxie Herbekian (far right). Photo by UNITE HERE.

BALTIMORE – “They fired me [for organizing],” said Hyatt worker Mike Jones at a Baltimore rally this month hosted by Hyatt Hurts, a nationwide campaign against labor abuses at the hotel chain. Jones, a 10-year employee of the Hyatt Regency Baltimore, is one of four workers there who claim they were axed in a crackdown against a unionization initiative by UNITE HERE Local 7.

Jones’ statement has been backed up by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which filed a complaint against the hotel November 1. In the complaint, NLRB Acting Regional Director Albert W. Palewicz ordered a formal hearing on the charges to be held on January 14, 2013.

According to Jones, the Local 7 unionization campaign has been under way for about 18 months, but was not confirmed to hotel managers until May of this year. Since then, he says, managers have singled out union supporters for unfair disciplinary procedures in order to build a case for firings and to intimidate other workers.

Is Immigrant-Firing Pizza Company Getting Pork?

By Josh Eidelson

Striking members of the Palermo Workers Union prepare to testify before the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. (Support Striking Palermo’s Workers / Facebook)

Four months into a bitter strike, labor groups are asking whether Palermo’s Pizza deserves its millions in public subsidies.

In a report released Tuesday and a legislative hearing Wednesday, strikers and their supporters charged that the non-union Milwaukee company isn’t offering the kind of good jobs that government funds and tax breaks are designed to encourage. The critiques, and an upcoming cross-country worker tour, represent the latest signs that advocates aren’t counting on labor law alone to punish Palermo’s mass firing of striking immigrants in May.

“When I started at Palermo’s I earned $7.50 an hour,” ex-Palermo’s worker Flora Anaya told Working In These Times just before testifying before the Wisconsin legislature on Wednesday. Anaya said that before going on strike and being fired by Palermo’s, she often worked long hours, for low wages, seven days a week. (Anaya and other strikers were interviewed in Spanish).

Now, Anaya says, “we’re reaching out to as many supporters and as much of the community as possible, and trying to get our voices heard, so Palermo’s will listen once and for all.”

Defending the NLRB from Romney Advisor’s Attack

by Julius Getman

Julius Getman

According to William Kilberg, a chief labor advisor to Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, President Obama and the National Labor Relations Board are engaged in a joint effort in violation of the law to limit the basic rights of corporate employers. He so states in an op ed that appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal, titled “What I Learned Fighting the NLRB.” His opening sentence states that the NLRB brought “a case against Boeing for opening a nonunion plant in South Carolina.” In fact, however, the case against Boeing had nothing to do with its opening a “nonunion plant.” Boeing had purchased a union facility months earlier from Vaught. No one contested its right to do so. Far from seeking to outlaw Boeing’s South Carolina facility, the complaint specified that “the Acting General Counsel does not seek to prohibit Respondent from making non-discriminatory decisions with respect to where work will be performed, including non-discriminatory decisions with respect to work at its North Charleston, South Carolina, facility.”

NLRB’s Flynn Resigns

by Tula Connell

Terrance Flynn

(May 27)Terence Flynn, National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member, resigned yesterday evening, effective July 24. He has immediately recused himself from all agency business and has asked that the President withdraw his nomination for Board Member of the NLRB.

The NLRB Inspector General earlier this year issued two reports describing how Flynn funneled confidential information about NLRB activities and deliberations, including attorney-client privileged information, to two former NLRB members who have worked to undermine and discredit the NLRB. One of those former members was Peter Schaumber—who co-chaired the labor policy advisory group for Mitt Romney’s campaign.

Back to the Future: Union Survival Strategies in Open Shop America

by Steve Early and Rand Wilson

 

The rupture of labor-management relationships that may have been “comfortable” in the past, plus the accompanying loss of legal rights in a growing number of states, have triggered membership-mobilization activity reminiscent of the original struggles for collective bargaining. In Wisconsin and elsewhere, labor’s recent defensive battles demonstrate that a new model of union functioning is not only possible but necessary for survival. As a first step in this process of union transformation under duress, workers must definitely shed their past role as “clients” or passive consumers of union services. In workplaces without a union or agency shop and collective bargaining as practiced for many decades, they must take ownership of their own organizations and return them to their workplace roots, drawing on the experiences of public workers in the South whose practice of public-sector unionism has, by necessity, been very different for the last half century.

 

When the history of mid-western de-unionization is written, its sad chroniclers will begin their story in Indiana. That is where Governor Mitch Daniels paved the way, in 2005, for copycat attacks on public-sector bargaining in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan — and for a successful assault on privatesector union security in his own state earlier this year.