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Feature
Story (continued) |
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Conversation
with
Peter Kellman
Program on Corporations,
Law & Democracy |
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| Free
to Speak ... Assemble ... Organize |
I first started thinking about workers’
rights back in 1979 when I was president of a shoeworkers
local here in Maine. One day, I was arrested for refusing to
take down a flyer on the bulletin board about a resolution my
union had passed against a nearby nuclear power plant.
We eventually won the fight, but in the
process, I contacted some good labor lawyers who told me that
under the National Labor Relations Act, union business is
defined in a very narrow way — it’s just about wages,
hours, and working conditions. Nukes don’t have anything to
do with it. So the antinuke flyer wasn’t protected activity.
I’d grown up thinking that we had freedom of speech in this
country, so I was stunned.
We put this paper together because we believe
we need a whole new way of looking at our rights as workers
and at labor law.
A NEW THEORY OF LABOR
LAW
There’s a story I sometimes tell to explain
why we need a new theory of labor law. Let’s say you know
nothing about cars except how to drive one. And one day, you’re
driving along and your car suddenly just stops running. Since
you don’t know anything about cars, the thing that occurs to
you is that the car has stopped because the wheels aren’t
turning. When it seems like that’s not the problem, you go
look at something else. Who knows if you’ll ever figure it
out.
On the other hand, if you have a theory about
how cars operate — that they have fuel systems and
electrical systems and so on — you would know what was
most important, and you’d go through a process of figuring
out why the car stopped and how to correct the situation.
The same thing is true with labor law. There’s
a problem. We think we have to pass a law here or there to try
to make the thing better. But we need to recognize that we
really haven’t had a theory that puts it all together. And
that’s what we’re trying to develop with this paper.
Present labor law is not based on human
rights, it’s based on the interstate commerce clause of the
Constitution. As long as we avoid that fact, we’re still
just looking at the wheels, and we won’t see how best to
reform the law.
OUR CONSTITUTIONAL
RIGHT
Corporations already have the rights we’re
looking for. Let’s say you and I decide we want to form a
corporation. We have a meeting (freedom of assembly) to talk
about it (freedom of speech). And then we just file a form
with the secretary of state’s office, and we instantly get
corporate recognition, limited liability, and all the rest.
But if we want to form a union, we have to get
all these cards signed, we have to have an election. And what
we’re suggesting here is that any group of people who want
to form a union should be able to do the same thing as with
forming a corporation, and the employer should have to
recognize them. We have a constitutional right to do this.
We want to talk with people about what these
ideas mean. There are a lot of possibilities. For instance,
when you have a rule that says you can only picket one plant
gate, not the other — who’s to say that under the
First Amendment we can’t picket any gate we want to picket?
One of the deadly things that happens in the
strikes I’ve been involved in is that there’s either
negotiations going on or some kind of NLRB case pending, and
everybody just sits and waits. We can’t do that. We’ve got
to start acting like we’re free — we’re not in a
state of involuntary servitude here. We need to raise our
expectations. And eventually, I think we need both judicial
reinterpretation of existing laws and legislation to clarify
and strengthen the laws.
But in general, we’ve stayed away from
trying to lay out how the ideas in this paper might be
applied. We want people to read the paper, grapple with the
ideas, sit down together, and see what we all come up with.
That’s what the Labor Party’s here for.
Next: A Conversation
with Jim Pope ->
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with Ed Bruno
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