The Boss is Getting
Away With Murder!

It is the day before workers at a Baltimore chemical firm are scheduled to hold their vote for union representation. Inside, management has called the employees together for one more anti-union harangue. As the boss drones on, a Baltimore police officer stands by, twirling his baton. Another plays with his handcuffs.

Election day arrives. On their way into the plant, workers encounter a virtual police barricade: Two patrol cars nearly block the gate. Inside, officers wearing SWAT-like flak jackets roam the plant.

It has taken a lot of courage for workers to get this far in their organizing. The plant is located in a downtown "empowerment zone" where employers are given tax incentives for hiring parolees and ex-convicts, where workers are so desperate they consider themselves lucky to be making $6 an hour.

The police presence in the campaign's final hours stokes the in-plant climate of fear and insecurity. And when the votes are counted, organizers discover that their majority support has evaporated. The campaign is lost. Organizer Al Smith speculates the police were stationed at the plant as part of a city/company strategy aimed at keeping Baltimore's empowerment zones "union free."

In the face of management terror tactics like these, the federal labor law protecting our right to organize is virtually a dead letter. Fear-inspiring employer tactics are one big reason why the labor movement can't seem to grow. Even when workers are ready to organize and unions are ready to help them, employers can stop a drive dead in its tracks with illegal firings, threats, and promises to those who vote no.

The union election stats -- the labor movement's bottom line -- tell of a labor rights emergency. Not only did unions seek fewer representation elections in the first half of 1996 than they did during the same period of the previous year, the number of elections unions actually won dropped by nearly 9 percent. The rate of union victories also slid, from just over half to 47.5 percent. Worse, this appears to be part of a trend -- the number of union election wins had slipped the year before, too.

All this helps explain how, in the space of just one year (between 1994 and 1995), the percentage of workers represented by unions slipped from 15.5 percent to under 15 percent of the total workforce.

This is not just a problem of unions devoting too few resources to organizing. The slide in unionization will continue for as long as we are denied that basic human right -- the right to organize a union.

We have living proof of just how much employer intimidation affects our ability to organize: Just take a look at how public sector organizing drives have fared compared to private sector organizing drives. You aren't likely to see flak-jacketed cops show up for a union representation vote in the public sector. Public employers are seldom as hardball in their anti-union tactics as private employers. And as a result, union campaigns involving public employees are much more likely to be successful. In 1994, the union win rate in the public sector was a healthy 85 percent. In the service sector, unions won only 57 percent of elections, and in manufacturing, unions won just 49 percent of the time.

Part of the way the system works against us is that it is full of delays -- and on the job, justice delayed is justice denied. When employers break the law, they are betting that any lingering sentiment for the union will dissipate during the months and years of appeals. A 1993 study of 200,000 National Labor Relations Board elections between 1962 and 1992 revealed that when elections took place within a month of filing, the union win rate was nearly 57 percent. The rate then fell precipitously with every delay. Today, less than one percent of all elections take place within a month. This gives employers lots of time to launch terroristic counter-campaigns.

And at the end of the process, employers guilty of breaking the law face little in the way of penalty. There are no fines to be paid for violating federal labor law. At most, an employer might be required to pay back wages to workers who are ordered reinstated -- often years after the fact.

It is still illegal to fire a worker for union activity. But it happens anyway -- frequently. Ex-unionbuster Marty Levitt says he routinely advised management to find excuses to fire or suspend key members of a union organizing committee. He even directed supervisors to plant drugs in workers' lockers as a pretext. Levitt also confesses to anonymous phone calls to the spouses of in-plant organizers claiming their mates weren't really attending meetings.

It's illegal for a boss to threaten to close the plant if the union wins the election -- but they do it all the time. Or workers are told that the union will usher in a regime of strikes and violence. One Delaware food-processing plant circulated a rumor that organizers were vandalizing cars.

The experience of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) at another manufacturing plant located in a Baltimore empowerment zone -- Precision Thermoforming and Packaging, Inc. -- offers a textbook case of blatantly illegal employer union busting. In the end, UE lost the November 1995 election. That 42.6 percent of the workers voted for the union was remarkable, given the employer's breathtaking display of calculated law breaking. The NLRB upheld UE's allegations of 51 separate violations of federal labor law in the weeks before the election, including discharge and other disciplinary action against union supporters, threatening workers with job loss, warning that there would be strikes and permanent replacement if UE won the election, interfering with workers' free speech and association rights, threatening harm to union supporters, spying on workers...

And there's more. The company's bag of dirty tricks included:

Intimidation. Company people hovered over union organizers as they passed out flyers at the plant entrance, peering into cars to look at workers who accepted union literature.

Harassment. Workers who attended a UE rally on their lunch break were prevented from returning to work until they got clearance from the front office.

Creating a climate of fear and racism. The bosses hustled Vietnamese workers out of a rear entrance, telling them that African American UE supporters were "rioting" in front of the plant.

Contempt for the law. The employer encouraged new employees to vote, knowing they were not eligible in the hope of creating as many challenged ballots as possible.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that labor law must be reformed if workers are to fully enjoy their right to organize, major party politicians -- including those who claim to be pro-labor -- have put workers' rights legislation at the bottom of their list of priorities. Two years of Democratic control of both the White House and Congress produced only a commission to study labor law reform. The Clinton-appointed commission accomplished nothing -- except to provide Republicans with the basis for their anti-union TEAM Act (a bill so bad that even the commission's chairperson, John Dunlop, objected).

Changing the law to make union elections quicker, protect workers' rights and punish employers' abuses is a job that workers will have to do for themselves -- with the help of their unions and their Labor Party.

-Peter Gilmore

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