I gave this a shout-out in yesterday's tab dump, but T.A Frank's
article on the effort to unionize Lancaster County's Rite Aid Distribution Center is an important read. Frank does something novel in the recent debate over easing labor law: He doesn't focus on card check. Rather, he focuses on the harsh realities of forming a union under current law. In the Lancaster organizing effort, for instance, the National Labor Relations Board --
Bush's National Labor Relations Board -- was so appalled by Rite Aid's brutal counter-organizing that they planned to take the company to court on
49 separate violations of federal labor law. Rite Aid chose to settle. That meant "agreeing to rehire two fired union supporters with back pay and to post a notice in a common area promising not to engage in thirteen types of illegal anti-union activity." Some settlement. The organizing campaign continued, and so too did Rite Aid's efforts:
Rite Aid insisted on an election, and the date was set for March 2008. Once again, the company did what it could to persuade workers to vote against the union. HR staff conducted mandatory hour-long sessions with employees once a week. They would lecture at length on why unionization would be damaging to workers. They would warn employees that the union would require high dues and stand in the way of healthy communication between management and labor. They would show videos about plants being shut down after becoming unionized. Meanwhile, by Warner’s count, more than 100 union supporters had been dismissed since June of 2006—although never, of course, for the explicit reason of having supported unionization. "We had a list of our people," she says. "And one by one we kept watching them get fired." By contrast, Warner says, only about ten non-union-supporting employees were let go in the same stretch.
Here is my fear: The unions have been so intent on defending card check that they have created a political battle over the specifics of their legislative solution. The air wars, thus far, have seen corporations on the offensive against card check -- taking away the secret ballot?" why that's undemocratic! -- while the unions defend its provisions.That's insane.There is no excuse for more Americans understanding the provisions of a hypothetical bill than understanding what a modern organizing campaign looks like. People get fired. Employees are forced into captive meetings where they are threatened and intimidated and warned of plant closures. Union supporters get brutal shifts, unpredictable schedules,and cruel workplace treatment. Those things are
happening. Universal card check is not, at the moment, happening. As such, there is no excuse for the conversation centering on the hypothetical actions of unions under some future legislative regime rather than the ongoing abuses of corporations under the current law. Towards the end of the article, T.A Frank notes that card check may be one of the least important portions of the card check bill. I don't agree with him: The unions and the corporate community are unlikely to both be wrong on the import of card check, which would completely short-circuit the employers ability to counter-organize. But he is right that there is much more in the legislation that matters. Frank continues:
I gave this a shout-out in yesterday's tab dump, but T.A Frank's article on the effort to unionize Lancaster County's Rite Aid Distribution Center is an important read. Frank does something novel in the recent debate over easing labor law: He doesn't focus on card check. Rather, he focuses on the harsh realities of forming a union under current law. In the Lancaster organizing effort, for instance, the National Labor Relations Board -- Bush's National Labor Relations Board -- was so appalled by Rite Aid's brutal counter-organizing that they planned to take the company to court on 49 separate violations of federal labor law. Rite Aid chose to settle. That meant "agreeing to rehire two fired union supporters with back pay and to post a notice in a common area promising not to engage in thirteen types of illegal anti-union activity." Some settlement. The organizing campaign continued, and so too did Rite Aid's efforts:
