Labor Union Blog

Here’s a trio of union news nuggets from AFSCME locals in Kansas and Connecticut and Sheet Metal Workers in Pennsylvania.

Some 7,000 licensed and registered home child care providers won their first contract with the state last month. The workers mobilized in 2007 to form the Child Care Providers Together Kansas (CCPT)/AFSCME.

The contract establishes the framework for strengthening ties between the providers, two state agencies and the legislature. Specifically, it adopts a list of provider rights and sets guidelines for licensing, professional development and the payment process.

In addition, the state agencies involved in overseeing child care agreed to work with CCPT to gain support in the state legislature to increase the rate of subsidies that have not been raised since 2002.

Scott Keller, who runs a group child care home in Wichita and is president of Kansas CCPT Local 644, says the contract “gives us a voice.”

As we move forward and the membership continues to grow, we will have an impact on important regulatory and legislative issues.

Meanwhile in Connecticut, 5,000 state corrections workers protected their contract against a move by Gov. M. Jodi Rell (R) to block the pay raises due them. The workers, members of AFSCME Council 4, won the raises after contract talks failed last year and negotiations went into arbitration.

Rell—who prefaced her call for a rollback with praise for the dangerous work the corrections officers perform—pushed to have the state legislature overturn the pay increases.

But the union members fought back. They attended legislative hearings, made phone calls, sent postcards and e-mail mesages and even launched a three-week TV ad campaign, “Proud to Serve.” The Republican-led efforts to table the award in the U.S. House of Representatives failed. Says John Pepe, president of AFSCME Local 391:

Legislators saw that acknowledging the critical importance of our work on one hand, and trying to kill the contract on the other, was duplicitous and wrong.

In Allentown Pa., Sheet Metal Workers (SMWIA) Local 19 helped to develop new training standards to ensure quality heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) work is performed in the city. The city council adopted the standards earlier this month.

Local 19’s William Dorward told WFMZ-TV electricians and plumbers already must meet training standards before working in the city, but there’s nothing on the books to ensure that all HVAC workers are as trained and qualified as Local 19’s members.

We didn’t have anything in place for the quality of the air we breath. So it became a necessary issue.

Joe Sellers, Local 19’s president and business manager, says the union’s members have received quality training and education through its programs for decades.

We have developed one of the most thorough and comprehensive training programs in the entire nation….Our program develops skilled sheet metal apprentices and journeypersons who are competent in all aspects of our trade and are able to work safely without close supervision.

President Barack Obama said yesterday the nation needs tougher laws to protect consumers who use credit cards. Replying to a question at a town hall meeting in Costa Mesa, Calif., Obama pointed to a study by Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor and chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP).  

There’s a woman named Elizabeth Warren…who did a great deal of study around this. And she made a simple point…if you bought a toaster, and the toaster blew up in your face, there would be a law, a consumer safety law, that would protect you from buying that toaster. But if you get a credit card that blows up in your face, that starts off at zero-percent interest…and suddenly, it’s 29 percent; and if you’re late two days, suddenly you just paid another $30—well, somehow that’s okay.

I think generally having some consumer safety, some consumer protection around credit cards, is important.

Obama was referring to one of the COP’s recommendations to Congress in its recent report on the need for regulatory reform of the financial system. Those recommendations reflect many reforms proposed by the AFL-CIO.

In a post at Credit Slips, Christian Weller shows why new credit card laws are needed. He reports that in the fourth quarter of 2008, credit card companies charged off—declared as uncollectible—a whopping 6.3 percent of their debt. This is the second-largest charge-off rate since the Federal Reserve began collecting this data in 1980.

Weller says one of the reasons for the charge-offs is the credit card companies’ greed:

Credit card companies milked every last dollar out of their preferred customers, the so-called “revolvers”—people who carry a balance and make some payments. Higher interest rates, increased fees, and fewer perks were typically in store for these card holders when defaults surged…a number of credit card companies are raising their fees, cutting back on perks associated with their cards, and raising interest rates right now.  Apparently, bilking the customer in the current quarter beats making sure that the customer can still pay the bills next quarter.

In his comments, Obama also reminded consumers to be “more thoughtful” in the way they use credit cards.

I think a lot of people have learned their lesson with credit cards. And credit cards can be an important convenience. But generally speaking, if you’re just running up your credit card and you don’t think that there’s a bill to be paid, you’ve got problems. So all of us, I think, have to be more thoughtful about how we use them, and ultimately we’ve got to take responsibility if we are going on shopping sprees that we can’t afford.

On the other hand, it’s also important that we have consumer safety laws, and that’s something that I want to promote and get done as President of the United States.

Obama’s remarks came the same day Warren and the COP held a hearing on international comparisons on bank bailouts. During the hearing, AFL-CIO Associate General Counsel Damon Silvers, a member of the COP, said the Bush administration policies of buying time in hopes that the nation’s banks and financial markets would return to rational business practices did not work. He adds:

The Obama administration now faces the choice of continuing a failed strategy based on mistaken assumptions, or looking to the lessons of history to craft a new strategy consistent with the values of responsibility, transparency and shared sacrifice that President Obama has rightly asked our nation to embrace. 

A striking concession today from the hard-right, corporate-friendly editorial board of the Wall Street Journal: In the midst of an angry editorial against the Employee Free Choice Act, the authors undermine years of messaging by anti-worker corporate groups by acknowledging:

The bill doesn’t remove the secret ballot option from the National Labor Relations Act….

However, the Journal writes erroneously that the bill makes secret ballots a “dead letter.” But as we’ve pointed out many times, the Employee Free Choice Act puts the choice of majority sign-up or a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election in the hands of the workers who want to form a union, rather than leaving workers at the mercy of management in that decision.

This acknowledgment is a big turnaround from the Journal’s frequent practice—detailed here by Think Progress—of making the “eliminate secret ballots” claim.

So there you have it: the Wall Street Journal editorial board says that the Employee Free Choice Act won’t eliminate secret ballots. Those who continue to try and contend that it does are trying to mislead the public and contradicting what the bill’s opponents know is true.

Not that secret ballots are sacrosanct for opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act when it serves their own interests. In fact, the Republican Party bylaws forbid secret ballot votes on most matters before the party’s national committee, notes Greg Sargent of The Plum Line blog.

The Journal’s ed board demonstrates that opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act are not against it because of their deep sense of respect for workers’ rights or for fairness. They oppose it because it would level the playing field and end corporate dominance over the process by which workers form unions. It would give workers the bargaining power they need to get a fair share of the value they create and would take the decision about how to form unions out of bosses’ hands and give it to workers.

Despite the Journal editorial board’s opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act, apparently the staff decided it can’t keep up the act anymore. Today we herald the beginning of the end for the myth of “eliminating the secret ballot.”

As the Employee Free Choice Act builds momentum to passage, opponents of the workers’ freedom to form unions are getting desperate in their attempts to mislead and distort this critical bill.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has joined with the U.S. Council for International Business (USCIB) for its latest spin against the freedom to form unions. The two groups are promoting a paper written by Stefan Jan Marculewicz, a management-side attorney, asserting the Employee Free Choice Act would violate the standards of the International Labor Organization (ILO). Unsurprisingly, an examination of this claim by experts shows the argument is false.

Lance Compa, a law lecturer at Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, says Marculewicz’s arguments mischaracterize ILO laws and apply them irrelevantly. In particular, it’s flatly wrong to say, as the Marculewicz paper does, that majority sign-up—legal in the United States and commonplace in nations around the world—is somehow outside of ILO standards.

Indeed, in most countries of the world, a version of card-check (i.e., workers joining the union by signing cards, signing petitions, attending assemblies or otherwise signaling their desire for representation) is the method by which previously unrepresented workers come to the bargaining table with their employers.

John Logan, research director for the University of California-Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, calls the claims made in the Marculewicz paper “laughable.” He says management control of the process for forming unions means that the United States isn’t living up to ILO standards now.

In a series of decisions over the past decade, the ILO’s Committee on Freedom of Association has consistently expressed concern over the failure of the National Labor Relations Act to adequately protect American workers’ right to choose a union and engage in collective bargaining.

Contrary to Marculewicz’s assertions, Logan says that the Employee Free Choice Act, if passed, would move our nation closer to, not further from, ILO’s principles of protecting the right to form a union and bargain.

James Gross, professor of labor policy at Cornell, likewise examined Marculewicz’s arguments and found they don’t stand up to scrutiny. In fact, says Gross, by protecting workers’ freedom to choose to form a union without coercive management interference and by ensuring that workers get the chance to bargain for a first contract, the Employee Free Choice Act would move the United States closer to international standards.

The International Labor Organization has stated workers’ freedom of association includes collective bargaining and the right to a legally-binding collective agreement. Where workers cannot secure a union contract, there is no freedom of association as defined by the ILO.

Compa notes the irony of these groups appealing to international labor standards as a test of policy, given their record of disregard for such standards in the past:

Since the USCIB is suddenly so enamored of ILO principles, you might ask them if they are now willing to accept CFA [the ILO's Committee on Freedom of Association] decisions on permanent striker replacements, union representatives’ access to the workplace, exclusions of low level supervisors, university teaching assistants, TSA screeners and other workers, bargaining rights for public employees, and other decisions finding U.S. law in violation of international standards.

The fact is that the Employee Free Choice Act is needed to bring the United States up to recognized international standards of protecting workers’ freedom to form a union, as noted in a Human Rights Watch report published in January. Nations around the world have labor laws similar to the Employee Free Choice Act.

As the AFL-CIO’s Stewart Acuff notes, the global labor community supports the Employee Free Choice Act as a way to protect workers and bring U.S. laws in line with successful international norms. Acuff says that Guy Ryder, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), is enlisting global unions and their allies in the fight to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. As Ryder said in a letter to ITUC affilates:

The violation of freedom of association and the rights to organize and bargain collectively weaken the American Trade Union movement considerably. That, in turn, weakens the international trade union movement….In addition, U.S. anti-union practices serve as a destructive model for industrial relations in other countries.

Message to the spinners at the USCIB and Chamber of Commerce: This argument just doesn’t work.

CWA Local 7304 members build buses on the New Flyer assembly line Thursday.

Barb Kucera, editor of Workday Minnesota, describes the second meeting of Vice President Joe Biden’s Middle Class Task Force at a clean fuel manufacturing plant.

Members of Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 7304 welcomed Vice President Joe Biden and members of the administration’s Middle Class Task Force for a town hall meeting Thursday at their workplace, the New Flyer Bus Co. plant.

New Flyer manufactures buses for some of the largest transit agencies and cities in the United States and Canada and is a leader in the production of hybrid and low-emission vehicles.

Workers at the St. Cloud plant chose union representation through a majority sign-up—the method that would become an option for all workers if Congress passes the Employee Free Choice Act. President Obama said passage of this law, which would make it easier for workers to join unions, is a priority for his presidency.

As part of the majority sign-up process, CWA collected cards from workers who said they wanted to join the union. Within two weeks, more than 50 percent of the workforce had signed cards and presented them to management, which voluntarily recognized the union.

The town hall meeting took place in a section of the plant where buses are inspected before being shipped around the country. Biden and four Cabinet secretaries—Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood—sat on chairs surrounded by workers, community members and four large buses, including one bearing the words, “Clean Air Hybrid Bus.” Praising the firm’s ability to prosper by developing buses using new, energy-efficient technologies, Biden called the company “an example of the future.”

He and the other members of the Middle Class Task Force listed several ways the federal Reinvestment and Recovery Act will aid families, businesses and communities.

They also answered questions from the audience, with many focusing on education, health care and the economy.

New Flyer President and CEO Paul Soubry introduced Biden and credited the quality of the company’s workforce and management’s partnership with the CWA as major factors behind its success. New Flyer employs 650 people at its St. Cloud plant, about 70 miles northwest of the Twin Cities, and another 300 people at its northern Minnesota Crookston plant, which also is unionized.

Thanks in part to the federal stimulus package, which provides funds for cities to invest in transit, New Flyer has a two-year, $4.1 billion backlog of orders, Soubry said.

We plan to add more jobs in America.

Local 7304 President Dave Rock, who works in the Crookston plant, joined company executives in welcoming Biden before the start of the town hall meeting. He said the workers in St. Cloud were a little stunned by the sudden celebrity but enjoyed the attention.

We’re very proud to be a leader in the production of fuel-efficient buses.

Workers, who enjoy good wages and benefits through their union contract, also show pride through a large yellow and purple CWA Local 7304 banner hanging near the shop floor. As Rock pointed out:

We got that in our last contract negotiations.

A similar banner hangs in the Crookston plant, he said.

Members of the Middle Class Task Force said the Reinvestment and Recovery Act is key to maintaining and creating good jobs, with Biden citing the importance of the union movement.

History relates how the industrial revolution spurred the construction of factories and the advent of many kinds of new jobs, he said.

But it wasn’t until we had unions that they became good jobs.

The St. Cloud event was the second for the Middle Class Task Force, which plans several more town hall meetings around the country.

Visit the website of the Middle Class Task Force here.