Two out of three new union members are women

Overall, membership up by 311,000 in 2007

More than 201,000 women joined unions in 2007. Nearly 7 million women now belong to unions, and women account for 44 percent of all members, a new high. Union membership is now 11 percent among women workers, compared to 13 percent among men.

Union membership grew overall by 311,000 last year, a sharp turn-around from previous trends, swelling membership to a total of 15.7 million workers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Union members accounts for 12.1 percent of all wage and salary workers, up  a notch from 12.0 percent in 2006. Another 1.6 million workers get union representation even though they aren't members.

Big turnaround

This is the first time in 25 years that union members' share has grown, announced the Service Employees International Union, which has nearly 2 million members and signed up 114,158 new members in 2007. Thanks to jobs going abroad, the difficulty of organizing under rules that relentlessly undermine workers’ rights,  and intense anti-union actions by employers, union membership had been dropping since 1983, when one in five eligible workers belonged to a union.

New York the most union state

The most-unionized state is once again New York (25.2%), followed by Alaska.  California, New York, Pennsylvania and Arizona led the nation in signing up unionists, due on part to organizing by the Communications Workers in Arizona.

Government workers highly unionized

More than 1 in 3 public sector workers -- 36 percent – now belong to unions , a rate about five times higher than for private industry workers. Local government workers, including teachers, library workers, police officers, and firefighters, have the highest rate of union membership. Private industries with high union rates include transportation and utilities (22.1 percent), telecommunications (19.7 percent), and construction (13.9 percent).

Black workers are the most unionized ethnic group (14.3 percent).

It pays more than ever to be union

Union membership pays more than ever -- The typical union worker made $200 a week more than non-union workers in 2007.

So many women; so few as leaders

Does labor have a CLUW? Forum covers the feminist agenda in the labor movement

Taken from article by Gary Schoichet, Communications Director, CWA Local 1180

Women make up 46% of the labor force. Women account for the majority of new workers organizing into unions, and among black women, union density is increasing.

So why hasn’t the labor movement fully integrated women—especially women of color—into its leadership; and why has it been slow to address the full range of women’s concerns including pay equity, maternity leave, flexible work schedules, and rights and protections for lesbian and gay workers?

At a joint Murphy Institute/Cornell ILR forum on January 25, three prominent feminist thinkers came up with some answers, and ideas for the future.

Where we came from, uneven progress

Alice Kessler-Harris, a history professor at Columbia University, went to the past to explain the present. Women used to work in jobs that were harder to organize, and had to put family responsibilities first. And men were supposed to be the providers. Things began changing during and after World War II.

Niki T. Dickerson, an assistant professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University, pointed out that among full-time workers, nearly half of Latina women and over a third of black women get poverty wages. Women are concentrated in the public sector, and when white women upgrade they go to the private sector.
Many unions, she said, find women’s issues divisive and often try to stay away from them.

Hartmann highlights Berger-Marks-funded report

Heidi Hartmann, the president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, drew from the “I Knew I Could Do This Work” report funded by the Berger-Marks Foundation. After summarizing obstacles holding women back, Hartmann then listed a “to do” agenda to encourage women’s involvement and leadership in unions that is summarized on this site.

Companies can ban union email messages

While still allowing personal messages, says NLRB

Although labor law has long guaranteed workers the right to use company bulletin boards or phones for union messages (so long as workers are allowed to communicate about other matters), today’s NLRB just crippled the right to communicate. They gave companies a green light to bar workers from using email systems for union messages.

In a 3-to-2 ruling just before the December holidays, the board said any employer with a policy that bars employees from using e-mail for “non-job-related solicitations” for outside organizations could ban union-related e-mail – even when it's okayed to use email for personal communications. Throwing union activities, which are all about the work and workers, in with outside “non-job-related solicitations” like selling Avon products is a bit hard to swallow.

“Anyone with e-mail knows that this is how employees communicate with each other in today’s workplace,” said Jonathan Hiatt, general counsel for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “Outrageously in allowing employers to ban such communications for union purposes, the Bush labor board has again struck at the heart of what the nation’s labor laws were intended to protect — the right of employees to discuss working conditions and other matters of mutual concern.”

The two dissenting board members insisted that the employees’ right to communicate among themselves about union activity and other collective concerns via email should trump “the employer’s asserted ‘property interest’ in e-mail — a questionable interest here, in any event.” In previous rulings, the board had called it illegal discrimination if the boss bars pro-union speech when it otherwise lets employees use e-mail for personal communications like for-sale notices and wedding announcements – but no more.

The ruling involved The Register-Guard, a newspaper in Eugene, Ore., and e-mail messages sent in 2000 by Suzi Prozanski, a newspaper employee who was president of the Newspaper Guild’s unit there. She sent three e-mail messages about marching in a town parade and urging employees to wear green to show support for the union in contract negotiations.

'Jane Doe' gets $400,000

Hospital paraded her work record at Labor hearing

It took 12  years, but a jury just awarded  a nurse in  Wilkes-Barre, PA $400,000 from a hospital she had worked for because  it violated her privacy rights during a labor hearing.

The sum includes $350,000 in punitive damages beyond the $50,000 in lost pay. “A punitive damage is given to discourage management from engaging in similar illegal and outrageous conduct in the future,” explained her lawyer. The woman, named “Jane Doe” in the lawsuit to restore her privacy, was “very pleased” with the outcome, said the lawyer. The hospital had tried many times to get the case dismissed and still hints at an appeal.

Work history is confidential

It all started in 1996, when Doe was a member of a union organizing committee and the NLRB held a hearing to decide which nurses could qualify for the union. During the hearing a hospital official brought up Doe’s name and said she had failed to take a patient’s vital signs as she’d been ordered to, which was reprinted in the local paper the next day.

As Doe’s lawyer pointed out,  there was no legitimate reason to publicly disclose this confidential information, and in fact it should only be released with an employee’s consent or subpoena. “I felt victimized and I don’t think it should happen to anyone,” said Doe. “I was constantly worried about losing my job — it didn’t happen, but I still worried.”

The jury unanimously agreed that Doe  had been wronged.

Does hiring undocumented immigrants exempt the boss from labor law?

No, says appeals court

Taken from PAI information

AgriProcessors Company claimed that it didn’t have to bargain with the UFCW union at its distribution center in Brooklyn, N.Y.and didn't even have to recognize the union, after an overwhelming majority voted to join in September 2005. Since many of the workers the company had hired didn't have legal papers, AgriProcessors declared that they had no right to vote or unionize. The Judge didn’t buy it.

AgriProcessors brought up a Supreme Court decision, Hoffman Plastic, which had said undocumented workers could be denied back pay as a remedy to labor law violations. That trumps labor law, argued the company, even though labor law covers all “employees.” 

All workers are protected by labor law

“The company’s argument ignores both the [National Labor Relations] act’s plain language and binding Supreme Court precedent,” wrote one judge in the  2-1 ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The Hoffman Plastic decision centered on what remedies the board can order when companies violate the rights of undocumented workers, he explained, but it doesn’t leave them “altogether unprotected” by labor law. the law still allows other penalties for violating their rights. The company has to obey an NLRB order to bargain.

“The court ... reaffirmed the long-standing principle that all workers, undocumented or not, have the right to choose a union and bargain collectively,” said the UFCW. 

Unions can leaflet in malls & urge shoppers to act -- in California

But across U.S., free speech in malls is still rare

Malls serve as public gathering places, yet in most cases, unionists and other Americans are denied the right to free speech in shopping malls that are privately-owned.  The biggest exception is California,  where a Graphic Communications union local  -- now a part of the Teamsters union – just won a 9-year-old case before the state Supreme Court.

More rights in California Constitution than in U.S. Constitution

In California unions can communicate in shopping malls, whether they’re public or privately owned, as well as on privately owned sidewalks outside of store entrances, said the ruling, by a 4-3 vote. That’s because the California Constitution gives residents greater free-speech rights than the U.S. Constitution does. The Court okayed the union's leafleting at a high-end San Diego mall, where it had asked shoppers to boycott stores that advertised in a paper that refused to bargain with the union.

 The mall’s owners had tried to convince the National Labor Relations Board and courts that they should be bound only by the U.S. Constitution. But Justice Carlos Moreno wrote that under California’s constitution, “a shopping mall is a public forum” where the right to free speech is guaranteed. That right "extends to more than abstract discussion…‘Free trade in ideas’ means free trade in the opportunity to persuade to action, not merely to describe facts.”

But in New York mall, man arrested for wearing T-shirt

But not so in most other states. In 2006 a New York state Supreme Court justice confirmed a 1985 decision that “a protester has no right to freedom of expression in a privately owned mall.” (But he  opened up a loophole for protesting before a military recruitment center, because the government tenant makes that area ”more akin to a public forum.”)

In 2003 a mall owner near Albany, N. Y. even arrested a prominent lawyer for refusing to take off a T-shirt he had bought at a store in the mall that read "Peace on Earth" on one side and "Give Peace a Chance" on the other. In that well-publicized case, mall owners backed down only after hundreds of demonstrators invaded the shopping center wearing shirts and carrying signs with antiwar messages. No one was arrested, and management dropped the charges against the lawyer.

Back in the day, we had free speech in all malls

ILWU leafleted stores on Easter week to support organizing by Blue Diamond workers

The first relevant ruling was in 1946, when the U.S. Supreme Court gave people the same First Amendment rights in a company town (a town set up and owned by a big employer) as in a traditional town, since it functioned the same way.

In 1968 the Supreme Court applied that logic to malls. That was when Amalgamated Food Employee Union Local 590 got a green light to picket a market at the Logan Valley shopping center in Pennsylvania. Although the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had let the mall kick out picketers as trespassers, the U.S. Supreme Court said that the private  shopping center served the function of a business district that was freely accessible and open to the public. Therefore, trespass laws couldn’t be used to exclude people exercising their “First Amendment rights…”

Then we lost free speech, then states  got a loophole

Four years later our rights were narrowed , when the Supreme Court gave a shopping mall the right to have  anti-war protesters arrested. Finally in Hudgens v. NLRB (1976), the Court explicitly rejected its earlier logic, and said  that in malls, private-property rights trump our rights to free expression.

While the 1980 U.S. Supreme Court case Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, confirmed that leap backward, it also said California students had the right to hand out leaflets at a mall because the state constitution gave citizens more rights than the federal constitution. That opened the door for other states to do the same, but few have.

Malls freed in New Jersey, Colorado

New Jersey is one of the few exceptions. In 1994, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled (in New Jersey Coalition Against War in the Middle East v. J.M.B. Realty Corp.) that because mall owners "have intentionally transformed their property into a public square or market, a public gathering place, a downtown business district, a community," they cannot later deny their own implied invitation to use the space as such.

In 1991, the Colorado Supreme Court defended the right of free expression at many malls.  It ruled that the Westminster Mall Company’s ownership was so entangled with the government that it couldn’t suppress free speech. The court pointed to a highly visible governmental presence in the mall, including a police substation, military recruiting offices and voter-registration drives. Even without that government presence, however the court said, “the range of activities permitted in the common areas of the Mall … indicates the extent to which the Mall effectively functions as a latter-day public forum.”  But it left open the possibility that under some circumstances it might rule differently.

Court still in session in other states

The North Dakota Supreme Court defended free speech in a  mall that was leased to a private developer, but owned by the city, and said “the common area walkways of the … mall constitute a public forum.” One case making its way through Florida courts rejected  a trespassing conviction on the grounds that Florida’s Constitution “prohibits a private owner of a ‘quasi-public’ place from using state trespass laws to exclude peaceful political activity.”

Other states have granted limited rights for election-related petitions or on private campuses that function as a “public forum” (Pennsylvania), but not in other situations.

Although 39 states have free-speech clauses in their constitutions, not all states have weighted in on the issue. Most still refuse to grant free speech in malls, but some have waffled, some have yet to decide, and in some, there are moved to pass laws to open malls to free speech.

Bush renominates NLRB chair

Wants Battista for another term, after  disastrous anti-worker spree

Taken from PAI information

California nurses were not happy with Battista's NLRB

Giving companies nationwide a  green light to ban union-related e-mail was the parting shot from National Labor Relations Board chairman Robert J. Battista, whose term has thankfully expired. President Bush immediately nominated Battista for another term, however, thumbing his nose at workers and  Democrats who vow not to reconfirm him because of his atrocious record of anti-union rulings.

AFL-CIO President Sweeney called the choice of Battista and management attorney Gerald Morales “poisonous.”

In the face of Democratic protests that he has destroyed the intent of the 1935 Wagner Act, which set up the NLRB to protect the right of workers to organize, Battista retorted that he sees it as his job to instead enforce the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, a Republican-backed law that limits some of those rights. Even so, he has taken his vendetta against workers’ rights to organize way beyond the mandate of any law or the rulings of any previous board.

600 New Hampshire call center workers join CWA

At site of first women's strike in U.S.

Taken in part from article in Foster’s Daily Democrat

Historic building where CWA workers organized

Almost 180 years after women workers at the Dover Cotton Factory in Cocheco Mills, New Hampshire made history with the first women's strike in the United States,  600 AT&T Call Center representatives who worked in the same building also made history. In January they voted to join the CWA, making them to biggest group of private sector workers in New Hampshire to unionize together since 1966.

The campaign began in earnest when workers realized that unionized AT&T employees in other locations got  higher pay, and better job security and health care benefits.

AT&T stayed neutral, respected workers rights

Once they voted to join Local 1298, an AT&T spokesman said the company will be open to negotiating with the CWA on all contract issues, including a health-care plan. "AT&T has a long tradition of union representation," he said. "We have 300,000 employees and about 60 percent are union represented."

CWA Organizing Coordinator Tim Dubnau credited AT&T with remaining neutral throughout the campaign. Rather than fight the union, he said, “They decided it was better to respect people's rights on the job."

Thanks to Dana decision, had to wait 45 days

The company accepted the union after a “card check,” where a majority of workers sign union cards that are certified by the American Arbitration Association. But they had to wait another 45 days to get their union, thanks to a new rule by the National Labor Relations Board, commonly called the "Dana decision." During that 45-day period less than a third of the workers -- 30 percent – can stymie the wishes of the majority and  call for an election to overturn the card check decision. For them, that period ended Dec. 28 without many workers contesting the decision.

Military families given rights to family & medical leave

Taken from PAI information

The good news is that landmark Family and Medical Leave act passed 15 years ago now covers families of wounded service man and women, thanks to a measure Senators Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), and Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) inserted into the latest defense bill. It was signed into law in late January.

The law to give workers unpaid leave for family and medical needs is weaker than the paid leave offered in other counties but it still is a life-saver for many workers and their families, since it allows them to keep their jobs when family needs must take precedence.

Bush Administration still trying to weaken law

The bad news is that Bush Labor Department is pushing  new rules to undercut those rights, which they’ve sent to the  Office of Management and Budget for review. Although the details aren't public yet, a leader of the National Partnership for Women and Families told PAI that this could make it harder for workers to take 'intermittent leave' for doctors’ appointments or rushing to school to pick up sick kids.

Defense workers' union rights saved

But budget funds anti-union rules

Taken from PAI information

The law funding most of the federal government for 2008 trashed a scheme by the Bush Administration to strip 700,000 civilian Defense Department workers of their rights to a union. It also called for an end to the Bush Administration’s ploy to let unsafe Mexican trucks ship goods across American highways –  by a resounding  75-to-23 Senate vote and an overwhelming 411-to-3  House vote. (Yet on Feb. 7 the Teamsters caught the Transportation Dept. trying to violate the law by welcoming a Mexican truck company with a horrendous safety record across the border as part of a “pilot program.”)

On the negative side, the new budget further burdens the hundreds of thousands of local unionists who serve as presidents, shop stewards and in other posts by funding new rules that  pry into their personal finances. The AFL-CIO then sued the Bush Labor Dept., saying the rules it imposed  last year to force union officers and stewards -- even unpaid ones -- to file public LM-30 disclosure reports on their personal finances are  illegal because there wasn’t enough time to comment on them, and they’re  “arbitrary and capricious.”

Facebook.com kicked out union organizer for having 'too many friends'

Protest gets his site restored

If you’re tempted to try using Facebook -- the latest and most popular "social networking" web site -- as an outreach tool, be careful.

Should union organizers explore the use of “social networking” web sites to make contacts and share mutual concerns? Facebook.com, which became immensely popular on campuses across the world as a way for students to network with online “friends,”  is now open to anyone with an email address. Once someone agrees to be your “friend,” you’re kept up to date with what they're up to and their friends, and vice versa. You also can join Networks and Groups that link you more broadly with your city and activities and causes that interest you. The site has amassed more than 62 million active users worldwide.

It might seem like a tempting way to click with the “Net” generation. Derek Blackadder, an organizer for the Canadian Union of  Public Employees thought so.  Blackadder says he joined Facebook to “determine just how useful it might be for trade union organizing. I don’t mean necessarily trade union organizing in the sense of organizing for certification, but also political mobilization or internal organizing within an established union."

So Blackadder started inviting people to be his friends on Facebook and attracted a lot of them  – about 460 people.  That should have been fine with Facebook -- movie producer Michael Moore has 4,813 "friends." Yet Facebook, which is run by a former student who co-founded it at Harvard in 2004, booted Blackadder – and access to the network he created -- off the site, after warning him a few times that he was collecting too many friends.

Free the Blackadder One

Today, Blackadder is back on Facebook, with more friends -- 566 of them. How so? John Wood of Britain’s Trade Unions Congress put up a Facebook site to “Free the Blackadder One,” which at our last viewing had 3,106 members. LabourStart, the international union support site, had launched  an email campaign urging people to  join the protest and that, Blackadder says, got Facebook’s attention.

Don't outsource your campaigns, say Lee

But is a Facebook presence worth fighting for? While one protester feels “unions and other campaigning organizations cannot afford to ignore any means of raising their profile,” Eric Lee, founder of LabourStart and a pioneer in online organizing, warns that “it's just another way of doing an online petition. A worse way…our experience has been that even with groups of under 1,000 names, the email doesn't always seem to work.

"What you're doing by outsourcing your campaigning to Facebook is growing their company, giving them direct access to your supporters and members. What's the alternative? Do-it-yourself online campaigns where you retain the information on who has sent off protest messages.” Read full critique.

In another article, Lee warns that “If I were a union-buster, the first thing I'd do is sign up to Facebook (where one is actually face-less and anonymous) and "befriend" all the union activists I could. In the real world, this would be tricky, expensive and time-consuming. But not online.”

Even more scathing is a long article by Tom Hodgkinson published in the Guardian/UK. Hodgkinson exposes the right-wing views of Facebook’s financial backers and calls Facebook “an arid global virtual republic, where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodities on sale to giant global brands.”

To call attention to public causes, meetings

How did we find these critiques? Through comments and copies posted on Facebook itself. And it was Eric Lee himself who gave clout to the Facebook group that restored Blackadder.

Facebook can still be a useful tool to call attention to worthy causes, get out public information, organize one-shot protests, and promote public events, and Lee himself urged people to join the “Free the Blackadder One” Facebook group. But be careful. Don't put anything in your profile you won't want out there indefinitely, and don't encourage others to either -- see a New York Times article on the difficulty of erasing your self from Facebook.

Pennsylvania Nurses Union merges with California Nurses

From Doug Cunningham, WINS radio news service

Pennsylvania's leading organization of registered nurses and other health care professionals, the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, (PASNAP), is affiliating with the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee. This unites two of the fastest growing healthcare unions in the nation.

“We want to use the voice of nurses across this country in every community to actually be the voice for the patient. And that's what this merger represents," RoseAnn Demoro of the California Nurses Association explained.