Anti-union employers step up attacks

Cornell study supported by Berger-Marks shows massive law-breaking

Taken in part from PAI information

Two out of three companies that unions tried to organize through a federally-supervised (NLRB) election between 1998 and 2003 violated U.S. labor law to fight the union. That’s what Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, discovered in a Berger-Marks-funded study of 1004 union campaigns. Bronfenbrenner, who has been studying employer behavior for 20 years, found that employer law-breaking has sharply escalated.

Angel Warner tells of campaign of terror

Angela Warner and Kate Bronfenbrenner

Linda Foley

Angel Warner, a worker at a Rite-Aid warehouse in Lancaster, Calif., is one of the victims.  She told her story at a briefing on Capitol Hill where Bronfenbrenner presented the report’s shocking facts. When Warner and 600 co-workers tried to fight intolerable conditions by unionizing, the company unleashed a barrage of illegal threats and actions, and fired her.

Pausing to get control of her voice, Warner said: “I have friends who lost their jobs, their credit is in the dirt, and they’re terrified.”  The union just barely won the election; yet before the company began its relentless harassment, seven out of ten workers had signed union cards.

'No holds barred'

Warner’s riveting story is all too common, says Bronfenbrenner. Her report, “No Holds Barred: the Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing,” gives the most comprehensive look ever at company tactics during union organizing campaigns and in bargaining contracts. In addition to studying five years of organizing drives that led to National Labor Relations Board-run elections, her research team also held in-depth interviews with 562 organizers. They found that the vast majority of companies use extreme tactics, legal and illegal, to thwart workers:

• 63% of employers interrogate workers about support for the union in mandatory one-on-one meetings with supervisors;
• 54% of employers threaten workers in such meetings;
• 57% of employers threaten to close the worksite;
• 47% of employers threaten to cut wages and benefits; and
• 34% of employers fire workers.

Every one of those acts is illegal. Yet punishment is weak to non-existent.

Is it worth it to file charges?

In two out of five drives, unions filed multiple “Unfair Labor Practice” charges against companies that broke the law -- twice the level of complaints in the prior five years. Most involved threats, discharges, interrogation, surveillance, and wage-and-benefits cuts.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, Bronfenbrenner says. In other cases charges weren’t even filed because the bureaucratic process could tie up recognition of the union for months or even years and companies have little to fear from the law; penalties on lawless companies are so weak and late that workers are losing “trust that the system will produce a remedy.”

In nearly half the cases – 45% --  despite the extreme pro-business tilt of the labor board under the Bush presidency, the union that filed charges was eventually vindicated – either in a settlement or in rulings by the labor board and courts. But while that could lead to union recognition, the heaviest penalty imposed on companies in the sample was having to pay back wages – minus what workers made while waiting for a decision.

It’s gotten a lot worse

AFL-CIO

These days, companies rarely bother to offer goodies to defeat unions, such as promises to change, social events, favors to pro-company workers and employee involvement programs. They’re emboldened to choose the stick over the carrot.

One out of four charges of the illegal acts -- including serious violations -– is filed even before the union formally asked for an election. And many employers continue to resist bargaining long after workers have won their union.

Just under half of newly formed unions get a negotiated contract within a year of winning the union election. And after two years, 37% still didn’t have a labor agreement. Even companies that once had decent relations with workers and accepted unions are turning to bare-knuckle tactics.

Earthgrains did a 180

Take Earthgrains, for example, which has a history of working with unions. When faced with an organizing campaign in its London, Kentucky plant in the summer of 2000, Earthgrains unleashed a relentless campaign of threats and intimidation.  Managers videotaped workers as they spoke to union representatives; passed around a list that supposedly revealed how other workers were going to vote; interrogated them about whether they or their co-workers supported a union; yanked union literature from the hands of employees who were on break; threatened to eliminate entire shifts and take away retirement plans, etc. etc.

Ultimately, even a conservative NLRB threw out the election Earthgrains had perverted with such tactics, and a new election was held, which the bakery and confectionary union won. But no one should have to go through all that.

More freedom to organize in government jobs

Union representation is “far below what would be the case if all workers who wanted to belong to a union could freely do so. In fact, studies have shown that if workers’ preferences were realized, as much as 58% of the workforce would have union representation,” concludes the study.

Bronfenbrenner points out how different these private-sector campaigns are from attempts to organize public workers, where surveys show that there’s “an atmosphere in which workers organize relatively free from the kind of coercion, intimidation, and retaliation that so dominates in the private sector. Most of the states in the public-sector sample have laws allowing workers to choose a union through the majority sign-up process.”

How to get your copy

The study was published by the American Rights at Work Education Fund and the Economic Policy Institute.
Read it here