Employee Rights

Workplace Tyrants Talk “Democracy” to Undermine Worker Free Choice

The halls of Congress are buzzing with talk of “workplace democracy.” This isn’t about syndicalism or co-determination. The slogan is being brazenly exploited by front groups for corporate interests fighting against a piece of federal legislation, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), that would make it easier for U.S. workers to form unions free of management intimidation.

Major companies and their trade associations are sparing no expense in fighting EFCA, which was just introduced in the Senate by Tom Harkin of Iowa and in the House by George Miller of California . We thus have an abundance of bogus grassroots campaigns operating under names such as the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, the Employee Freedom Action Committee, the Workplace Fairness Institute and the Alliance for Worker Freedom.

They all foster the delusion that U.S. workplaces are currently a realm of full self-determination in which employees can robustly exercise their Constitutional rights. This Eden of autonomy is said to be threatened by EFCA, which, according to the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, “is fundamentally incompatible with protecting the interests of individual liberty and the principles of a sound democracy.”

It is mind-boggling that these groups can get away with mouthing such slogans in furtherance of a movement whose leading proponents include Wal-Mart Stores, a company whose name is synonymous with labor abuses ranging from short-changing workers on overtime pay to mercilessly squashing any union organizing efforts. “We believe every associate or employee should have the right to make a private and informed decision regarding union representation,” a Wal-Mart spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal recently. And when that decision results in a vote favoring the union, the company promptly shuts down the offending workplace.

Given its reputation, Wal-Mart has nothing to lose in openly opposing EFCA. Most other large non-union companies have been more circumspect, letting the front groups and trade associations do the dirty work. Yet their fear and loathing of EFCA sometimes make it on the record. For example, Wal-Mart’s cooler competitor Target Corp., which is just as “union free,” is also riding the anti-EFCA bandwagon, according to a Minneapolis Star Tribune article that appeared in January. That same article cited two other Twin Cities-based firms, Best Buy and Hubbard Broadcasting, as EFCA opponents.

The latter company’s chief executive, Stanley S. Hubbard, is a long-time foe of unions who has kept collective bargaining out of nearly all his stations. Just this week, union members in the Twin Cities picketed (photo) the company’s flagship station KSTP to protest Hubbard’s effort to extract radical concessions—including the right to withdraw negotiated pay increases at any time—from NABET-CWA Local 21 at WNYT in Albany, New York. The workers at the station have been without a contract since last September.

Stanley Hubbard also has a history of mistreating his non-union employees. A May 1997 profile of him in the publication Corporate Report Minnesota (available via Nexis) stated: “Junior reporters and cameramen regularly told friends that they would have to leave KSTP just before their fifth anniversary because the Hubbards didn’t want them vested in the company pension plan.” The author of the article quotes Hubbard as mocking reporters who challenged his autocratic style: “Newspeople think, Oh, no one should tell me what to do.”

Such is the workplace “democracy” that corporate opponents of EFCA want to preserve.

Chicago Sit-In and the Future of Green Jobs

The sit-in at Chicago’s Republic Windows & Doors brings together a host of issues such as labor rights in a plant closing, the refusal of a major bank receiving billions in federal bailout funds to invest in a struggling company, and the fragility of blue-collar employment in the weakening economy. Let me add another to the mix: the fate of green jobs.

Coverage of the labor dispute tends to treat Republic as an old-line manufacturer desperately trying to survive in a new economy. On the contrary, Republic’s business – the production of replacement windows – is a key component of the clean energy revolution being so widely touted these days. Installing those windows lowers the amount of energy used by homes and commercial buildings, thereby reducing the need for new fossil-fuel-burning power plants. The Apollo Alliance is calling for a national energy efficiency commitment to reduce energy use in new and existing buildings at least 30 percent by 2025.

Before it fell on hard times, Republic was promoting green principles not just in terms of the uses of its windows but also in the way its products were made. In December 2003 the company issued a press release announcing that it was developing a “cradle to cradle” design system that would allow the materials in its windows to be fully recycled, thus avoiding the generation of waste. The project received funding from the Chicago Department of the Environment. In a follow-up interview with Industry Week, company executive Les Teichner said Republic was also looking into ways to expand the life span of window frames so they could remain in place longer while the company would replace and recycle window sashes more frequently.

It’s not clear to what extent Republic was able to follow through on its ambitious environmental plans and what role they played in the company’s competitive and financial circumstances. It is also not yet known whether the announced closing of the company last week was more the result of a shutoff of credit by Bank of America or a decision by the company’s owners to move the operations out of state.

In any event, the situation serves as a cautionary tale for proponents of green jobs. We cannot assume that the clean-energy revolution will happen spontaneously nor that the kinds of jobs it creates will necessarily meet the highest standards. Aggressive government enforcement of labor laws and strong union advocacy of the sort being demonstrated by the UE at Republic will be necessary to fulfill the promises of the green-collar economy.

Rank-and-file activism like that being employed by the Republic workers will also be a key part of the equation. The Republic sit-in harkens back to the labor militancy of the 1930s but it also looks forward to the coming struggle to create a future of secure, well-paying and environmentally-friendly jobs.

Wal-Mart Exercises Its Political Rights—Employees Be Damned

After the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Wal-Mart has been holding meetings with its supervisors warning of the terrible consequences that would follow a Democratic victory in November—specifically, a law that would make it easier for unions to organize—the labor and progressive communities have, justifiably, been up in arms. Groups such as American Rights At Work are calling on the Federal Election Commission to investigate whether the giant retailer broke the law in its implicit electioneering.

Whether or not the company violated election laws, it is unfortunately clear that Wal-Mart’s actions were not contrary to employment law. As Bruce Barry details in his book Speechless, the Bill of Rights does not apply inside the factory gate. With the exception of public employees, who retain their First Amendment rights while on the job, Americans generally do not have political freedom in the workplace.

What this means is, first, that workers have no recourse if they are disciplined or fired for expressing their political views. This became clear in 2004, when an Alabama woman sporting a Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker on her car was terminated by her employer, an ardent Bush supporter.

It also means that a company can, as Wal-Mart is apparently doing, seek to impose its political views on its employees by forcing them to attend meetings on company time during which those views are emphatically expressed. These sessions are analogous to the captive anti-union meetings that employers use during organizing drives—a practice that the legislation Wal-Mart dreads, the Employee Free Choice Act, would greatly neutralize.

Wal-Mart’s workplace electioneering came to light shortly after Ronald Meisburg, General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, issued a memorandum clarifying, among other things, that employers can discipline workers for engaging in political advocacy that does not have “a direct nexus to employee working conditions,” even when it occurs away from the workplace. Meisburg noted, for instance, that nurses who informed state agencies about inadequate staffing levels were protected but those who complained about inadequate patient care were not.

The main problem with Wal-Mart’s anti-Democratic meetings is not that they broke the law, but rather that they make it clear what is wrong with the law: the denial of the rights of private-sector workers to express themselves politically or to organize unions without intimidation. The Employee Free Choice Act would immediately address the organizing issue and ultimately would help with political rights as well, since a union contract would make it much more difficult for an employer to get rid of a worker for ideological reasons. These are the real consequences that Wal-Mart so desperately wants to prevent.