twenty-two reasons to say thank you

[kaigou]

If you figure unions have had their days and come and gone, well, think again. Every single day you work, you're going to experience at least two benefits, and probably more than that, that you're getting thanks to a union.

If you like getting a half-hour for lunch every day, thank a union.

If you're glad your employer can't make you work 10 to 16 hour days, 6 days a week, thank a union.

If you think an 8-hour days for 5 days a week is a sane limit (and enjoy weekends), thank a union.

If you like getting time-and-a-half when you do have to work overtime, thank a union.

If you're under 16 and don't like the idea of being worked until you literally pass out, thank a union.

If you're black and appreciate getting the same pay a white person would get doing the same job, thank a union.

If you're a woman and appreciate getting the same pay a man would get doing the same job, thank a union.

If you're hispanic and appreciate getting the same pay a white person would get doing the same job, thank a union.

If you're over 40 and glad that a company can't deny you health benefits because of your age, thank a union.

If you're over 40 and it matters to you that you be offered the same training options and advancement as younger employees, thank a union.

If it matters to you that your employer can't pay you $1.50 an hour or some equally unlivable low wage, thank a union.

If you attended a public secondary school, thank a union.

If you like having the option for sick days, thank a union.

If you work on your feet and like those quick breaks you get, thank a union.

If it matters to you that your work environment is as safe as possible, thank a union.

If it's important to you that if you're injured or killed on the job that your employer is liable for negligence, thank a union.

If you like knowing that if your employer doesn't pay you, that you have the right to sue him to pay what you're owed, thank a union.

If it matters to you that if you have to temporarily leave work for a illness in the family that your job is protected until you return, thank a union.

If it's important to you that you can protest harassment or abuse by employers, thank a union.

If you've gotten pregnant and taken leave from work to have the kid and liked that you were able to go back to your job, thank a union.

If it's important to you that your employer can't expose you to toxic chemicals, turn off the heat in winter, or turn off the A/C (or fans) in summer, thank a union.

If it matters to you that if your company lays you off, that you have the option of unemployment benefits, thank a union.

---

I've seen this topic floating here and there over the past year, but only in reading Romney's economic proposal (which got a yes, hrm okay, no, yes, hrm alright, yeah, no, no, okay, from me) I noticed that two paragraphs tacked on the end were the standard obligatory potshots. One, I won't go into because I know it's basically Republican BS, while the other is... well, even more historical hysterical Republican BS. I've hit the point where I've pretty much come to the conclusion that to be considered a card-carrying Republican, you absolutely have to throw in two statements regardless of the actual topic: omg social security is bad! and unions are evulll!

Now, both the ex and the current were union. And somewhere in there, I was always lukewarm to unions (though perhaps due to lack of interaction, being military so never having parents who relied on them, despite having grandparents who did). Along with that, my first interaction was in my early 20s, and neither the ex nor I were all that hyped about the unions, but I think in hindsight that's for reasons that have more to do with our ignorance of the benefits and our general antipathy (at that age) to the institutional structures of working in/with a union.

However, CP was a union guy for a number of years, so I figured if anyone might know what this card-check stuff is, he'd know, right? Uhm, no. It's been a few years & he's not been following it, and what I've been reading rather casually has had me baffled because it's a lot of hype thrown around and not too many really clear points. But what is pretty clear to me is that -- and this is the blunt reaction here -- when a business owner or a Republican starts concern-trolling about how something will be oh-noes-bad-for-workers, I sit up and take notice because without single exception in my lifetime, those two parties only concern-troll for workers when the reality is that if workers get that and/or do that, it'll be a benefit that will in some way make the business owners' life harder (read: profits lower).

That's not cynicism. That's a simple acceptance of the fact that Republicans & business owners share the same priorities, so they want business owners (not workers) to get the goodies. But when the fox starts bemoaning just how hard something is going to make life for the chickens, let's just say I find him less than credible. I'm not saying Mr. Fox is a bad guy; I'm just saying his objective doesn't necessarily match the chickens' objective, even if Mr. Fox is quite the expert about chicken coops.

So here's what I've found, in case anyone else was as puzzled.

The current long-standing method, as described by CP, is that you'd get a ballot & envelope in the mail. You then check "yes" or "no" and mail it back in. That's your vote as to whether or not you want a union. It's an NLRB election.

To "win" an NLRB election, the majority of people voting must vote for the union.

Which means: if 100 ballots go out and only 3 are returned, with 2 saying yes and 1 saying no... the union now has permission to enter as the employee's representative and begin collective bargaining.

In contrast, to "win" with a card check option requires a yes-vote from the majority of all eligible employees.

If there are 300 employees, then 151 employees must vote YES. Even if only 151 employees vote at all, and anyone who doesn't vote is either saying no and/or abstaining from apathy or fear or whatever, to achieve unionization, there must be a majority of all workers voting yes.

Over on DKos, Nathan Newman has an excellent diary about this. He raises the question of why the unions would be throwing so much weight behind this. I mean, if you could get a union by only having 3 people vote and 2 say yes of those 3, why would you want to sign up for the time and investment and energy of outreach to 151 people when you could've done it so much easier with the current NLRB?

That right there, I think, is very good to look farther, above and beyond Mr Fox's suspect testimony.

Union organizer VikingKing says about convincing employees to create unions that:

I’m a union organizer who operates in a card-check neutrality work site (the University of California). Here’s how my "intimidation" goes: I walk up to someone, usually in their office or after or before they go to work, I introduce myself, shake their hand, go into my spiel about the union while I hand them a card and a pen, and try to convince them to join. Sometimes people tell me to sod off, sometimes people get very passive-aggressive and say they need time to think about it and never get back to you, but most time people join without much need for persuasion.

If they say no, you know what I do? I smile, shake their hand, and walk away.

I have no power over the person I’m talking to. I can’t fire them, I can’t discipline them, I can’t reassign them, I can’t force them to talk to me. The boss does have that power. In that circumstance, why would I try to use violence and intimidation against someone whose confidence, trust, and support I’m trying to win? Actual intimidation from union organizers is extremely, extremely rare because it’s a toxic strategy – even if you get that person to sign a card, you aren’t going to get them to walk a picket line or phonebank or go to a membership meeting or anything like that; when the word gets out and it inevitably will, you’ll have destroyed all possibility of building a rapport with workers and any idea that the union is an institution that’s on their side. Not to say that it doesn’t happen ever, or that it has never happened, but it’s a dead-end strategy that only the most depraved individual would employ and any sane institution would condone. You’d more or less have to assume that unions were kamikaze institutions to think that they would embrace this as a major tool, given the huge blowback they would face and the damage to their interests.

Which makes sense. I mean, you'd think it'd be moronic to beat the crap out of the people you want to join the union, given how many times CP has told me about strikes and walking the picket line and the other demands that can/may be put on workers to act in joined forces against employers when collective bargaining requires the muscle. It's not like you have to show up at the picket line, from everything I've ever heard, and if you hate the union for browbeating you, then you probably won't -- in fact, you're more likely to cross a picket line and become a scab, wouldn't you? It's not like you've got any loyalty to the union.

So that whole "union organizers will be merciless against the poor defenseless workers oh noes!" strikes me as more concern-trolling from Mr Fox. It certainly doesn't wash with me. All I'd say to some overly pushy union organizer is, "look, buddy, when I show up at work tomorrow and tell my coworkers, you're gonna have a lot less votes than you're counting on." In fact, historically, those toxic abusive strategies are the ones used by companies to prevent unionizing, tactics such as:

...spend unlimited amounts of company money on anti-union campaigns, require employees to attend vote-no meetings, require employees to attend one-on-one meetings, bar union organizers from the premises during elections, "predict" that the plant will close if the vote is yes, and so on.

Some of the crap done by McDonalds (a major union buster) to their employees, and by the most infamous one of them all, WalMart, is just reprehensible. If there's any strong-arming going on, it's from the corporate/business side. The employees are putting their own jobs on the line, so perhaps my sympathy is with them, for that reason. They have a lot to gain, and a whole lot more to lose. The company? Eh, it can do what McDonald's, and Walmart, and others have done: fire the organizing forces and hire other, more pliable, less-educated (or just plain more desperate) workers. To add insult to injury, a lot of companies will do just that and pay those replacement workers even less.

How is this possibly a good thing, let alone a moral act? Yes, I know I'm the last one you'd expect to invoke the notion of morality, but such corporate behavior falls squarely inside the little pigeonhole in my head that's labeled "immoral acts".

Another snippet o' Newman's explanation about votes and organizing, this well-put explanation:

At the moment, if a majority of people sign cards saying they want a union, the employer can demand an election; after that election, the Bush NLRB has decided, a minority of workers can sign cards saying they want to invalidate the election, and a new election has to be held.

Which means: you could, conceivably, hold that election in which 98% of workers vote and 75% say yes, and you have a union -- until the company threatens, err, convinces ("do this or you lose your job", you wanna bet) a minimum number of employees to dissent and say they disagree with the election results. Hello, square one.

The card-check option means that by having a majority of all employees agreeing, the "minority negates the results" option is bypassed. If a majority agrees on a union for the workplace, things move ahead and there's no company cancellation option for Mr. Fox.

Wikipedia sums it up nicely, as well (emphasis mine).

The two methods for recognizing a union in the United States begin with an employee petition for representation by a union. If at least 30% of employees sign petition cards requesting a union,[2] then the cards are submitted to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a secret ballot election. If more than 50% of employees certify their desire for representation, then a union can choose to form using card check procedures. Under current U.S. law, the employer need not recognize the card check petition and can require a secret-ballot vote overseen by the NLRB.

Under the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, introduced in the United States Congress in 2005 and again in 2007, the NLRB would recognize the union's role as the official bargaining representative if a majority of employees have authorized that representation via card check, without requiring a secret ballot election.[3][2] The bill was passed by the House on March 1, 2007. The act had majority support in the Senate, but was never voted on due to a Republican-led filibuster.[1] The Employee Free Choice Act allows employees to choose a secret ballot process to elect union representation if they do not desire a card check election, but employers are required to accept whichever method employees choose.

Still, all well and good but there are a lot of people out there who are anti-union, aren't in a unionized industry, or choose to sit out the union in a unionized industry but in an open-shop state.

If you're thinking, as I did for a long time, that unions are just leeches, some kind of disembodied entity that hangs out, then you're as wrong as I was. The unions are the workers. Even those "union bosses" are quite often fellow employees, doing a job right alongside the union members. And if you're thinking unions just haven't done all that much for you, so why support union organizing... well, see the twenty-two reasons your career is probably very different -- much healthier, saner, less abused, more respected, and even more equitably paid -- thanks to a union.

If that wasn't enough, though, here's a short history lesson.

At the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, millions from around the world flocked to this very city in search of opportunity. Immigrants from Europe, African-Americans from the Jim Crow South, and ethnic groups from every corner of America made their home in these neighborhoods and a living from the mills and factories that crowded a bustling Chicago.

The work was brutal and the pay was low, but none more so than on the South Side between Halsted and Ashland Avenue, where you could smell the stench of the meatpacking stockyards from miles away.

50,000 worked in what Upton Sinclair would later call "The Jungle," under some of the most dangerous and oppressive conditions in America. Twice the workers tried to organize, and twice they were ferociously beaten back by employers willing to use violence, race-baiting, and starvation in order to keep wages at 32 cents an hour.

But these workers made a choice - a choice that this would not be their future. And so in 1937, as the CIO begin organizing mass industries all across America, meatpacking workers began to follow their lead.

Imagine - these people would slave away in these plants all day long, freezing in the winter and sweltering in the summer, watching coworkers get their bones crushed in machines and friends get fired for even uttering the word "union" - and yet after they punched their card at the end of the day, they organized. They went to meetings and they passed out leaflets. They put aside decades of ethnic and racial tension and elected women, African Americans, and immigrants to leadership positions so that they could speak with one voice.

They could have accepted their lot in life or waited for someone else to save them. Through their actions they risked life and living. They chose to act.

In time, they won. It started with victories as small as putting fans on the factory floor, and ended with paid holidays, and wage increases, and a seniority system, and pensions. It started with hope, and it ended with the fulfillment of a long-held ideal. A humble band of laborers against an industrial giant - an unlikely triumph against the greatest odds - a story as American as any.

---

Unions are the workers, and if we as worker bees can be productive, safe, well-treated, respected, and paid a fair and livable wage, this will benefit the companies in the end, just as much, because we are the companies, too.

---

Also: the first person who throws anything at me about UAW worker incomes being so fabulously exorbitant and therefore the reason for the Big Three's freefall into economic disaster area is going to get smacked down hard. That oft-tossed $75 an hour is "pay plus health, retirement, paid leave, and other benefits" -- not the actual pay, which is $27 an hour, and that's for a skilled, trained, production job.

Oh, let's compare that, shall we, to the combined total income earned by the Big Three's CEOs: $24.5 million in salaries, bonuses and other compensation -- that's for three people, there! Executives one step down? $1.3 million at Ford, $1.4 million at GM and that's not even counting stocks and stock options. Call me cynical, but the math just doesn't add up. And lest we forget, these don't count other perks like the much-ballyhooed and beloved private jets. Righto. I'm quite sure somewhere on this planet there's a small boy in a dark room playing a violin just for those three CEOs and their top execs. Yeah. Lotsa playing going on, baby, but if you ask me, the vast majority of it's by Mr. Fox, and not the chickens.

Lastly, from emptywheel, Flight 1549: this miracle brought to you by America's unions.

Comments

[leorising1959.livejournal.com]

Don't forget that the compensation figures commonly used for UAW members include benefits currently paid retirees and widows, as well, which inflates the figure.

My mother's father passed on when I was about 3 years old. I remember finding a blackjack (otherwise known as a "sap") while Mom was packing their attic. Turns out he had to use it to defend himself from Henry Ford's goons on the original UAW organizing line. It is a source of family pride. (I wanted that blackjack, too, dammit, young as I was. Didn't get it, of course. :D )

Dad was a journeyman pipefitter. While he was able to work that job, it was a damned good living, and we never wanted for health benefits, either.

I do believe that unions can get too big and too pushy, but it's nothing compared to the crazy top-heavy executive structure and pay scale of the American car makers. In general, if it weren't for unions, we'd still be in the semi-feudal employment system of the 19th century.

Go union! ^_^

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

The other day on ONTD_P I saw one of the comm's resident idiots arguing vehemently against the movement to ban sweatshops on the grounds that it "steals jobs" from poor people in third-world countries. The discourse included, among other things, railing against "unreasonable regulations" like child labor restrictions, minimum wage or maximum shift hours length.

It would have been hilarious if it wasn't so disgusting.

[vcmw]

I think that there's an amazing lack of public education [well, not amazing if you've read some stuff about school systems] about unions and labor issues.

Unions are one of the only ways that employees can try to balance the huge information advantage larger employers have. I think of the bad rep they get as a deliberate disinformation campaign, rather than random ignorance on our part - I honestly do think there are people who make a lot of conscious decisions to not include that info in textbooks, articles, etc.

I also think a lot of small business owners or employees of small businesses (like, 1 or 2 bosses and 4-5 employees type small) don't really get how different the employee-employer dynamic gets when you have a huge business with dozens of bosses and hundreds or thousands of employees.

[christeos-pir.livejournal.com]

One more for your "thank the unions" list: public secondary school education.

[recession.livejournal.com]

If you're glad your employer can't make you work 10 to 16 hour days, 6 days a week, thank a union.

Unless you work in the transportation industry, because you're under the Railway Labor Act and basically are the company's bitch. :/ Maybe not 6 days a week, but they can make you work indefinitely on any shift so long as it's claimed as "operational need" to keep the airline running. I see it happen nightly.

I'm beginning to believe airline unionization is dead. The Northwest ramp union is going to implode soon, with the Delta merger coming to full bloom. Delta, a rather notoriously non-union company, merging with Northwest, a company known for its union? Needless to say they're not going to get the votes they need, and this will lead to absolute chaos amongst the workers. I'm seeing it now in Detroit, where the IAM has taken Delta to court because they've been trying to work a "con" on the union from what I can see. Granted, I'm not horribly "in the know" because I work for the regional airline, which has never had a union.

Not that we didn't try. God knows we have. Corporate pulled the same crap that you read all the time. They had the hiring staff scare the new hires that their jobs would be on the line if there was a union, that they couldn't shift swap, that life would be horrible. The new hires bought it, class after class. The last union to try and take us was the IAM, and I think there was only a 45% vote across the board so it failed.

Then they did a mass "restructuring" and cut 50% of our workforce right after the vote failed.

The whole situation revolving around my area of employment just puts a bad taste in my mouth. We fight for things we shouldn't have to while management gets to sit back and say "if you don't like it there's the door, we're not fixing it." I shouldn't have to spend six months fighting a write-up over a missed timeclock punch (first missed punch in four years? Six other people claiming that timeclock isn't working properly? Don't spout to me "must be operator error," DO something to pretend to give a shit!), I shouldn't have to email the CEO of the company to get paid the per-diem that they owe me from three months ago, I shouldn't have to pull corporate HR into a simple matter of getting a date changed because on-site HR tells me to go fuck a duck. Yet I do.

I am so outta this industry the moment I have an escape route.

[jennythe-reader.livejournal.com]

This is a wonderful essay. Thank you for posting it.

I linked to it in my own journal, and gave it a thumbs-up on StumbleUpon.

[ninjacooter.livejournal.com]

Thank you for writing this. It is phenomenal. I have linked it to my own LJ and will be linking to it on Facebook as well.

Bravo. Seriously.

Reasons for Belonging to a Union

[https://me.yahoo.com/a/AoTSCuQ1hcaHiXm1LOGps.hN6ooC54AdkbFLF.Q-#66dc0 (from livejournal.com)]

It would be helpful if you provided references for the 22 reasons you list as reasons to thank a union. Some of the reasons could be challenged and a reference would be helpful to refute the challenge. (I am not going to challenge unionization however, I have been a union member on several occasions in my life and realize that unions are the only counterbalance to organized corporations.)

Thanks for the article. (I read it on Daily KOS and followed the urls.

Roger

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Good idea. I wasn't going to topload it with even more, but I probably should (at some point) compile all the places I got the information from -- mostly I just went through the listed amendments to certain laws, and who were the largest groups pushing for passage of those laws and/or amendments, and the benefits enshrined in those laws.

But yep, footnotes, should do that. Heh. Thanks!