Tactics Escalating, More Negative
By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer
LANCASTER, Calif. (PAI)--Angel Warner and her 600 co-workers at a Rite-Aid warehouse in Lancaster, Calif., have been through hell -- and it’s not just because they broil in the summer in the un-air-conditioned facility or freeze in the winter.
It’s because they tried to organize. They succeeded, but at a huge cost.
“We were all living paycheck to paycheck” after new managers came in and working conditions crashed, she told a D.C. press conference on May 20. Wages were frozen, health care premiums were unilaterally increased -- and workers had a choice, at the work rates managers demanded, of either cutting corners and toiling in unsafe conditions, or not cutting corners, failing to make quotas, and being fired.
“So you walk a fine line between taking a trip to the hospital or a trip to the unemployment line,” she says.
And then, when they organized with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in a campaign that began more than two years ago, things got worse. Rite-Aid “threatened to fire people, and close the building, and they followed through on their threats.” Pausing to get control of her voice, Warner added: “I have friends who lost their jobs, their credit is in the dirt, and they’re terrified.” Warner was illegally fired.
Company actions when the workers organize “put a physical, emotional and psychological pressure on you,” she adds. ILWU won the election at Rite-Aid, after getting cards from 70% of workers, but by only a few votes. After a year of negotiating with Rite-Aid, and 30 bargaining sessions, it’s obvious the firm is stalling there, too: “The only thing we’ve agreed upon is where to hang the union bulletin board,” Warner says.
Unfortunately, Warner’s riveting story is common, says a new report -- the most comprehensive to date -- on company tactics during union organizing campaigns and in bargaining contracts.
No Holds Barred: The Intensification Of Employer Opposition To Organizing, by Cornell Professor Kate Bronfenbrenner, covers the most recent five years of data (1998-2003) from organizing drives that culminated in National Labor Relations Board-run elections, which were followed all the way through to their conclusions, years afterwards. It found firms took harder lines than ever before when workers organize.
Bronfenbrenner, working with a sample of 1,004 cases -- from the initial organizing contact all the way through to the end of each drive, whatever it was -- and 562 in-depth interviews with organizers, found overwhelming majorities of companies using extreme tactics, legal and illegal, to thwart workers. Specifically:
* Employers threatened to close the plant -- supposedly illegal under labor law -- in 57% of organizing drives, illegally fired workers in 34%, and threatened to cut wages and benefits in 47% of drives. In two-thirds of all drives, workers were forced to attend one-on-one anti-union sessions with their supervisors. Those sessions are legal, but the interrogation in them about union support (in 63%) and threats (in 54%) are not.
* The number of organizing drives where unions were forced to file multiple charges of labor law-breaking, formally called unfair labor practice charges, doubled, to 40%, compared to the prior five years. But Bronfenbrenner says that actually understates company labor law-breaking.
Charges were not filed in most organizing drives, her study found, for three reasons: They were dropped as part of contract settlements, they could delay recognition of the union if it won the vote, or open workers to more retaliation if it lost.
* Companies used to combine sticks -- labor law-breaking such as firings and threats to close -- with carrots: Raises to favored workers, promises of change if the workers voted against the union, and so on. Not any more. Bronfenbrenner said firms, emboldened by the political climate, by their own increasing ability to pick up and move to avoid unions, and by the weakness of labor law penalties, rarely bother with carrots.
* Companies aren’t waiting for organizing to get in gear before breaking labor law. The report says 23% of all labor-law breaking charges and 24% of serious charges -- illegal firings, spying and interrogation -- were filed before elections, and one-sixth of the charges were sent in at least a month before the union petitioned for the election.
“Our research showed the NLRB has failed workers, and they no longer trust it,” Bronfenbrenner said. That’s because the law is tilted and its penalties weak, she said.
Warner and her colleagues at the Rite-Aid warehouse in Lancaster suffered all that and more, Warner told the group. That’s why Congress must pass the Employee Free Choice Act, she added. Its majority sign-up provision -- to let workers instantly, legally get their union once an NLRB-verified majority signs election authorization cards -- would cut off much of the pressure workers now face, speakers said.
But the act faces a GOP-planned filibuster. It needs 60 votes and has more than 50, but one of seven uncertain Democrats is Warner’s California senator, Dianne Feinstein. Warner told the workers’ story to the senator’s staff, and got a brush-off. “The response is ‘Now is not the time,’” Warner reported.