A Labor Day Ramble

Hope you had a restful Labor Day, Pickle readers!

Sadly, this Labor Day finds the American worker in something of a pickle. The National Labor Scorecard has many of the unsurprising details - for instance, zero real growth in weekly earnings over the past eight years. The most poetically unjust detail of the Labor Day report is that union membership has plummeted over the past ten years.

Organizing a union is hard, incredibly hard, and it's never harder than when you have a National Labor Relations Board that is itself hostile to unionism. Since 1966, unions have organized using a concept called the "voluntary recognition bar" - basically, once a majority of workers agree to be represented by a union, the union is automatically certified, bypassing a formal election. This is important because it's during the election period that employers engage in most of their shenanigans, ranging from outright intimidation to extending and delaying the election, then firing the organizers for "other" reasons. With voluntary recognition, the protections of being in a union are immediately conferred upon the members and organizers. Last year, an NLRB decision, the Dana Corp decision, changed all that. Now if as little as 30% of the workers object, this triggers an election to decertify the union - rendering the protections moot.

The Employee Free Choice Act, introduced by Ted Kennedy, can potentially fix this. It would essentially codify the voluntary recognition bar (which even under the 1966 NLRB decision was just an option)- once more than 50% of the employees indicate their wish to be represented by the union, it would be instantly certified (this is called majority sign-up). And it would stiffen penalties against intimidation.

Incidentally, the EFCA is a priority for the Writers Guild because of the obvious help it would give us in organizing in the area of reality TV. Because reality "companies" only exist for a brief period of time, they can easily tie up a union election beyond the life of the company, and because the structure of the industry is such that workers move from project to project and constantly are in need of hiring, blacklisting is fun and easy. If they could instantly unionize, they'd instantly be protected.

Opponents of the EFCA have deep pockets (hi, Chamber of Commerce!) and in a move that is very much in keeping with their political bedfellows, have perverted the debate - they claim the EFCA is simply an effort to eliminate secret ballots from union elections. This is preposterous for a number of reasons. First, the EFCA doesn't mandate majority sign-up - it preserves an election mechanism. Second, the presumption that NLRB elections are in any way fair and that its secret ballots are meaningful is a joke. This video is Congressional testimony about how employers are actually trained to circumvent the spirit of a secret ballot.

I would also like to add that this anti-EFCA advertisement, trafficking in a hackneyed stereotype of Italian American mobsters manipulating unions, is straight up racist. Its other crime is that it's nearly incoherent. You'll recognize the main actor - it's Vincent Curatola, aka Johnny Sack from the Sopranos! Come on, Vincent! You're in a union! And you were in this weird Hillary Clinton video parodying the last Sopranos episode, and she supports the EFCA! Sheesh.