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 New Orleans Kenneth Stretcher faxed me an article from the September 2010 edition of Labor Notes knowing that I would be desperate to read it, and I was. The piece was “Should Non-majority Unions Have a Right to Bargain?” by Judy Atkins and David Cohen both of the UE. They speculate that with a full panel on the NLRB now, a decision could soon be coming from the Board on the question of referred by the NLRB’s Division of Advice on whether or not unions should be allowed to bargain without having a majority standing and certification.
This is an issue near and dear to me. The instate case goes back to 2005 and Mike Yoffee, the United Steelworkers Union organizing director, and I discussed it several times at length. They had been organizing a warehouse unit at Dick’s Sporting Goods and though they didn’t see the full majority coming together after a long drive and deep investment in the unit, made a demand to bargain on certain health and safety issues for the members they had. Much of this strategy was informed by a controversial, though exciting book by Charles Morris, a senior often dissenting law professor from SMU, called The Blue Eagle at Work. I was able to enlist SEIU’s general counsel, Judy Scott, into hosting a discussion with some of the organizing department and the SEIU legal department with Morris in DC on the issues about nonmajority standing that the book raised.
Seven unions filed a petition challenging a negative opinion by NLRB’s Advice in 2007 including Steel, IBEW, CWA, UAW, IAM, and California Nurses, but not SEIU it seems all supporting different forms of “members-only” bargaining and representation. History is on the side of such practice as is section 7 of the NLRB, though over the years NLRB decisions have migrated heavily towards the creation of “labor peace” standards that favor “exclusive representation” by one union for specifically defined units of workers that act as “an appropriate” bargaining unit.
Continue Reading Bargaining Rights for Non-Majority Unions
 New Orleans In about a month the biggest union election in 2010 will be counted once all of the mail ballots are in from over 40,000 Kaiser Permanente workers who are being polled. Unfortunately this not another milestone of successful union organizing, but hopefully the final major battle in the intense and long standing, bloody war between SEIU and what is left of its breakaway dissident local of many names, but most recently United Healthcare West, old Local 250. Elections even in the constrained settings undemocratic workplaces are never easy to predict, because when it’s all said and done, workers vote with their feet and they’ve been running all different directions at Kaiser in the last several years of this internecine war. Nonetheless without talking to any insiders and without being privy to any internal voter assessments or polling from either side, I’m pretty confident that it’s not too early to declare SEIU the winner now, way before the votes are counted.
Here’s why I believe they will win:
- Delays Always Favor the Company: This decertification election has been on and off too long to allow the challenger to maintain the momentum against the incumbent. In regular organizing that means the company wins more than 2/3rds of the time that the election is over 60 days from the filing. In this case the “company” is SEIU, and its ability to tie up the challenger means just on the numbers, before any work was done, if normal odds prevailed their chances of winning were at 2/3rds.
- Change the Boss: One of the standard pages in any law firm or company side labor relations manual holds that when you are caught behind, it’s best to change the boss or whomever the workers see as responsible for the problem. SEIU’s boss has changed. In this very personal struggle between Sal Rosselli from Oakland and SEIU’s Andy Stern from DC, too much of the dissident’s campaign always presumed it was safe to individualize the attack and target Stern as the problem. When Rosselli saw me in the Detroit hotel hallway and told me he had heard that Mary Kay Henry had the votes to become SEIU’s president, he chortled that it was “good news for the union, but bad news for me.” Had Anna Burger, Andy’s longtime leadership partner prevailed in the board election, the dissidents would have easily just said “same ol’ same ol’” but in Henry the workers would see a new leader from California harder to brand with the problems in Stern’s legacy, yet someone who had fought Rosselli for 20 years and had been the losing candidate as Secretary-Treasurer to Rosselli’s winning slate when he took over Local 250 after that trusteeship. I’m not saying that Stern left SEIU because of this election, but I will say that SEIU’s organizing expert, Tom Woodruff, has been in too many hard fought company/union elections, not to have calculated the impact on this election.
Continue Reading Bet on SEIU in West Coast Family Feud
 New Orleans Next year will be the 10th anniversary of the Dukes vs. Wal-Mart suit seeking to rectify the damage that comes from the company’s systematic discrimination against women workers. The latest company dodge comes by way of an appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court of the 9th Circuit decision to create a million worker class action of the Dukes case. Bizarrely the company didn’t even question the facts of its gender discrimination only how many of them should be allowed in the suit where damages would run back to 1998.
This is all trending from blatant to bizarre. The estimates of a settlement now range in the billions which is not surprising: a million women workers each averaging only $1000 in the settlement would be a billon!
I’ve been wrong on this before. Almost two years ago in a fit of optimism I wrote here that settlement might be imminent. My bad! I had forgotten one of the cardinal Wal-Mart rules: it’s always cheaper to pay lawyers than to pay workers.
The company’s legal gambit seems to be that the “class” has too little in common, only the fact “of the lawsuit” and that “they are women.” It’s hard to imagine why that isn’t more than enough? The whole point is that they are women, and the company did them wrong. Hello? Are they just playing for time now? Postponing a bad press day? What’s up? They can’t really be serious that they think the class is too big? They should have thought of that before they paid women less, didn’t promote them, and rolled them out earlier than men.
Dukes is still working as a greeter for Wal-Mart even a decade after filing the suit. Now there are going to be three women on the Supreme Court.
The waiting strategy is not going to work for Wal-Mart.
I’m liking Dukes’ odds now, because at a million to one, a million women against one company, I’m not seeing a way to lose at this point.
New Orleans One of the little known trivia questions about New Orleans over the last 20 years would be what newspaper in the country developed more Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonists? The Times-Picayune would be right at the top of that list and Mike Luckovich now laboring for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is consistently one of the best of the best.
His cartoon about the near farcical Beckaton in front of the Lincoln Memorial along the reflecting pool says it all for me right down to the nonsensical right arm: “ACORN = nuts = insane” though “mosque + cow = Moscow” is pretty much a classic.
When dealing with a clown, a cartoon just seems to say it best!
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New Orleans Kenneth Stretcher faxed me an article from the September 2010 edition of Labor Notes knowing that I would be desperate to read it, and I was. The piece was “Should Non-majority Unions Have a Right to Bargain?” by Judy Atkins and David Cohen both of the UE. They speculate that with a full panel on the NLRB now, a decision could soon be coming from the Board on the question of referred by the NLRB’s Division of Advice on whether or not unions should be allowed to bargain without having a majority standing and certification.