Shaun Richman

Another Terrifying Labor Statistic

The Center for Economic and Policy Research has released a report that finds that one in five union activists can expect to be fired during an organizing campaign under George Bush's watch. Overall, a pro-union worker had a 1.4 percent chance of being illegally fired for his sympathies in 2005. An organizer's gut reaction to authors John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer's paper might well be, "Oh, great, just what my organizing committee needs to hear!" The fact is that workers already know that organizing is risky (and organizers don't suger-coat the risk).

Combined with threatened and actual plant closures, terminations and employer animus are the greatest reasons why half of all union representation elections lose and so many more campaigns never even come to election as activists are fired as a chilling example to their coworkers not to step out of line. The report's numbers are based on cases where the National Labor Relations Board found a termination to be illegally motivated by anti-union animus and ordered that the employee be reinstated with back pay. This remedy is hardly punitive, since the boss is not fined or jailed for willfully violating the law, and, indeed, the back-pay that he must make up are the wages he would have paid anyway minus any other wages that the employee earned from other employers in the meantime, which at an average of $2,749 per fired worker is a huge discount if the firing successfully discourages the rest of the workers from pursuing their organizing campaign.

The authors utilize NLRB data for their report, which ignores a world of activity beyond an increasingly archaic and anti-union process. Public sector employees, who are governed by state laws, are far less likely to face termination for their union activism, a fact that Kate Bronfenbrenner and Tom Juravitch cited in an earlier paper as a reason for the higher win percentage for unions in public versus private sector campaigns. And many innovative unions are bypassing the NLRB election procedure for pressure campaigns leading to card check recognition. Union activists are probably less likely to be terminated during such a campaign, but it's impossible to gather numbers. Instead, the authors estimate the number of workers organized through such procedures and add them to the universe of their study, which produces a very conservative figure for the likelihood of a pro-union worker to be fired.

Schmitt and Zipperer perhaps should have ignored these cases entirely and focused on the NLRB process. What their paper would be then is yet another convincing argument that the National Labor Relations Act is broken; that, on the whole, it serves management's interests and provides a legal roadmap for a campaign of terror to beat back most union organizing campaigns, and, as such, is in desperate need of reform or repeal.

Labor law reform is on the agenda, with the Democrats newly in control of Congress, although mostly as a wedge issue for the coming presidential contest since Bush is likely to veto anything that the Congress passes on labor (save, perhaps, for a narrow tweaking in response to Kentucky River). The prospect of a Democratic presidency coupled with the Democratic Congress, absent a groundswell of political pressure, should not inspire too much optimism. After all, labor law reform was on the agenda the last time the Democrats controlled Washington (and the situation was, in some ways, worse - a worker was more likely to be fired for union activity during the Reagan years), but two years of studies and commissions produced nothing.

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Posted at 11:29 AM, Jan 05, 2007 in Governmental Reform | Labor
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