October 06, 2006

Blogometer Extra

BLOGGERS VS. BELTWAY: Labor Pains

  Enemy combatant, Pluto, supervisor.  What do those three have in common?  They've all recently been redefined amid much consternation.  On Tuesday, the National Labor Relations Board "redefined and expanded the definition of 'supervisor,' potentially taking away the federally protected freedom to form a union from 8 million workers," rued Tula Connell at Daily Kos.  "Under federal labor law, supervisors are barred from forming unions."

  The cases that yielded the NLRB action are collectively referred to as "Kentucky River" and involves a group of nurses; but, as Connell points out, "it's the lead case Oakwood Healthcare Inc. that creates a new definition of supervisor."  She continues:

The board's new definition essentially enables employers to make a supervisor out of any worker who has the authority to assign or direct another and uses independent judgment.  Amazingly, the board also ruled that a worker can be classified as a supervisor if he or she spends as little as 10 percent to 15 percent of his or her time overseeing the work of others. ... Under today's ruling, ... hundreds of thousands of workers ... now could be classified as supervisors, and so cannot belong to a union.  And not only nurses: journalists, building trades workers, port employees and many, many, others may now be considered supervisors under U.S. labor law and so barred from joining unions.

  Union might, once a crucial part of political support, has waned in recent years as the American economy has changed with the times, and as business-friendly politicians have steadily undermined it.  It's not lost on Connell, who says, "[T]he Bush-backed NLRB regularly has ruled in favor of corporate interests over those of workers: The board has taken away workers' protections and limited workers' freedom to form unions, including workers with disabilities, temporary employees and graduate employees.

  Nathan Newman at TPM Cafe puts it bluntly, "That means if [workers] say a positive thing about unions, their bosses are free to fire them at will."  He peers further into nightmarish workplace scenarios:

[T]hese kinds of exclusions means that other workers rights are also undermined.  The fact that independent contractors can't unionize means that many firms can contract out work to block or undermine unionization.  Undocumented workers in the workplace can be threatened with deportation to break unions.

And the new expansive definition of "supervisor" means that more workers will be given nominal supervisory responsibilities to undermine their right to unionize-- and lock every union vote in endless delays as companies litigate who is and who is not a supervisor.  Even if the workers "win", the election will probably be delayed long enough to kill the union drive.

And here are the dynamics when large numbers of workers are declared to be supervisors-- it means that friends in the workplace immediately are turned into enemies as supervisors are told to spy on their friends or lose their jobs.  Instead of a union being about workers challenging the power of top management, it is turned into an internal workplace civil war.

But divide and conquer, pitting people against each other based on race, ethnicity, gender and now menial distinctions in authority on the shopfloor are the tools of the trade for the corporate rightwing. This decision is just one more bullet to the rights of working Americans.

  "[F]or this administration, simple legalities are not the issue," writes Jordan Barab at firedoglake, "crushing labor unions is."

  That's not what the Chamber of Commerce believes, as Kevin Drum at The Washington Monthly says.  He quotes:

The decision will probably affect primarily work sites where union organizing is going on, said Stephen A. Bokat, general counsel at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  "Where there are established collective bargaining relationships," he said, "these issues with regard to supervisors are very well established and I doubt most employers will totally upset their workplaces to meet that definition."

  Those who believe that "semi-cheerful spin, please raise your hand," remarks Drum.  "I imagine it will take no more than a few hours for some enterprising CEO with an 'established collective bargaining relationship' to realize what a great opportunity this is to send his company's unions into turmoil."

  James Joyner at Outside The Beltway has a wholly different, pragmatic tack.  "Do businesses prefer to deal with workers as individuals rather than as a group?&bsp; Sure.  Would they prefer to avoid the risk of being blackmailed with group walkouts and forced to pay workers more than they would command in a free market?  You bet."  He continues:

At the end of the day, however, the United Autoworkers can still try to organize the vast majority of the nurses at Oakwood Healthcare Inc. ... If 127 represents “two-thirds of the total bargaining unit,” then there are roughly 192 nurses at the facility.  Of those, only 12 were added to the “supervisory” category as a result of this ruling.  That’s a little over 6 percent.  Does that sound like an inordinately high number of supervisors?  Indeed, it sounds rather low to me for a profession in which at least an associate’s degree and often a bachelor’s degree is an entrance requirement.

That an auto workers’ union is trying to organize nurses shows how much the economy has changed since the bad old days.  These aren’t low skilled, geographically bound workers stuck doing dangerous work at the only factory in town but rather highly skilled, high demand, mobile workers in a burgeoning industry doing relatively pleasant work for which they spent years training.  Hospitals already have to pay high wages and offer competitive benefits to attract nurses, who are in shortage in much of the country.  The idea that they need to band together in solidarity for protection is absurd.

  Speaking of absurd, news jester Stephen Colbert explains the whole NLRB schmear in his unique, tongue-in-cheek way in a video available here that several of the above writers referenced.

  But Connell at Kos has little use for levity with so sobering a issue.  She rues, "How did we as a nation come to the point where those in power take away the rights of millions of workers to exercise the freedom to form unions--one of the pillars of the Bill of Rights?"

Posted by Conn Carroll at October 6, 2006 07:56 PM