Sham "Union Facts"-- Bad For Public's Health And Safety

My old boss, AFSCME President Gerald W. McEntee, has gone after Richard Berman's sham, corporate backed, union hating, worker loathingUnion "Facts" (sic) in an article in the Huffington Post. (And he even quotes my previous piece on Berman.)

Berman's original goal was to kill the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would allow for card-check recognition of unions rather than the traditional bankrupt NLRB elections. But McEntee points out Berman's current round of attacks against public employees is targeted at states where voters are considering so-called "Taxpayer Bill of Rights," or TABOR, measures.

TABOR is Grover Norquist's latest attempt to fulfill his promise to cut government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" by starving public services of tax dollars. TABOR puts mandatory draconian caps on public spending, making it nearly impossible to meet health and safety needs.

The measure has had a disastrous effect in Colorado, where TABOR has stifled spending on highways and programs for the elderly. And the percentage of uninsured children has nearly doubled. That's why voters suspended it when they finally had their say on the measure in 2005; the Wisconsin legislature rejected it just this year.

But the right wing brigade marches on, trying to institute TABOR in other states. And working Americans are fighting to stop them. So is it any wonder why Mr. Berman is going after public employees?

Here are the real union facts: Mr. Berman's attacks on public employees only serve to weaken our public health and safety. We won't let him do it.

You can check our the real facts in this critical analysis of one of the ads. If you live in Nevada, Montana, Oregon or Michigan, watch out.

Department of Labor Union Busting

Before:

In the words of the organic act establishing the Department of Labor, its main purpose is "to foster, promote and develop the welfare of working people, to improve their working conditions, and to advance their opportunities for profitable employment."

Official History of the US Department of Labor

After:

In the words of the organic act establishing the Department of Labor, its main purpose is "to foster, promote and develop the welfare of working people corporate America, to improve their working conditions ability to stay union free , and to advance their opportunities for profitable employment."

Before:

It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.

-- NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS ACT (Wagner Act)

After:

It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by endiscouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting preventing the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating dictating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid protection subjugation.

***

Earlier this week, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington(CREW) received a 108 page document showing "a close and supportive relationship" between political appointees at the Department of Labor and staff of the anti-union, Center for Union Facts run by conservative lobbyist Richard Berman. The document resulted from a Freedom of Information lawsuit requesting any information about contacts between DOL and Berman.

So what's the problem here? Those younger than a certain age may not remember that the law of the land encourages the formation of labor unions, and that the Department of Labor was created to improve the working conditions and welfare of working people. Yet, these days the sole purpose of the Department of Labor seems to be ignoring workers and acting as if all unions are mafia offspring that deserve about as much sympathy as Al Queda.

So what is the Center for Union Facts and why do we care if they've got a close, personal relationship with the powers-that-be over at the Labor Department? I've written a couple of times recently about the Center. According to its website, the Center is "dedicated to showing Americans the truth about today’s union leadership. The real purpose is to fight the labor movements increasingly successful move to card check organizing.

Card check means that instead of the traditional "secret ballot" election to determine if workers want to organize a union, management voluntarily agrees to recognize the union if a majority sign cards indicting their desire to join the union. Under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), it is up to the employer to agree to card check recognition or to require a traditional election.

Because of the difficulty in conducting a fair election, card check campaigns — instead of secret ballot elections — have become labor’s main tool for organizing the unorganized. Card checks were used to sign up roughly 70 percent of the private-sector workers who joined unions last year, according to the A.F.L.-C.I.O, compared with less than 5 percent two decades ago. Workers in Las Vegas casinos, janitors in Houston and thousands of workers at Cingular have organized recently using card check.

And what does the Center do with its corporate funding? Recent advertisements compared UNITE HERE president Harris Raynor to Fidel Castro and Kim Jon Il, the group headed by an operative named Richard Berman who has never seen a corporate scam he couldn't exploit whether opposing Mothers Against Drunk Driving and its efforts to lower the legal blood alcohol content limit or defending the tobacco industry against smoking curbs in restaurants or organizing campaigns against raising the minimum wage. Union "Facts" recent campaign is a slick television commercial that asks a group of perky worker/actors what they "like" about their union: Paying union dues (just so I can keep my job), supporting union bosses' fat-cat lifestyles, that my dues are going to politicians I don't like, and how unions discriminate against minorities,... You get the idea. Berman is also behind an organization called Employment Policies Institute, which describes as “a think tank financed by business” that runs websites opposed to increasing the minimum wage and living wages. You can read more about at the AFL-CIO blog.

CREW's FOIA request was inspired by a Washington Post column last March that revealed an e-mail from Lynn Gibson, an aide in the Department of Labor's public liaison office, that alerts people on her DOL mailing list to an educational opportunity: The website of the Center For Union Facts.

Sensing that there may be more going on behind the scenes at the Department of Labor, CREW filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit requesting any information about contacts between DOL and the Center's Executive Director, Richard Berman.

Crew received a 108 page document showing

a close and supportive relationship between the two entities. For example, the documents include correspondence showing that DOL Secretary Elaine Chao agreed to be profiled for one of Richard Berman’s many conservative organizations, the First Jobs Institute.

The documents include an email indicating that Lynn Gibson set up a meeting between Berman and DOL staff. In another, Ms. Gibson tells a CUF staff person that she will send out emails related to CUF’s website to her “network.” Additionally, the e-mails obtained by CREW and sent out by DOL staff, include an op-ed drafted by Berman, anti-union newspaper accounts as well as anti-union blogs and news releases.

Claiming privilege, DOL has withheld e-mail correspondence including correspondence from Secretary Chao, that directly refer to Berman and his organizations. CREW will litigate this issue and press for the release of all documents responsive to its request.

Berman and friends were apparently a big help to Gibson, having just arrived at DOL from the conservative Heritage Foundation, asked her e-mail list for "Any suggestions as what I need to do to read up on regarding labor-related issues."

According to the documents, she spent most of her time reading and circulating to DOL political appointees publications from the Center For Union Facts that they "might get a kick out of," numerous anti-labor articles, as well as publications the State Policy Network's State Labor Policy Exchange. The State Policy Network is a "the professional service organization for America’s state-based, free market think tank community."

Now, I once worked at the Department of Labor and I can certainly sympathize with those who find their e-mail splashed across the Washington Post and passed around the internet. And there's nothing wrong with sending "interesting" items to friends and co-workers.

The problem here is what gets these people excited: trashing labor unions, characterizing them as corrupt pseudo-mafia-like organized crime syndicates who's only purpose in life is to prey on poor innocent workers who want nothing more than to be left alone to develop their own individual relationship with their kindly boss who thinks of them as family.

This is not what the Department of Labor was created for, nor is it what the Department of Labor has ever been used for, by Republicans or Democrats.

Related Articles

• Union Organizing In the 21st Century: Card Check and Roach Motels(FireDogLake), May 30, 2006
• Union "Facts" -- NOT, March 20, 2006
• Not Your Father's Labor Department, March 14, 2006
• Democracy In American Workplaces? Joke, right? March 12, 2006
• The crocigator, February 22, 2006
• Anti-Union Forces Running Ads, Running Scared, February 14, 2006

Katrina Evacuees Scab At San Francisco Hospital Strike

[Note: See update below. --JB]

It just keeps getting worse. Employers and the Bush administration are using Katrina to gut environmental protections, cut workers' pay and now even break strikes:

About a dozen evacuees from Hurricane Katrina are filling in for striking workers at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, hospital officials said Saturday.

The workers -- among them janitorial staff and nursing assistants from the storm-ravaged gulf -- are employed by a temporary employment agency, CPMC Medical Director Allan Pont said.

"We learned they were Katrina refugees through word of mouth," Pont said. "Our staff is hearing what an ordeal they've been through"

Pont said the hospital had little recourse but to hire temporary workers to care for patients and provide upkeep for the hospital, but union members walking a picket line outside the hospital were aghast to find out the hospital was using evacuees from Hurricane Katrina to fill their jobs.

About 800 cafeteria workers, health aides and represented by SEIU on strike last week against three campuses of Sutter Health, CPMC's parent company

"It's such an extraordinary irony," said Sal Rosselli, president of SEIU United Health Care Workers West.

"SEIU is sending nurses and psych techs to New Orleans to care for people there. We're engaging the government to establish training programs there for workers who are unemployed."

Sutter has hired a scab supply company -- Healthcare Contingency Staffing Services (HCSS) to supply workers to fill in for the strikers. HCSS is run by the unsavory scabmaster Gary Fanger, who the Bay Guardian calls "the perfect guy for the messy, unpleasant, and all around ugly job of quashing a strike.":

a 52-year-old ex-felon who's been convicted on fraud, forgery, and drug charges and accused of stealing trade secrets and failing to pay child support.

Fanger portrays himself as a decent guy who's made some mistakes over the years. "I did some stupid things back then," he says. But, "I think I've been a contributor to society by employing hundreds of people.... I'm a good boss, a good dad."

· · ·

You can chart the career of Gary W. Fanger, a bulky man with blond hair, a soft voice, and a passion for sailing, by trolling the court records and criminal databases of California, Colorado, and beyond.

Fanger, who was raised in Los Gatos, first appears in the system in 1981, in Colorado, when Aspen police accused him of writing a bad check for $1,666.66, according to a search-warrant affidavit. At the time, Fanger was running what appears to have been a barter business called Executive Exchange. The case was closed and prosecution deferred when Fanger agreed to repay the money along with a $250 fine and court costs, court records show.

By 1984 he was wearing handcuffs again, accused by Denver cops of second-degree forgery (four counts), criminal impersonation (three counts), and check fraud (a single count). At trial, court reports indicate, he was found guilty on two forgery charges and sentenced to four years in the state pen; he appealed the conviction and was released on bond.

While out on bond, he was popped a third time, for "conspiracy to dispense" cocaine, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Probation records say he pled to a single count of "Criminal Attempt to Possess a Schedule II Controlled Substance," and got another four-year sentence, to be served consecutively with his earlier term. Fanger tells us he did three years in the Colorado pen and used the time behind bars to pursue college degrees.

His probation officer didn't have particularly flattering things to say about him, concluding, in a written report, that he was driven by "greed" and "the opportunity to turn $100,000 into half a million dollars in three to four weeks time." The probation officer was also concerned that Fanger was $25,000 behind on child support payments to an ex-spouse, with whom he'd had four kids.

"It's amazing," says one source who knows Fanger. "Every person around him gets screwed."

UPDATE: I recently received a call from Gary Fanger asking me to take down this post, disputing some of the allegations made in the Guardian article, and noting that even some of the accurate points were long in the past. Also note that Mr. Fanger has apparently left the "strike staffing" business.

While I have a policy of not taking down posts, I do have a policy of letting everyone have their say. I am publishing Mr. Fanger's letter below.

Dear Jordan,

Thank you for taking the time to talk about the Scab Master post this morning. I wrote a letter a couple of days ago to the publisher of the Guardian asking him to take the article down. The article was interesting because the next issue had a full page inside front cover ad for the SEIU. I don’t know if they were rewarding them for the article but my issues with the SEIU are behind both of us. Their negative information about me was pulled down by them voluntarily last year. I am hoping you can do the same.

I understand that you don’t normally take your postings down but this is a little different since the information was taken from the Guardian and it was not substantiated like it should have been. They called me hours before it went to press and even though I gave th em plenty of references, my son who is an attorney, an ex wife, an employee and other business associates they did not take the time to interview them.

The article covers the strike but mostly talks about my life and portrays a lot of negative information, some which is false and some that was true many years ago about past taxes and child support that was due and now paid. The article mentions a criminal record that is over 20 years old which I paid a price for but this article and its content continues to haunt my life. I have several children I am supporting, I pay all my taxes and I have no child support that is due. I have overcome a lot of obstacles in my life but still this article coming up on the top of a Google search is causing me personal and professional problems.

One of my employees voluntarily wrote a counter follow up commentary that ran in an issue just after this article. It helped because it would show up under the Scab Master article but it does not show up any more. I ignored the posts for years but lately they have caused me some real problems professionally and even when I was trying to get a loan.

I appreciate your time and attention and hope that you will consider my request.

Sincerely,

Gary Fanger

OSHA Nominee Ed Foulke: A Gift to Workers From A Union Busting Law Firm

So it turns out that the nomination of Edwin Foulke as Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA last week is looking more and more like a typical Bush administration move: Appoint a Republican political operative to head an agency that he's spent most of his career working to undermine. Except in this case, there's an extra twist. Foulke is not just a Republican mover and shaker in South Carolina, he's also a partner at Jackson-Lewis, one of the most notorious union-busting lawfirms in the country. How appropriate for a Bush Administration Assistant Secretary of Labor.

I realized that when I wrote the original post that Jackson Lewis resided on the dark side, but I didn't have time to do much research that evening. Little did I know how easy the research would be. Just Google "Jackson Lewis" + "union busting" and you come up with 322 hits. Substitute "union busting" with the more polite phrase "union avoidance" and you get 304 hits.

Jackson Lewis publishes a newsletter called Preventive Strategies and one of their main Practice Areas is Labor Relations, including Preventive Practices"

Committed to the practice of preventive labor relations through issue assessment, supervisory training, policy development, and positive communications, Jackson Lewis has assisted many employers in winning NLRB elections or in avoiding union elections altogether. (emphasis added)

Much of Jackson-Lewis's evildoing, or "preventive labor relations" came to light nationally in a New York Times article last year that described how Enersys, a company that had hired Jackson Lewis to help it "avoid" a union, sued the law firm for malpractice, accusing Jackson Lewis of advising it to engage in illegal behavior.

You've really got to read the entire article. It's a nightmare about how the workers at the plant chose to organize with the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE), despite the anti-union campaign organized by Jackson Lewis for the company. The company then fired a union steward and broke numerous other labor laws leading to an NLRB complaint citing 120 violations of federal law, among them wrongly firing union leaders, assisting the anti-union campaign, improperly withdrawing union recognition and moving production to nonunion plants as retaliation. The company then refused to sign a contract and threatened layoffs unless the union agreed to a "gainsharing program," that would provide bonuses based on productivity increases. The company never provided the bonuses and it was later discovered never had any intention to. (More on Enersys here.)

Even Tonight Show host Jay Leno doesn't think much of union busting firms like Jackson, Lewis:

Unionists have a good reason to watch "The Tonight Show". Its host, comedian Jay Leno, just busted the number-one union busting law firm, Jackson, Lewis, out of a lucrative deal.

Leno was scheduled to appear at the Society of Human Resource Management's annual convention in Las Vegas on June 25-28 - that is until union research Rick Rehberg found out about it. Rehberg, a corporate researcher for the Food & Allied Service Trades, an AFL-CIO department, kept coming across Jackson, Lewis in the 25 or so union campaigns he's worked on.

That's not surprising since the notorious law firm has defeated organizing drives in over 30 states. And they've done it mean and dirty. For example, the New York Daily News reported the law firm was responsible for setting up armed guards at factory gates in at least three states to stop union organizing campaigns. And Jackson, Lewis routinely advises companies to set up forced overtime when union meetings are scheduled, watch workers during break time to detect potential organizing drives, and prohibit workers' communication to thwart the distribution of union material.

Companies pay big money to Jackson, Lewis and other union busters for exactly that kind of information. In fact, union busting is a billion dollar industry. Jackson, Lewis charges $1,200 to $1,600 a person for running seminars titled, "How to Stay Union Free in Today's Era of Corporate Campaigns" and "Best Employer Practices to Stay Union Free in the Millennium". But thanks to Leno, Jackson, Lewis, won't be garnering a hefty check at this year's SHRM conference.

You can also find stories about J-L's participation in notorious campaigns against the unionization of Borders Bookstores, Berlin Health & Rehabilitation Center in Berlin, Vermont, Episcopal Church Home, nursing home in Rochester, NY, and Patient Care in New York City and many, many more. Infuriated after losing a 2002 election at Saint-Gobain Abrasives factory in Worcester, Massachusetts, Jackson Lewis even went so far as to file an unfair labor practice suit against Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA) because he told workers that they should vote for the union (which they did.)

Foulke isn't directly part of J-L's union-busting practice. He belongs to the "Workplace Safety Compliance, including Violence Prevention" practice:

To assist in compliance efforts and to reduce the likelihood of a citation, we advise employers in developing safety programs and conducting preventive self-audits to pinpoint and remedy potential legal vulnerabilities.

Yes, you read that right. The purpose of Jackson Lewis's safety programs and self audits is not to protect workers from getting injured or killed, but to "pinpoint and prevent potential legal vulnerabilities." We all have our priorities.

And then there's the Violence Prevention part, which from J-L's perspective seems to be instruction in how to lay off troublesome employees without having them come back in and blow your head off. No mention is made of the overwhelming cause of workplace violence like retail store robberies and assaults of mental health and social service workers.

Foulke was also a member of J-L's Management Training practice, which includes programs on "maintaining union-free status."

Whether or not Foulke participated directly in Jackson Lewis's union busting activities, he certainly didn't have a whole lot of good things to say about one of labor's priorities throughout the 1990's, OSHA's ergonomics standard that was repealed by the Bush administration in 2001:

"It should be called the OSHA Lawyers' Full Employment Act," says Edwin Foulke, himself an attorney who specializes in OSHA-related issues for the Jackson Lewis law firm based in Washington, D.C. "I would have liked to have seen voluntary guidelines. Most employers want to do the right thing, but this will just be a big record-keeping exercise."

Foulke and other skeptics claim there isn't enough science yet to prescribe precise fixes for problems....

While Foulke was basically J-L's OSHA guy, questions need to be asked (preferably by Senators at his confirmation hearing) about what Foulke thinks about workers' right to organize. Was he in sync with the union busting activities of Jackson Lewis? Are union organizing campaigns that focus on health and safety issues a healthy sign of worker involvement or a sign of trouble? What does he think about behavioral safety programs that blame workers for accidents?

What does he think about the role of the "worker representative" as described in the OSHA law? Is it a good thing if workers exercise their rights to push management into improving safety conditions? Coming out of such a virulently anti-union firm, will he be able to work with unions? Unlike any other Republican administrations since OSHA was created in 1971, the Bush appointees have refused, with rare exceptions, to work seriously with unions. Will he continue this practice?

So what does all this mean for OSHA over the next 3 ½ years?

The bottom line is that we’re somewhat lacking in actual health and safety expertise in OSHA's front office. We now have attorneys in all of the top three jobs: Foulke, an attorney from a union busting lawfirm, a local Republican Party chairman and an officer in the Republican National Lawyer’s Association; Deputy Assistant Secretary Jonathan Snare, a former Texas political operative, member of the Republican National Lawyer’s Association and former lobbyist for Metabolife, maker of the killer drug ephedra; and Deputy Assistant Secretary Steve Witt, an attorney who has worked at a variety of positions in OSHA's Washington headquarters since 1985.

What all this means is no major regulations except those ordered by the courts, more emphasis (if that’s possible) on costly, unproven voluntary programs like VPP and alliances, continued frosty relations (or no relations) with labor unions, enforcement will continue muddle along increasingly strained for resources and there will be little, if any, Congressional oversight unless the Democrats take back one house of Congress next year.

In other words, status quo.

Union Bashing 101

I’ve spent some profitable times over the past couple of decades taking classes and teaching at various labor education centers and have always admired the work that they do – especially in health and safety. They are indispensable for training future union activists and supplementing union efforts to train their members in a variety of labor issues. Check out the projects and publications at LOHP at Berkeley or LOSH at UCLA.

Well you can imagine my surprise to find out that labor studies centers are evil, according to a Wall St. Journal article, “Picketing 101,” by Steve Malanga of the right wing Manhattan Institute.

“Under AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney, these departments have defined their mission chiefly as supporting labor and its organizing effects rather than educating students.” (Some – like me -- would argue that “supporting labor and its organizing efforts IS educating students)

The Manhattan Institute is a think tank whose mission is to develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility. A longer article on the same topic can be found on their web site.

What examples to we have of the labor movement’s crimes in co-opting of academic departments and programs?”

-- U-Mass Amherst has an M.A. program in union leadership and administration – “in essence a school for union leaders.” (Horrors!) Amherst also has a course whose description, in part, reads “we live in ‘an era of crushing corporate power and aggressive opposition to unions.” (as personified perhaps by this article?)

-- Wayne State university provides technical support for “living-wage campaigns around the country which helped to spark successful efforts to raise the minimum wage for some workers in dozens of cities.” (What will they stoop to next?)

And if the subversive course material isn’t bad enough, labor programs go so far as to sponsor internships, which like the vampires of old, direct impressionable students “to do labor’s bidding.”

What do these possessed interns work on? Some help in organizing campaigns, and if hat isn’t bad enough, some of them are guilty of assisting campaigns that involve “forcing business to raise the sallies of some employees,” which somehow works “against the interests of taxpayers” (who are different from workers? I’m getting confused.)

In addition to warping their young minds and recruiting them into the union cult world, these programs also put out reports on “subjects key to the labor movement’s legislative agenda: free trade, globalization, living wage legislation, poverty…These reports, with their veneer of academic objectivity, appear to provide scholarly proof of labors most cherished contentions.”(Hear that John Ashcroft? Any more room in Guantanemo?)

But if it’s really tainted research he’s interested in, he should check out reports by the American Association of University Professors and the Center for Science in the Public Interest who have documented multiple examples of business-dominated university research programs.

The report also identifies more than 30 university-based research centers that draw substantial financial support from companies or corporate trade associations. Among those are several university centers on forestry funded by timber or paper industries and several centers on nutrition funded by food and agribusiness companies. All such centers let corporations put an academic sheen on industry-funded research, according to CSPI.

“People would be far more skeptical of a ‘Corporate Polluters Lobbying Association’ than an industry-funded ‘Harvard University Center on Important Issues,’” said [CSPI Director Michael] Jacobson. “Companies hope that a nonprofit’s or university’s good name will burnish their reputations. Call it ‘innocence by association.’”

More on the CSPI study here.

So what’s the goal of these subversive activities? “Labor programs state plainly that they exist primarily to promote unions and create a generation of activists. For example,

The labor program at UMass Lowell, for instance, uses its website to disseminate “action alerts” about local union campaigns, warning that a union local is under attack from a movie theater chain or imploring readers to assist an organizing effort at a local supermarket chain by downloading a form letter to send to the chain’s president. The labor studies program at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, sponsors intensely partisan radio programs, dubbed “Heartland Labor Forum.”

Well, excuse me, but don’t business schools exist primarily to promote American business. Check out the Wharton business school web page: “Wharton is dedicated to creating the highest value and impact on the practice of business and management worldwide through intellectual leadership and innovation in teaching, research, publishing, and service.”

And last time I checked, it was still just as legal to organize a union or go out on strike as it is to form a business.

But isn’t labor studies just as legitimate as African American studies or women’s studies? Of course not. “Unlike gender or race studies (both disciplines strongly supported by the Wall St. Journal and the Manhattan Institute), labor studies undeviatingly promote the interests of a tiny constituency: the union” (Actually, labor studies promotes the interests of a slightly larger constituency: workers. But let’s not get too picky.)

The longer article on the Manhattan Institute website goes into a bit of labor history. It seems that labor studies programs once served a useful purpose (just as at one time unions themselves served a useful (purpose):

When labor studies programs arose just after World War II, mostly in the “extension” or continuing-education divisions of universities, their aim was modest: to help create a better-educated generation of union workers to combat mob control, corruption, and communist influence. “If labor leaders could be better educated, it was thought this would lead to fewer confrontations and fewer strikes,” says Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

In other words, as long as labor studies programs were teaching workers to accept their conditions, not to confront their employers and never strike, they were OK.

How things have changed. Now we have

Queens College of the City University of New York, professors developed a labor internship program, the Solidarity Project, with help from the university’s Education Center for Community Organizing, whose purpose is to stimulate social activism and community organizing in students.

And the last thing a democratic nation needs is more social activism and community organizing.

Ah, the good old days:

Back in the sixties and seventies, when labor bosses were culturally conservative, supported pro-growth policies, and sent their hardhats to battle long-haired students over the war in Vietnam, who would ever have thought the day would come when union leaders would co-opt the professors?

Or vice versa.

Malanga’s article is clearly an attempt by the Manhatten Institute to foment a taxpayer revolt against these publicly funded programs. Malanga quotes a small businessman viewing a Living Wage who was “shocked to learn that some of those out on street corners agitating in favor of the [Living Wage] law were fulfilling course requirements. ‘As a [California] taxpayer, I'm funding the U.C. system. This isn't the kind of activity I want to fund.’”

Of course, if taxpayers really want to revolt, they could look down the road a few miles from where I’m writing to the public George Mason University and its rabidly anti-union, anti regulatory Mercatus Center. Mercatus is best known for counting up the costs of regulations every year (leaving out the benefits) and for sponsoring anti-regulatory “studies” such as one I quoted a few months ago that argues that OSHA Kills.

So why is labor studies important? As California AFL-CIO President Art Pulaski, Executive Secretary- Treasurer of the California Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, says:

"We are in danger of becoming two Californias: the privileged, highly paid executives and professionals, and the rest of us -- the teachers, the construction workers, the farm laborers, the garment workers, the retail clerks, the child care and nursing home staff. Many of these people are immigrants and minorities who are having great difficulty making ends meet. The University of California should study these jobs and the problems of these workers and offer well-informed advice to policy makers in labor, business, and government. The result will be new policies, partnerships, and employment institutions that contribute to an economy in which prosperity is shared and opportunities are opened to all."

Update: Check out Tapped and the Joe Kenehan Center for other perspectives on this article.

Airport Screeners Fight to Organize Union, Threaten National Security. Oh My!

This article from the Orlando Sentinel describes Airport screeners efforts to build a union and eventually get collective bargaining rights despite the Administration's insistence that unions and homeland security are incompatible.

The opening salvo was fired in January by TSA chief James Loy, when he forbade screeners access to collective bargaining. That was followed by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and its absorption of tens of thousands of civil service workers, who were offered only a one-year guarantee that their union rights would be preserved. And now the Department of Defense is asking Congress for unprecedented authority to hire, fire and promote its 746,000 civilian workers.

The administration couches everything in national security terms, saying it wants to create a nimble work force capable of responding to today's threats. But union leaders call it thinly veiled union busting.

"The part that really frustrates me is that they are lying to the public. They have all the flexibility they need under the current law," said Bobby Harnage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 600,000 government workers.

Although screeners are allowed to join AFGE, they aren't allowed to bargain. Screeners talk about how they are being mistreated and claim they are being harassed for organizing activities.

Among the problems cited in Orlando and other airports: Schedules are inconsistent from week to week, and sometimes even day to day; paychecks are lost or wrong; employees are often denied breaks whenever there is a shortage of workers; and screeners who used to work for private screening companies are given first shot at promotions.

And they say those who complain about working conditions often are harassed by supervisors -- including being given less desirable schedules or denied transfers.

"The way we are treated -- it's always negative," said Marzke, who thinks his union activism has made him a target.

Marzke was one of 13 screeners who made a trek to Washington, D.C., in March to officially join the union and take part in a news conference. Immediately afterward, he started having trouble with his pay -- including missing two consecutive paychecks.

"I could only assume it was retribution for my union activities," Marzke said.

***

Nationwide, screeners are complaining about many of the same things, though there are issues of more importance to specific locations.

At Boston, for example, union activist Dennis Cullity is worried about the lack of radiation-detection badges -- they track cumulative exposure -- for screeners who operate X-ray machines. Such badges are worn by the technicians who come in to repair the machines, he said.

"But we're with the machines eight hours a day and we don't get to wear them," Cullity said. "If they are wearing them, why aren't we?"

In Los Angeles, a hub for flights to and from Asia, screeners complain about not being allowed to wear masks to ward against the sometimes fatal respiratory disease SARS. But also, screeners want to see less chaotic scheduling.

But less chaotic scheduling would clearly threaten the security of the homeland, according to Robert Poole, director of transportation studies at the Reason Foundation,* a conservative think tank.

With unions would come new workplace rules that could make it harder for managers to respond to sudden threats. The TSA likes to point to its rapid mobilization of screeners around New Year's Day, when intelligence suggested terrorists were planning to sneak shoe-bombs aboard U.S. jetliners.

"You want to have that level of flexibility. And that's going to be difficult to preserve if the union takes hold," Poole said....

Even if they can't strike, union workers could use other tactics, including sick-outs and work slowdowns, to apply pressure during contract negotiations, said Charles Slepian, an aviation security expert with the Foreseeable Risk Analysis Center.

"We can't start messing around with the aviation industry," Slepian said.

Well, all I can say is that it's a good thing there weren't any of those union members involved in 9/11 events. Imagine what a mess that would have been.

*Reason Foundation on Bush's Government Privatization Proposal: "In an exciting development for privatization advocates, the Bush Administration announced plans to privatize 850,000 government jobs, almost half of the federal work force. The decision is a powerful endorsement of Reason’s decades of privatization work....Reason Executive Director Adrian Moore and Senior Fellow Carl DeMaio provided research and strategic guidance in formulating the Agenda, and are working closely with OMB to ensure its smooth implementation."

OK. All Together Now: Let’s Trash Unions!

My good buddy Eric Alterman, upon whom I showered praise Friday morning (and whom I’ve never met, but he did nicely reference my Workers Memorial Day post in his WebLog, Altercation) took a rare wrong turn Friday afernoon trashing the NY city unions as "irresponsible" for not sacrificing more to ease the city’s fiscal crisis. He cites this article by Steven Greenhouse in the New York Times.

Greenhouse’s article starts out:

Shoppers will soon pay more in sales taxes, and smokers more in cigarette taxes. Property owners are already paying more in real estate taxes, and upper-income New Yorkers are staring at a surcharge on their income taxes. Subway and bus fares are up. So are rents.

The only ones who seem immune from the pain of the city's and state's budget deals are New York's powerful labor unions.

Immune? Hello? Who, exactly are “the city’s powerful labor unions?” The unions are institutions that represent their members. The members, who work for the city, are also citizens of the city; the same shoppers, smokers, property owners (or renters), subway and bus riders (more than upper-income New Yorkers) who are already making the sacrifices that Greenhouse – and Alterman – are accusing them of somehow being immune from. (This point is briefly made in Greenhouse’s article by teacher’s union president Randi Weingarten, but it’s buried at the end of the article.) Then, on top of that, they are expected to be "responsible" and sacrifice their health care benefits?

And then we get this from Alterman:

Yes, (the NYT-endorsed right-winger) Pataki’s the worst, and the commuters suck too, but the unions in New York City are just almost as irresponsible. I know I said this yesterday, but [the Greenhouse] piece makes the point in more detail. The leadership would rather lose jobs and services than offer up any sacrifice and this from people with totally free medical care. I mean, I’m all for totally free medical care. But why are NYC unions the only people entitled to it?

This is just one example of how public employees are seen as lesser human beings -- especially if they belong to unions. And it's a story being repeated right now in every city and in every county and in every state in this nation where public employees are organized. (Another example of how public employees are treated as second class citizens is the fact that most public employees in this country are not covered by OSHA – they do some of the most dangerous work in this country and have no right to a safe workplace. But that’s a story for a different time.)

Actually, public employees bleed like everyone else. So why are NYC unions -- workers -- the only people entitled to free medical care? To the extent they are paid decently (many still aren’t) and receive decent benefits (which are being cut nationwide), it’s not because NYC public employees are more selfish than everyyone else. It's because, unlike most of the rest of America, they are organized and politically active, which is the way the rest of progressive America – not just workers – should be. Then we wouldn’t have to deal with these destructive tax cuts and tragic wars. We wouldn't have a country that “is headed to hell in a handbasket from so many directions one can barely keep track,” to quote…Eric Alterman.

Acts of God, Acts of Man, and Faith-based Health and Safety

Here we clarify a little recent history. This story, like much of our most important history, contains lessons that should never be forgotten. Unfortunately, most people will never know about it in the first place, much less remember it or do something about it.

The Nation ran an excellent article in its March 17 edition about the real story behind last year's "miraculous" Somerset County, Pennsylvania mine rescue.

Written by Charles McCollester, director of the Pennsylvania Center for the Study of Labor Relations at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, the article describes how "The flooding of the nonunion Quecreek mine reveals much about government inadequacy stemming from chronic underfunding; government incompetence and/or complicity with powerful vested interests; corporate irresponsibility and greed; and coordinated anti-union activity."

Prior to the flooding of the mine there had been multiple warnings about the inadequacy of the 1957 map that showed the adjoining Saxman mine that was flooded with water and was the source of the flood in the Quecreek mine. After the disaster, several elderly former Saxman miners claimed on local television that they had gone to the owner of the mine, Black Wolf, in the months just preceding the breach to warn the company that its map was inadequate and that Black Wolf was nearing the Saxman Coal Harrison #2 mine workings.

Despite these warnings, Black Wolf owner-operator David Rebuck called the flooding an "act of God" in one local TV interview. As McCollester wrote, "The flood of testimonials to the mercy of God threatens to obscure the very human factors that led to the near-disaster. God may well have had a hand in the rescue, but human avarice and more than a century of fierce corporate manipulation and struggle for profit and control were behind the wall of water that swept into the Quecreek mine."

(Note from JB: The "Act of God" excuse was often used, in my experience, to explain such "unfathomable" processes as the collapse of a 12 foot deep trench on top of construction workers or the asphyxiation of sewer workers in an unmonitored confined space. "Who could have predicted it?" "Brave men, dangerous job, tsk, tsk." A related scapegoat was Mother Nature, as in "Yup, that trench just gave way. Who could have known? Just one of those terrible unpredictable things when you're dealing with Mother nature.")

These "excuses" often worked -- at least for public consumption -- because they were generally quoted in the typical one-day article in the local newspaper. By the time experts are found (if anyone bothers) or the OSHA report comes out (assuming they weren't public employees who had no OSHA coverage), the local media had lost interest. But I digress...)

The article notes "The ultimate act of political cynicism was reserved for President Bush, who made a choreographed whistle-stop visit to the rescued miners on his way to a million-dollar campaign fundraiser in Pittsburgh."

The UMWA had attempted to organize the mine, but "Repeated attempts to organize Quecreek had broken down because the majority of the miners were intimidated. [According to] UMWA organizer Nick Molnar (now retired): "The company gets wind of our presence and first you get threats to fire individuals who support the union; that's followed by veiled threats about closing the mine. In a depressed area, such actions are extremely effective."

"If Quecreek had been union, workers might have been more candid about company responsibility immediately after the rescue, when some of them supported management's claim of normal mining conditions. If the union had been recognized, the workers could have refused to continue advancing--without fear for their jobs--as they saw conditions worsening."


Union health and safety activists understand that the best guarantor of a safe workplace is not OSHA and not (for God's sake) Workers Compensation, but a strong, knowledgeable and active union. (Some think it's even possible that health and safety problems would make a good organizing issue.)