DAILY MEMO: labor:

Card check might be union war’s collateral damage

Bill founders as one leader of Unite Here departs

Wednesday, June 3, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Wilhelm's stand: Labor will rebuild middle class (5-31-2009)
Unite Here even more split as co-leader resigns in huff (5-31-2009)
Unplugged: The SEIU chief on the labor movement and the card check (5-10-2009)
Hard bargaining or bad faith at Wynn? It's hard to say (5-6-2009)
Another union seeks Culinary's right to organize Strip workers (4-26-2009)
Labor secretary says OSHA to be strengthened (4-23-2009)

Labor is losing.

After spending hundreds of millions of dollars to win Democratic majorities in Congress and elect Barack Obama president, the labor movement’s No. 1 legislative priority — a bill that would make it easier for workers to organize — is in severe jeopardy, in large part because of high-profile infighting among some the country’s most progressive unions.

Exhibit A: Unite Here General President Bruce Raynor resigned last week from the apparel and hotel workers union after six months of legal and verbal jousting with co-president John Wilhelm over union resources and the direction of Unite Here.

He said he decided to quit after Wilhelm’s allies, accompanied by nearly a dozen security guards, broke into his New York union office and stole personal files related to mediation sessions aimed at reconciling the two leaders’ differences. Raynor likened the incident to something one would see on the HBO mob series “The Sopranos.”

Wilhelm said Raynor had been shredding documents and he needed to prevent further destruction. Wilhelm then turned his sights on Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern, who he says conspired with Raynor to raid Unite Here and steal organizing jurisdictions. Both Stern and Raynor deny those allegations.

Labor is losing the message war. Business is carrying the day, using the fight to taint unions in general and further its argument that labor organizations are rife with intimidation.

The business lobby, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has solidified Republican opposition, won over key Democratic votes and mounted a multi-million-dollar ad campaign while unions are spending precious resources on internal squabbles.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, became the latest in a line of labor leaders to make a personal appeal to the two men, saying in a letter that the Unite Here civil war was causing “collateral damage” to the entire labor movement and its drive to enact the Employee Free Choice Act.

According to The Wall Street Journal, it’s doing just that. The newspaper reported that Democratic leaders in Congress, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, met with the heads of several unions this year to push for some sort of settlement because the feud was hampering the bill’s prospects.

Raynor and Wilhelm agree.

“It makes the labor movement look bad,” Raynor told me last week. “It puts Democratic allies of ours in difficult positions and distracts from the real issues we ought to be concentrated on: health care, immigration reform, retirement security.”

Wilhelm’s assessment was much more dire: He said the card-check legislation would likely fail, and predicted that unions would see few, if any, fundamental reforms to federal labor law this year.

Lost in the din was a report by Cornell labor professor Kate Bronfenbrenner, which shows that employers have ramped up their opposition to unionization drives in recent years. The study, based on National Labor Relations Board cases and surveys from union organizers, found that management threatened to close the plant in 57 percent of representation elections, fired workers in 34 percent and warned of cuts to wages and benefits nearly half the time.

“Employers are literally operating at full force, engaging in aggressive anti-union behavior,” Bronfenbrenner said. “It’s an intensity we haven’t seen in the past. They’re not bothering with the carrots. They are going straight for the stick.”

As a result, Bronfenbrenner said, the number of union elections has dropped by half in the past eight years. “Workers do not see the National Labor Relations Board as a mechanism that is worth the risk,” she said.

Weingarten, for one, seems to recognize the urgency.

“Together you have the power to turn the page on this chapter and move forward,” she wrote to Raynor and Wilhelm. “For the sake of the movement, I ask you to do so.”

Discussion: 6 comments so far…

By outtatown

6/3/09 at 5:10 a.m.

Suggest removal

Wilhelm's actions make me sad to call myself a trade unionist. More mob than labor I say...
By neiman1

6/3/09 at 5:29 a.m.

Suggest removal

SEIU leaders and ACORN leaders are mingled and the same. These thugs are about power and extortion. The SEIU should be disbanded.
By term25600

6/3/09 at 8:21 a.m.

Suggest removal

Its unfair to say the labor is losing. The unions caused the end of the domestic car companies and thousands and thousands of jobs for 'labor'.

The problem was that the unions got too powerful with the support of the government, and they were able to extract too much money and perks from the car companies. They all borrowed against their assets to try and pay these legacy costs, even Ford. Most of the jobs that these companies provided are gone now anyway, despite government bailouts !!

To give unions MORE power at this point is crazy. They already cost the taxpayers another $50 billion so Obama can retain his worker votes. Its time to let the market do its work and rearrange things into stable companies that can actually provide long term employment.
By homer

6/3/09 at 9:51 a.m.

Suggest removal

One might expect more stupidity from neiman, someone who does not work and knows nothing about life except for what her hears from Rush and Fox News. Now go ride your skateboard.
By goingbust

6/3/09 at 9:52 a.m.

Suggest removal

"allies, accompanied by nearly a dozen security guards, broke into his New York union office "

One AR-15, one magazine of ammo, and a good cover position would have solved this problem with ease and removed a dozen very bad people from this world.
By boftx

6/3/09 at 11:43 a.m.

Suggest removal

I have said it before, and I'll say it here, the only card-check law needed is one for green cards, especially in Unite-Here and Culinary.

Unions are the primary (though by no means the only) driving force behind the outsourcing of jobs. There is simply no comparison between the cost of labor here in the States and overseas. At the same time, I maintain that the concept of Free Trade is insane whith countries that don't share our values and have comparable governments. We should at least engage in Fair Trade that recognizes that our government must take care of us first.

Both the Democrats and Republicans have screwed the pooch on this.

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