Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

DAILY MEMO: labor:

Card check might be union war’s collateral damage

Bill founders as one leader of Unite Here departs

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.”

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