[BlutoSays]

Big Labor Traps Workers in Unions They Oppose | Opinion
Mark Mix , President, National Right to Work Committee
Newsweek, September 5, 2022

This Labor Day, you may see headlines about a supposed "boom" in union organizing, and while high-profile union campaigns against well-known companies like Starbucks and Amazon have generated buzz, Department of Labor numbers showed unions lost 241,000 members last year.

Less likely to make headlines is a trend Big Labor's cheerleaders wish to ignore: the significant increase in efforts by workers seeking to remove long-entrenched unions from their workplaces.

Employees across the country have submitted a wave of petitions to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), asking the federal agency to schedule votes to remove unpopular unions, a process known as "decertification."

In fact, according to the NLRB's own data on petitions for elections to either install or remove a union, a unionized private-sector worker is more than twice as likely to be involved in a decertification effort as a similar nonunion worker is to be involved in efforts to unionize his or her employer.

Another recent analysis found decertification petitions to the NLRB have increased by a whopping 42 percent this year. That's 16 percent higher than the increase in petitions seeking to bring in a union (when counting the Starbucks campaign once, rather than tallying each individual location's petition).

When you consider that NLRB policies make it impossible for most workers to hold a decertification effort outside a brief 30-day window once every three years, the jump in decertification efforts looks even starker. There is no similar limitation on when petitions can be filed to trigger unionization votes.

What we've seen here at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which provides free legal aid to workers, confirms this trend. Foundation staff attorneys have received a record number of requests for legal assistance over the last couple of years from workers seeking help to navigate the NLRB's maze-like decertification process.

While you may not have heard about the wave of workers seeking to free themselves of unwanted unions, you can be sure Big Labor and its political allies know exactly what's going on.

You see, rather than ask why so many workers want to escape union ranks, union bosses and their Biden administration allies are pulling out all the stops to make it even more difficult for hard-working Americans to participate in a decertification election.

The Biden-backed PRO Act—Big Labor's top legislative priority—is a laundry list of new power grabs for union organizers. It would wipe out all 27 Right to Work laws that make union dues voluntary.

Other PRO Act provisions, like mandating "Card Check" recognition that bypasses secret-ballot votes for unionization, and permitting unionization to be forced on gig economy workers, have also made headlines. Yet the bill also includes new statutory prohibitions on decertification elections, including giving union officials the ability to automatically delay any decertification vote through unproven allegations called "blocking charges."

But with the PRO Act stalled in the Senate, the Biden NLRB isn't waiting on Congress to stifle decertification efforts.

Biden-appointed union activists at the NLRB are seeking to squelch decertification efforts through bureaucratic fiat. This includes reversing the Election Protection Rule, a set of common-sense, if modest, reforms previously adopted by the NLRB that removed multiple Board-invented barriers to worker-backed decertification. One of those reforms that the Biden Board seeks to reverse allowed workers to challenge a union's installation through Card Check with a private, secret-ballot vote.

Meanwhile, the former union lawyer who was appointed top prosecutor at the Labor Board has said she intends to overturn the Foundation-won Johnson Controls precedent, which allowed employers to act on workers' majority petitions and end the union's "representation" through withdrawal of recognition. Johnson Controls also allowed union officials to seek an automatic secret-ballot vote to try to counter such withdrawal petitions, but few unions have opted for that because they fear private, secret-ballot elections.

The fact that the NLRB is helping Big Labor strong-arm workers into joining union ranks, and going to such lengths to block workers from escaping, shows just how out of touch the NLRB is in protecting the rights of workers—one of which is the statutory right to decertify.

Instead of improving the service they provide to attract more workers to voluntarily join union ranks, union bosses are simply doubling down on exercising their coercive government-granted powers to get workers under their control. In the short term, rigging the rules might help keep forced union dues flowing, but over the long run it will only further alienate union bosses from the workers they claim to represent. This is not a prescription for satisfied workers on Labor Day.

Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Committee.

https://www.newsweek.com/big-labor-trap ... on-1738636

[ckaihatsu]

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/0 ... s-s05.html


The political issues confronting American workers on Labor Day 2022

Jerry White
18 hours ago

Labor Day 2022 presents the working class with two choices. One is with the AFL-CIO and the Biden administration, which plan to make workers pay for imperialist war, facilitate the spread of the pandemic no matter the death toll, cause mass layoffs through the hiking of interest rates, and lower wages as the cost of living explodes.

The other path is the development of an independent movement of the working class. This is happening objectively, in the form of the rejection of sellout contracts, the development of an international strike wave, and a growing sense in every workplace that things cannot continue as they are.

But to succeed, this emerging movement needs political direction and strategic self-awareness.

The first path—the losing path—goes through the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Party. President Biden will be traveling to Pittsburgh today where he will celebrate his supposed “pro-worker” policies with the corrupt and widely hated union executives who lead the AFL-CIO, the United Steelworkers (USW), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and other unions.

In an advance statement released by the White House, Biden declared, “Unions have been the voice of American workers, guiding their path to power as a major force in our society. Unions fought for higher wages and family-supporting benefits, established vital health and safety standards, secured an eight-hour work day, eradicated child labor, guarded against discrimination and harassment, and bargained for every worker’s fair share of economic prosperity. They give workers a say in critical decisions affecting their lives and livelihoods and play a transformative role in shaping the future of our democracy…”

Biden turns reality on its head. Far from being a “voice for American workers” the membership of the official trade unions has fallen to an all-time low, with only 10.3 percent of all workers and 6.1 percent of private sector workers in a union. Over the last 40 years, the continued existence of these organizations has largely depended on the financial and institutional support the unions have received from a section of employers and the capitalist state, which see them as a critical tool to police the working class.

The period of time when the unions “fought for higher wages” belongs to the distant past. Over the last year, as inflation rose to a four-decade high of 8.5-9.0 percent and energy costs by 41.6 percent, the average unionized worker saw a pay increase of only 4.4 percent. This is less than the 5.3 percent increase for non-union workers.

Biden’s claims that the unions have “bargained for every worker’s fair share of economic prosperity” are belied by the four-decade-long decline in real wages of US workers and the explosive increase in the wealth of the corporate and financial oligarchy. Since the pandemic began, the net worth of America’s 727 billionaires rose by 70 percent, or $1.71 trillion. Meanwhile, the unions, led by bureaucrats with incomes in the top 5 percent of the population, have negotiated contracts at the oil refineries, with shipbuilding companies, in the tire industry, at hospitals and in the public sector. These wage increases, as USW President Tom Conway boasted, “did not add to inflationary pressures.”

As for the unions enforcing “vital health and safety standards,” again, the opposite is the case. Throughout the pandemic, AFL-CIO unions have played the central role in forcing workers into unsafe factories, schools and other work locations. This has contributed to the massive loss of more than 1 million Americans and a historic decline in life expectancy in the US. While the unions have concealed the numbers, tens of thousands of unionized transit, health care, retail, logistics, meatpacking and other workers have died, including an estimated 8,000 active and retired teachers alone. Millions more face long-term disability. And these horrific figures are on top of the 5,000 workers—or nearly 14 per day—who die annually from workplace accidents.

Biden’s reference to the eight-hour day is an insult. The unions regularly sanction workdays of 10, 12 and even more hours per day, six or seven days a week. Railway workers, who do not have paid sick days, are basically on call 24/7. After such exhausting and dangerous hours, some workers will be grabbing much needed rest on Labor Day while enjoying a few rare hours with their families—if they don’t have to work. The US is the only advanced economy in the world that does not federally mandate paid vacations or holidays, and about one in four US workers does not have any.

According to Biden, the unions “give workers a say in critical decisions affecting their lives and livelihoods and play a transformative role in shaping the future of our democracy.” In fact, the democratic rights of workers are routinely trampled on by union bureaucrats who conceal information, ignore unanimous votes for strike action, and ram through pro-company contracts with threats and ballot-stuffing.

In recent weeks, the unions have worked with the Biden administration to impose a de facto ban on strikes by 28,000 West Cost dockworkers, 110,000 railroad workers and hundreds of thousands of teachers and nurses across the country.

Most importantly, the unions have been totally silent on Biden’s speech last Thursday night warning about the danger of dictatorship posed by Trump, his fascistic supporters and the majority of the Republican Party. “Trump and the MAGA Republicans,” Biden said, were promoting “an extremism that threatens the very foundation of our Republic.” They “do not respect the Constitution” and do not “recognize the will of the people” or “accept the results of a free election.”

Like Biden, all the unions can say about this existential threat is to vote for the Democrats in the mid-term elections. The fact is, the unions and the Democratic Party have spent the last four decades attacking the jobs, living standards and social rights of the working class, while promoting nationalism and militarism. This has given Trump and the Republicans the ability to exploit popular discontent for their own reactionary purposes.

On every issue facing the working class, the unions have lined up with the ruling class. On COVID, they’ve helped it spread. On the US proxy war against Russia and the escalation of trade war measures and military encirclement of China, the unions are in support. On inflation, the unions favor pay cuts. On fascism, they are silent. They subordinate the working class to the Democratic Party even as it escalates the war against the working class and threatens to drive the economy into a recession to beat back workers’ demands for wage increases that keep up with surging prices.

Biden boasts that he is the “most pro-union president in US history.” By this, he means that his administration is doing everything it can to prop up the discredited and hated labor bureaucracy in hopes that it can hold back the rising tide of social opposition and impose the labor discipline needed to wage war abroad and class war at home.

Biden’s agenda is that of corporatism, that is, the ever closer integration of the unions with corporate management and the state.

The development of a movement of class struggle requires at every point the building of independent organizations, rank-and-file committees, that will unite all sections of the working class, in the US and internationally, against the corporatist trade union apparatus. This, in contrast to the path of defeat through the Democrats and the AFL-CIO, is the path to victory for the international working class.

The highest expression of this growing rebellion of the working class is the campaign of Will Lehman, a Pennsylvania Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for president of the United Auto Workers union. Lehman has received powerful support from autoworkers, teachers, railroad workers and other sections of the working class for his call for the abolition of the labor bureaucracies and the transfer of power to rank-and-file workers.

Lehman has called for the formation of rank-and-file committees in every factory and workplace and the coordination of struggles across national boundaries through the building of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).

The independent organization of the working class must be connected to the building of a socialist leadership in the working class. There is not a single problem confronting workers—exploitation and inequality, the threat of fascism and dictatorship, imperialist war—that can be resolved within the framework of the capitalist system.

The way forward is the fight for socialism, connecting the growth of the class struggle in the US and throughout the world with the building of the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International as the revolutionary leadership of the working class.

© 1998-2022 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.

[Unthinking Majority]

Translation: "I hate unions MAAAAAHHHH".

[ckaihatsu]

Translation: "I hate unions MAAAAAHHHH".

Guuuyyyyyyzzzzzzz! Please! Stop *fighting*, already -- !


x D

[BlutoSays]

Translation: "I hate unions MAAAAAHHHH".

Translation: Leftist Democrats (redundant), stop using FORCE to implement your ideas.

If your ideas are worthy, they'll sell themselves without iron-fisted, top-down, Soviet-style oppressive rule.

[ckaihatsu]

Translation: Leftist Democrats (redundant), stop using FORCE to implement your ideas.

If your ideas are worthy, they'll sell themselves without iron-fisted, top-down, Soviet-style oppressive rule.

I'm just going to leave these *here*, BS, and we'll see what happens....

The fact is, the unions and the Democratic Party have spent the last four decades attacking the jobs, living standards and social rights of the working class, while promoting nationalism and militarism. This has given Trump and the Republicans the ability to exploit popular discontent for their own reactionary purposes.

Biden boasts that he is the “most pro-union president in US history.” By this, he means that his administration is doing everything it can to prop up the discredited and hated labor bureaucracy in hopes that it can hold back the rising tide of social opposition and impose the labor discipline needed to wage war abroad and class war at home.

Biden’s agenda is that of corporatism, that is, the ever closer integration of the unions with corporate management and the state.

[Steve_American]

BlutoSays wrote:

Translation: Leftist Democrats (redundant), stop using FORCE to implement your ideas.

If your ideas are worthy, they'll sell themselves without iron-fisted, top-down, Soviet-style oppressive rule.

People like Bluto cherry pick where they use different talking points.
They were fine with the states ending increased unemployment checks late in 2020 to "force" workers to go back to work. This seems like top/down forcing people to do thinks they don't want to do. Or, forcing 10 year olds to carry their rapist's baby for 9 months and often raise it for 18 more years.

Forcing Union members to pay their dues is intended to reduce free riders from getting the benefits of the Union in the income, etc. at their job place without paying to support that Union. OTOH, people like Bluto are perfectly fine with Walmart using its profits to support political parties that their customers hate. They're even fine with Walmart reducing their profits, and so their taxes, by making those payments to support political causes be a deductible expense, but not letting tax paying people deduct their political payments.

.

[pugsville]

Big Labor Traps Workers in Unions They Oppose | Opinion
Mark Mix , President, National Right to Work Committee
Newsweek, September 5, 2022

This Labor Day, you may see headlines about a supposed "boom" in union organizing, and while high-profile union campaigns against well-known companies like Starbucks and Amazon have generated buzz, Department of Labor numbers showed unions lost 241,000 members last year.

Less likely to make headlines is a trend Big Labor's cheerleaders wish to ignore: the significant increase in efforts by workers seeking to remove long-entrenched unions from their workplaces.

Employees across the country have submitted a wave of petitions to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), asking the federal agency to schedule votes to remove unpopular unions, a process known as "decertification."

In fact, according to the NLRB's own data on petitions for elections to either install or remove a union, a unionized private-sector worker is more than twice as likely to be involved in a decertification effort as a similar nonunion worker is to be involved in efforts to unionize his or her employer.

Another recent analysis found decertification petitions to the NLRB have increased by a whopping 42 percent this year. That's 16 percent higher than the increase in petitions seeking to bring in a union (when counting the Starbucks campaign once, rather than tallying each individual location's petition).

When you consider that NLRB policies make it impossible for most workers to hold a decertification effort outside a brief 30-day window once every three years, the jump in decertification efforts looks even starker. There is no similar limitation on when petitions can be filed to trigger unionization votes.

What we've seen here at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which provides free legal aid to workers, confirms this trend. Foundation staff attorneys have received a record number of requests for legal assistance over the last couple of years from workers seeking help to navigate the NLRB's maze-like decertification process.

While you may not have heard about the wave of workers seeking to free themselves of unwanted unions, you can be sure Big Labor and its political allies know exactly what's going on.

You see, rather than ask why so many workers want to escape union ranks, union bosses and their Biden administration allies are pulling out all the stops to make it even more difficult for hard-working Americans to participate in a decertification election.

The Biden-backed PRO Act—Big Labor's top legislative priority—is a laundry list of new power grabs for union organizers. It would wipe out all 27 Right to Work laws that make union dues voluntary.

Other PRO Act provisions, like mandating "Card Check" recognition that bypasses secret-ballot votes for unionization, and permitting unionization to be forced on gig economy workers, have also made headlines. Yet the bill also includes new statutory prohibitions on decertification elections, including giving union officials the ability to automatically delay any decertification vote through unproven allegations called "blocking charges."

But with the PRO Act stalled in the Senate, the Biden NLRB isn't waiting on Congress to stifle decertification efforts.

Biden-appointed union activists at the NLRB are seeking to squelch decertification efforts through bureaucratic fiat. This includes reversing the Election Protection Rule, a set of common-sense, if modest, reforms previously adopted by the NLRB that removed multiple Board-invented barriers to worker-backed decertification. One of those reforms that the Biden Board seeks to reverse allowed workers to challenge a union's installation through Card Check with a private, secret-ballot vote.

Meanwhile, the former union lawyer who was appointed top prosecutor at the Labor Board has said she intends to overturn the Foundation-won Johnson Controls precedent, which allowed employers to act on workers' majority petitions and end the union's "representation" through withdrawal of recognition. Johnson Controls also allowed union officials to seek an automatic secret-ballot vote to try to counter such withdrawal petitions, but few unions have opted for that because they fear private, secret-ballot elections.

The fact that the NLRB is helping Big Labor strong-arm workers into joining union ranks, and going to such lengths to block workers from escaping, shows just how out of touch the NLRB is in protecting the rights of workers—one of which is the statutory right to decertify.

Instead of improving the service they provide to attract more workers to voluntarily join union ranks, union bosses are simply doubling down on exercising their coercive government-granted powers to get workers under their control. In the short term, rigging the rules might help keep forced union dues flowing, but over the long run it will only further alienate union bosses from the workers they claim to represent. This is not a prescription for satisfied workers on Labor Day.

Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Committee.

https://www.newsweek.com/big-labor-trap ... on-1738636

just as Many workers are fighting to get unions introduced.

The Weekend bought to you by unions.

[Politics_Observer]

@BlutoSays

Hey, conservatives also use FORCE to implement their policies. Conservatives FORCE women to have children they don't want through the government. FORCE is the government and who controls it. Unions have been proven in most cases to ensure workers are paid better and assured a strong middle class in the past before Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in the 1980s and set that legal precedent to destroy unions. So stop being a hypocrite and accept that your side, your team, relies on the government to use FORCE to implement policies on others who do not like it. It's part of the game. So stop bitchin' and whinin'.

[ckaihatsu]

Millions of Indian workers to join two-day general strike against Modi’s ruinous pro-investor policies

Deepal Jayasekera
27 March 2022

Millions of workers across India are mounting a two-day general strike this Monday and Tuesday to oppose the ever-escalating assault of the Narendra Modi-led, far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government on their social and democratic rights.

The strike will be joined by government workers, coal and copper miners, steel, oil, telecom, postal and rural health (ASHA) workers. Particularly strong participation is anticipated from workers at public sector enterprises targeted for privatization like Coal India, the Life Insurance Corporation of India and the state-owned banks.

The strike will cut across the caste and communal divisions that are systematically promoted by India’s ruling elite and its political representatives, providing a powerful demonstration of the objective unity of the working class.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/0 ... i-m28.html

[ckaihatsu]

Tens of millions of Indian workers join general strike against Modi’s class-war assault

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/0 ... i-m30.html

[late]

The "Right to Work" movement is trolls working for Big Business.

It was started by Jim Crow in the 1940s...

“Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions for everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer, and there are no civil rights.”
Martin Luther King
https://labornotes.org/2018/07/racist-h ... right-work

"Over the past several years, billionaires have donated millions to the right-wing Midwestern governors pushing for state right-to-work laws, while at the same time bankrolling the current Supreme Court case, Janus v. AFSCME, which will determine whether public employee unions can require dues from nonmembers to support union activities from which all employees benefit.

Their efforts are not the product of a post-Citizens United landscape, but rather part of a decades-long project. For more than 70 years, supposedly nonpartisan groups, big businesses, wealthy donors and small firms have been devoting time and money to guarantee that Americans would have the right to work — for less.

So-called right-to-work laws have always been sold as all-American protections of individual freedoms. But they are in fact dangerous, confusing restrictions on Americans’ basic rights on the job. These statutes empower employers by undermining workers’ right to organize and rolling back the gains — better wages, working conditions and hours — that unions fought to secure.

Unsurprisingly, that right-to-work belt was also infamous for its low wages. Right-to-work membership restrictions made it difficult to form unions, bargain with managers or even keep enough members to retain the federal recognition that had enabled so many blue-collar Americans to exercise their power to collectively bargain for white-collar living standards and to actively participate in politics.

Midwestern states only started to join that impoverished archipelago in the 2010s. After almost 50 years of largely confining the right-to-work fight to the courts, Republican legislators and governors, like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, in those heavily gerrymandered states quickly passed these laws at the behest of billionaire donors. They didn’t dare put the issue before Rust Belt voters who still cherish their rights on the job and have vigorously protested these restrictions. Then, to avoid confronting angry workers, they used redistricting and new voting restrictions, including ID laws to shield themselves from vulnerability."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mad ... -for-less/

Republican scum on the march.

[Politics_Observer]

Workers need unions for bargaining leverage ALONG with strong union laws. Such as reversing the legal precedent set by Reagan when he fired air traffic controllers. If you have a union, but no strong union laws, then you have no bargaining leverage. Workers need REAL bargaining leverage.

[ckaihatsu]

Workers need unions for bargaining leverage ALONG with strong union laws. Such as reversing the legal precedent set by Reagan when he fired air traffic controllers. If you have a union, but no strong union laws, then you have no bargaining leverage. Workers need REAL bargaining leverage.

---

The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees

For the working class to fight back, a path must be created to coordinate its struggles in different factories, industries and countries in opposition to the ruling class and the corporatist unions. For this purpose, the International Committee of the Fourth International and its affiliated Socialist Equality Parties are initiating the formation of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).

The IWA-RFC will work to develop the framework for new forms of independent, democratic and militant rank-and-file organizations of workers in factories, schools and workplaces on an international scale. The working class is ready to fight. But it is shackled by reactionary bureaucratic organizations that suppress every expression of resistance.

Naturally, conditions confronting workers vary from region to region and country to country, and these may affect the choice of tactics. But it is undeniably true, in all countries, that the existing bureaucratized trade unions function as an institutionalized police force, determined to protect the corporate and financial interests of the ruling elites and their governments against growing popular resistance.

The fight to develop the network of globally interconnected rank-and-file committees is not limited to factories, schools and workplaces where trade unions exist. In actual fact, the overwhelming majority of present-day work sites are not unionized. This social fact means that rank-and-file committees will emerge as the initial and sole form of practical organization in innumerable work locations.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/0 ... s-a24.html