LaborPains.org

You read that right (you may need to read it a few times to fully grasp the hypocrisy). An employee of the Clark County Education Association (CCEA) in Las Vegas was allegedly fired for trying to organize a union of the union’s organizers.

“My job is to recruit teachers to join the union, but you won’t allow me to join a union,” claimed Maria Lean Hermason, a former organizer at the CCEA. The National Labor Relations Board will hear her complaint in August.

Amid declining support and dwindling membership rolls, Big Labor continues its latest tactic to try to prevent its own demise. In the spirit of escaping the negative connotations associated with the “union” label (i.e. a history of corruption, driving companies into bankruptcy, and forcing employees to pay for political causes they don’t agree with), organized labor continues to hide behind so-called “workers centers.”

Two such “worker centers,” Fast Food Forward and OUR Walmart, performed coordinated efforts today:  the SEIU front group Fast Food Forward staged a “strike” in Chicago, while OUR Walmart, a group backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, performed similar protests.

It’s a new approach to organized labor’s same old game. But this time, Big Labor is avoiding the rules and transparency requirements that lawfully regulate unions—the federal National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA)—through the thinly veiled mask of “workers centers.”

It’s a loophole exploited by organized labor, but not without criticism. A recent paper in the law journal of the Federalist Society examined several “worker centers” (including OUR Walmart) and determined that under NLRA and LMRDA, they should be regulated as labor organizations.

The protests and strikes by the union front groups may have made a lot of noise on the airwaves, but the decision to form a union should lie with the employees, not union bosses. That’s why real union reform with the Employee Rights Act is absolutely necessary.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) engaged in a campaign against the Port of Longview which included obstructing the railway that serves the port. Unfortunately for the demonstrating longshoremen, that’s illegal, so several months later the union’s international president is on trial.

Actually, he’s on trial for the second time (the first trial ended in a hung jury). According to the local newspaper, prosecutors argue that ILWU president Robert McEllrath directed his members to obstruct train tracks during a protest. McEllrath’s attorneys had a different view:

Union attorney Neil Fox, who is defending McEllrath along with Thomas Phelan, said despite his client’s high position in the union, he does not control the members.

“This is not a traditional top-down union,” he said. “It’s a democratic union. … He can’t dictate to all the members.”

So the union’s international president isn’t in charge of a union demonstration. That’s not how the Associated Press reported it back when the demonstrations occurred: “The train […] arrived Wednesday night after police arrested 19 demonstrators who tried to block the tracks. They were led by McEllrath, who said they would return.”

McEllrath’s lawyers will be attempting to convince a jury that the president wasn’t in charge as the trial continues. We’ll see how credible jurors think that claim is.

Do you deserve a raise?

If you’re in a union, good luck getting one. Chances are your union contract is one of the 80 percent that do not allow individual workers to receive merit-based pay increases.

That problem could have been solved with the Rewarding Achievement and Incentivizing Successful Employees (RAISE) Act, sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rep. Todd Rokita (R–IN) in their respective houses of Congress.

As Sen. Rubio explains, the RAISE Act would have eliminated the pay ceiling on employees working under a collective bargaining agreement. That is, employees who outperformed others would be rewarded for their work with pay increases, as determined by their employer on an employee-by-employee basis. The RAISE Act would not affect the pay floor—the lowest that any employee can be paid. That’d be left to the union negotiation.

James Sherk at the Heritage Foundation demonstrates that there are almost 8 million workers subject to these restrictions. The numbers show that when individual pay raises are permitted, workers make six to ten percent more.

Unfortunately, the bill went down to defeat in the U.S. Senate with only 45 Republicans supporting the bill. Millions of workers will still be stuck with pay ceilings.

But to union leaders, that means little. Michael Franc notes at the National Review Online the absurd opinion of the Teamsters’ Jimmy Hoffa, Jr.  Hoffa stokes the flames of fear by claiming that there would be “favoritism” and “arbitrary action” by employers if individual, rather than collective raises, were permitted.

Hoffa’s theories sound outrageous to anyone working at a non-union shop. Employers have little incentive to offer “arbitrary” raises, but instead reward those who have performed at a high level.

To Hoffa and his ilk, a system based on merit does little to help unions keep their stranglehold on American workers.  Instead of supporting the RAISE Act, union leaders have been bellyaching over the recent Supreme Court decision, Knox v. SEIU, that struck down the public sector unions’ practice of forcing non-members to pay for political activism without first getting the non-member’s approval for these additional dues. Such a practice is unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

Meanwhile, the SEIU celebrated the defeat of the RAISE Act.

It is not hyperbole to say that unions are more interested in taking money from their own members–as well as non-union workers–than they are in allowing their members to earn higher wages.

There is an ongoing dispute between two unions over which should represent two Port of Portland workers, and now it has become so acrimonious the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has intervened.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) dispute which union has the right to represent the two employees who plug in, unplug, and monitor refrigerated cargo containers. The Port’s operating contractor, ICTSI Oregon, recognizes the IBEW, so the ILWU has staged a work slowdown.

The slowdown has already caused one ship to bypass Portland for Oakland. Now the IBEW has declared its intent to picket the Port if it loses representative status.

The NLRB is now intervening. The Seattle regional office has filed suit in federal district court to declare the ILWU work slowdown unlawful. The ILWU has also filed for a court action, arguing it deserves to represent the two employees and isn’t staging a work slowdown.

This is concerning in light of the NLRB’s Specialty Healthcare decision, which will allow unions to form multiple smaller bargaining units (“micro-unions” to critics). The NLRB has already ruled that shoe salespeople at New York’s Bergdorf Goodman constitute a bargaining unit separate from other salespeople. Will micro-unions create more inter-union acrimony like that seen at the Port of Portland that will threaten business? Only time will tell.

A federal court blocked the NLRB from issuing a rule requiring employers to display posters explaining workers’ collective bargaining rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered an emergency injunction on the rule, pending appeal. The poster rule, set to go into effect on April 30, will now be delayed until the appeal is decided.

“The facts in this case and the law have always been on the side of manufacturers, and we believe that granting an injunction is the appropriate course of action for the  court. The ‘posting requirement’ is an unprecedented attempt by the board to assert power and authority it does not possess,” said Jay Timmons, National Association of Manufacturers president. (The Hill, 4/17/12)

On Friday, a federal judge for the U.S. district court in Charleston, S.C. struck down the NLRB poster rule. The ruling is a victory for business groups.

“We would hope they would suspend the regulation until all these legal uncertainties can be sorted out,” said Randel Johnson, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s senior vice president for labor issues. (Wall Street Journal, 4/16/12)

The poster created by the NLRB informs workers of their right to join a union or not join, but has no information on the decertification process–leading business groups to claim that the posters are one sided in favor of unions.

According to President Obama, striking down the Affordable Care Act would be unforgivable judicial activism. According to his grassroots base, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision was an unjustifiable vote in favor of unbridled corporate power. But according to one union, Citizens United is proof that Indiana’s right-to-work law unconstitutionally infringes unions’ free speech rights—by preventing unions from extracting dues from workers on the pretext that they are bargaining on workers’ behalf.

“Attorneys for the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150 argue in a court brief that Indiana’s new law, which allows workers to not pay union dues even if a union bargains on their behalf, interferes with the union’s free speech rights and ‘impinges on this fundamental right of union membership.’” (Associated Press, 4/9/12)

It’s strange enough to see the President’s union allies hang their hopes for the status quo on a ruling slammed by his base. But the logic of the union’s case gets even stranger.

Local 150 claims that it “legitimately utilizes dues money collected through agency shop provisions in its collective bargaining agreements” in order to “finance political speech,” among other things. Since Indiana’s right-to-work law bans agency shop agreements, it “restricts a channel through which speech-supporting finance might flow.”

It’s so crazy, it just might work—at least in the minds of the union’s imaginative attorneys. Even if it’s true, as Local 150 attorney Dale Pierson observes, that the courts require workers to pay unions “the costs of representing them’—and federal law mandates that unions represent all the workers—it’s quite a stretch to claim that union-selected political expenditures count as ‘representation.’

The recognized purpose of unions is to represent members’ interests inside the workplace in bargaining with employers—not to represent them outside the workplace by pushing whatever they consider their members’ best political interests to be.