LaborPains.org

Recently, a number of groups taking the form of “worker centers” have staged walkouts of fast food restaurants in several cities. The most prominent has been Fast Food Forward in New York City, but Chicago, St. Louis, and Detroit have also seen some activity. The Detroit Free Press reports on events in that city:

Organizers in Detroit said several hundred food workers participated in the walkouts, which succeeded in disrupting operations at six chain restaurants in the city, including two McDonald’s, a Subway, a Burger King, a Long John Silver’s and a Popeyes. […] The Detroit strike was organized by a coalition of labor, faith and activist groups calling itself the Michigan Workers Organizing Committee.

Of course, these “Workers Organizing Committees” aren’t exactly forthcoming about who sponsors them. Unsurprisingly, the Service Employees International Union, which has been plotting a campaign to organize fast food restaurants for years, appears ultimately and financially responsible. Unions’ federal financial disclosures show that the SEIU has put over $2.5 million into the organizations fronting the NYC campaign.

With that level of investment, don’t expect unions to give up chasing a potentially deep source of dues—and perhaps just as important, mandatory initiation fees. Unions hope that by rebranding themselves, by dodging reporting requirements and picketing rules by using “workers centers” to lead the line, and by standing in the way of highly popular governance reforms (like the Employee Rights Act) they can reverse their decline. Workers deserve better than that.

Organized labor knows that employees are leaving it in droves. That shouldn’t be surprising: A history of corruption, forcing employees to pay up for political causes with which they don’t agree, and driving companies into bankruptcy (and employees onto the unemployment line) with unreasonable demands should all be warning signs that unions aren’t the way of the future.

Unions don’t want to be the next corporations unions lead to non-existence, so they’re looking for new ways to shore up their declining ranks. Unions think that avoiding the rules and transparency required by the laws regulating unions — the federal National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) — is the way back to relevance, so they’re backing so-called “workers centers” to conduct campaigns that the unions themselves cannot.

A commentator writing at the American Spectator thinks that this isn’t fair to employees. Since these “workers centers” are funded by unions, act sort of like unions, or advocate unionization, they ought to be regulated as “labor organizations” under the NLRA and LMRDA. He explains, using the “workers center” Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) as an example:

CIW does little to hide that it acts as a labor organization — essentially a union. On its website, it includes as its goals promoting “enforcement against those who would violate workers’ rights” and “the right to organize on our jobs without fear of retaliation.”

Those clearly are union goals, yet CIW is not considered a union under current labor law. Officially, it is a “worker center,” which allows it to circumvent oversight and disclosure rules [...] If CIW and other worker centers are truly committed to the pursuit of better conditions for workers, they should have no objection to showing their supporters how they are funded and how they spend their money.

But then again, circumscribing and evading employee rights are longstanding Big Labor tactics. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would have effectively abolished employees’ rights to secret ballot votes on whether to unionize. Unions fought all the way to the Supreme Court to try to keep forcing public employees to give to their political programs on pain of termination. (They lost, in a case called Knox v. SEIU.)  And when Congress proposed granting workers the right to receive merit raises in unionized bargaining units, unions said, “No way.”

So evading regulations that ensure that unions have majority support and give employees the ability to see where there money goes is no surprise. That’s why real union reform, like the Employee Rights Act, is so necessary.

The NLRB issued a news release today explaining its decision to hold in abeyance Wal-Mart’s charge that the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) committed an unfair labor practice (ULP). Wal-Mart contacted the NLRB just before Thanksgiving as Making Change at Walmart, along with OUR Walmart, a “worker center” that is a subsidiary of the UFCW, attempted to disrupt Black Friday shoppers.

So the UFCW will take a small break from protest circuit, all the while pretending to not have an interest in organizing Wal-Mart workers. The NLRB’s Advice Memorandum makes it clear that the Board is willing to stay ignorant and believe the hype that so-called worker centers, like OUR Walmart or the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), just want to “help” employees. In reality, “alt-labor” groups won’t hesitate if they ever get the chance to start skimming from employee paychecks and into the pockets of union officials.

Organized labor just had a tough week. First, it had to endure the report of devastating membership numbers that show that only 11.3 percent of the workforce is stuck in a union. Then, the pro-union National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the President who blindly supports labor had to face the reality that the Board was illegally constituted, and its recent radical decisions may soon be no more.

So after comically spinning about the numbers and ignoring the reality that the NLRB has questionable authority at best, it’s clearer than ever that labor needs a backup plan.

Josh Eidelson, a union organizer-journalist, writes in the American Prospect that the next generation of the so-called labor movement will be in the form of “alt-labor.” Eidelson devotes much of his article to the UNITE HERE-linked Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), a radical labor group that isn’t legally a union. Eidelson would know best: According to his blog, he was an organizer for UNITE HERE for five years, so undoubtedly, ROC is close to his heart. Groups like ROC are part of labor’s rebranding, trying to make itself more palatable to the employee of the 21^st century (or even the latter half of the 20^th, for that matter).

The problem is that ROC and others like it provide all of the problems of regular unions and none of the benefits. “Alt-labor” groups are convinced that they have managed to find the sweet spot that allows them to ignore the hard work posed by running a real union and to focus on well-publicized harassment and shakedowns. In an article published in Engage, a legal journal, this strategy is explained:

But Eidelson says that this is what labor will look like in the foreseeable future, and the AFL-CIO and Change to Win have both endorsed the worker center “movements.”

If you went to a Wal-Mart this weekend, chances are that you had more trouble getting to the best deals thanks to obstructions from your fellow shoppers, not because of a much-ballyhooed, but little-attended labor action.

It turns out that the proposed strike, walkout, protest — whatever you want to call it — really didn’t amount to anything. And even if you spotted a few of these lonely folks, there was no guarantee that they were even Wal-Mart employees. And that’s even with the $50 gift card enticement that the organizers offered give out if you wanted to “sponsor a striker.”

The groups behind the effort, Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) and Making Change at Walmart are both efforts of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union. The UFCW has long pined to get a foot in the door at America’s largest retailer, but to date, its efforts have resulted in complete failure.

And this weekend’s actions appear to be a repeat performance of the union coming up short.  Most reports found a handful of employees at a protest, if there were any at all. Regardless of the numbers, even the highest estimates wouldn’t make much of a dent in the 1.4 million people employed by Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart attempted to stop the proposed action last week, but the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was unable to reach a decision before the non-events, claiming that it was “complex” and could not be decided so quickly. A recent paper published in Engage, the practice journal of The Federalist Society, takes a closer look at groups such as OUR Walmart and explains what types of issues the NLRB will likely have to address in its ruling.

Along with several other labor groups, OUR Walmart is classified as a “worker center,” not a labor union like the Teamsters or the United Auto Workers, for example. As authors Stefan Marculewicz and Jennifer Thomas explain, worker centers are able to avoid complying with the laws that affect labor organizations, including the protections given to workers by federal law.

We certainly do not take any position in this article with respect to the value these worker centers may offer to workers.  However, no organization, no matter how laudable its mission, is above reproach.  Just as corruption plagued the labor movement in the last century, and gave rise to the legislation that governs labor organizations and provides workers the basic protections enjoyed today, so too could similar malfeasance cloud the efforts of worker centers.  Compliance with the NLRA and LMRDA serves not only as a protection for workers, but also, perhaps, as a validator of the worker centers that claim to represent them.

A goal of many worker centers is to ensure that employers of their members comply with the basic laws that offer protections to the workers.  It is quite reasonable to expect worker centers to comply with them as well.

So what of OUR Walmart? The group is considered a subsidiary of the UFCW and its goals for how it plans to affect change at Wal-Mart include alterations to wages and hours of employment as well as other employment-related policies. The group has also directly demanded these changes on Wal-Mart’s management. For these reasons, Marculewicz and Thomas find that OUR Walmart should be considered a “labor organization” under federal law and must therefore follow the rules that they are currently avoiding.

Labor, in making a lot of noise about Wal-Mart and not backing it up with any real action, may damage itself by bringing more attention to its apparent end-run around federal labor law.