SUMMARY: Workers, jobs and wages are central to the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China, in which the two countries have exchanged tariffs and threats recently. Though many Americans fear that they will be the ones to pay the price for the friction, Judy Woodruff talks to James Hoffa Jr. president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, about why he thinks the tariffs are a “good idea.”
SUMMARY: Confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will begin a week from today. Set against the backdrop of the ongoing Mueller investigation, new attention is being focused on Kavanaugh’s record on executive power. John Yang turns to Jonathan Turley a law professor at George Washington University, and Robert Barnes a Supreme Court reporter for the Washington Post, for analysis.
SUMMARY: Business and labor are two areas of the law that have been front and center at the Supreme Court in recent years. What does nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s record suggest about how he might rule on cases at the high court? Judy Woodruff gets analysis from Karen Harned of the National Federation of Independent Business Small Business Legal Center, and Daniel Goldberg of Alliance for Justice.
It might not get as much press coverage as other Donald Trump administration calamities, but the U.S. President is set to appoint a known union buster to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), push the body to a Republican majority and reverse Obama-era protections that rankle Big Business.
On July 13, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee held hearings on Trump's two NLRB selections and his deputy labor secretary pick. All three of these men are expected to be confirmed.
William Emanuel, one of Trump's NLRB appointees, is a management-side attorney and a member of the conservative Federalist Society. He is also a shareholder of Littler Mendelson, an infamous union busting firm that was most recently brought in by Long Island beer distributor Clare Rose to negotiate a contract full of pay cuts.
After being selected, Emanuel disclosed 49 former clients and declared he would recuse himself for up to a year if any of the companies found themselves in front of the NLRB. The list included multiple businesses that have clashed with the labor board, including JPMorgan Chase Bank, MasTec Inc, Nissan, and Uber.
Uber's ongoing skirmishes with the NLRB have, perhaps, been the most publicized. At the end of 2016, the ride-share company battled with the NLRB after the agency sent out subpoenas aimed at gleaning information about whether Uber drivers were statutory employees.
In 2016, Emanuel authored an amicus brief that defended class-action waivers in employment contracts. Workers often depend on class actions to fight sexual and racial discrimination, and their existence is an important part of upholding wage laws. The NLRB ruled that such waivers were illegal under Obama.
Emanuel was asked about Littler Mendelson's anti-union work by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. “You have spent your career at one of the country's most ruthless, union-busting law firms in the country,” she said. “How can Americans trust you will protect workers' rights when you've spent 40 years fighting against them?”
In response, Emanuel claimed that he would be objective whenever making decisions for the agency.
Emanuel is not the only appointee raising concern among workers' rights advocates. Marvin Kaplan, another Trump nominee to the NLRB, is a public-sector attorney and current counsel to the commissioner for the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission. The Kaplan pick excites business executives and their advocates, who envisioned him helping overturn Obama-era labor regulations.
At the time of the announcement, Kristen Swearingen, chair of the anti-union group Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, declared that “Marvin Kaplan will begin to restore balance to an agency whose recent and radical decisions and disregard for long standing precedent have injected uncertainty into labor relations to the detriment of employees, employers and the economy.”
The excitement is well-founded. Kaplan served as counsel for Republicans on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The New York Times reports, “The committee held hearings during his tenure scrutinizing prominent NLRB actions in which the witnesses skewed toward business representatives and other skeptics.” Kaplan also helped develop the The Workforce Democracy and Fairness Act, legislation that would kill a labor board rule that shortened the amount of time between when the board authorizes a workplace unionization vote and when the vote actually takes place. Since 2014, the number has been set at 11 days. But this act would increase it to at least 35, thus allowing more time for union efforts to be squashed. The legislation hasn't passed in congress yet.
Concerns do not stop at the NLRB. Trump's Labor Department nominee is Patrick Pizzella, a Federal Labor Relations Authority Member who was grilled by Minnesota Senator Al Franken on his ties to the infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Pizzella worked with Abramoff during the 1990s to exempt the Northern Mariana Islands from federal labor regulations.
The Senate has only been in session for 10 days since the Pizzella and Kaplan nominations, and only four days since Emanuel's. A group of civil rights and labor organizations sent the committee a letter asking for the hearings to be postponed. During her opening remarks, Sen. Patty Murray called Trump's attempt to jam through the nominees without proper oversight “unprecedented.”
Roughly 10 workers representing the pro-labor organization Good Jobs Nation stood up during Thursday's hearing, put blue tape over their mouths and walked out of the room in silent protest. Groups like Good Jobs Nation are concerned about a pro-business majority in the agency amidst Trump's proposed cuts to the Labor Department.
Trump is putting the NLRB in the position to undo a number of important Obama-era labor decisions. His NLRB could potentially reverse rulings that made it easier for small groups of workers to unionize, established grad students as employees, put charter school employees under NLRB jurisdiction, and held parent companies jointly liable for with franchise operators who break labor laws. Writing about the imminent anti-union crackdown on this website in May, Shaun Richman wrote, “Unions and their allies should be convening research teams to plot out a campaign of regulatory and judicial activism. That work should begin now.”
Early in the hearing, Washington Senator Patty Murray asked Emanuel if he had ever represented a union or a worker. Emanuel explained that he worked exclusively for management for his entire career. "You just don't do both,” he told her. “It's not feasible."
As one of their first orders of business, President-elect Donald Trump and Mike Pence, his vice president, helped strike a deal between the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) and the Carrier Corporation to keep more than 1,000 jobs at Carrier's Indianapolis manufacturing plant.
The company had originally planned to send all but 300 research and headquarters jobs at the facility to Monterrey, Mexico, where workers reportedly earn $3 an hour. Carrier later decided to keep an additional 800 or so jobs in Indiana in exchange for a reported $7 million in tax breaks over 10 years.
Carrier was a frequent target of Trump during his presidential campaign, in which he promised to protect jobs and penalize companies for leaving the United States. After tweeting about a deal in the works with Carrier on Thanksgiving, Trump and Pence spent the next several days hashing out its parameters before the president-elect announced on Twitter on November 29 that they had reached an agreement. Trump took a victory lap at Carrier's plant in Indianapolis this week.
Mixed reactions
Though controversial, it's important to note that workers at Carrier have lauded the Trump-Pence deal. That's the case even though the actual terms and conditions of the deal, as it applies to workers who get to keep their jobs, have yet to appear in fine print and the union representing the plant was not involved in the negotiations.
Looked at as a whole, the Trump-Pence announcement has received mix reviews. Some have celebrated Trump's “art of the deal,” others have questioned whether this is a model that can be replicated as a way to keep jobs in the United States, while Bernie Sanders decried it as a bad deal for taxpayers and a potentially disastrous precedent moving forward.
Even Trump admitted his own sense of surprise at a press conference celebrating the agreement.
During the presidential campaign, in which he made an example of the Carrier plant as the dark side of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Trump told the public that he would use his business prowess to force Carrier and companies like it to keep jobs in the United States. If not, Trump said, there would be economic hell to pay.
But in his speech in Indianapolis, he said his campaign promise to bring Carrier jobs back was a “euphemism,” not an actual promise to cut a deal at that particular plant. With Pence uniquely situated to help foster a deal through the IEDC, though, the stars aligned and the deal was cut. (Pence chairs the IEDC board.)
Workers at a nearby plant in Huntington, Indiana, however, may not be as lucky.
That facility, which is also owned by Carrier's parent company, will soon lay off 700 workers. Many of them made the two-hour drive south to Indianapolis to protest. They held signs that read, “What about our jobs?”
“All of our jobs are leaving. Why isn't he saving some of our jobs if not all of them?” asked Bill Davis, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 983. “I'd love to keep the whole facility, but even if we can keep some of our jobs – because I think some of the people would be glad to retire and some of the younger ones stay – so I think our membership could be satisfied even if it was just 50 percent that got to stay.”
Offshoring jobs and taxes
Missing in the many media stories that have tackled the Carrier deal is the fact that Carrier's parent company—United Technologies—isn't just in the business of offshoring U.S. jobs. It also likely skirts paying its share of federal and state income taxes by maintaining offshore tax havens. Carrier, itself, is incorporated in the domestic tax haven of Delaware.
Though a company with taxable income at the level of United Technologies has a corporate tax rate of 35 percent at the federal level, United Technologies only paid an 11 percent tax rate between 2008-2012, according to numbers crunched by Citizens for Tax Justice. It has done so while also securing billions of dollars of U.S. government contracts and receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal tax subsidies.
Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, who has critiqued the Trump-Pence Carrier deal in a series of blog posts, told In These Times he sees this entire saga as an example of Carrier “gaming the system” for its own ends on the backs of taxpayers.
“Companies competing with United Technologies that haven't as brazenly threatened to move jobs offshore will have to pay higher tax rates than United Technologies,” says Gardner. “And, of course, in the balanced-budget setting of state budgets, every tax break for a specific company ultimately has to be paid for by the rest of us, including smaller businesses and working families. This deal is a poke in the eye for the many business and individuals who already pay their fair share.”
Like Sanders, Gardner sees Carrier as a worrisome case moving forward in the sense that if it can be repeated or modeled at other workplaces in other cities and states, it will only harm working-class communities.
“The more such deals are carved out, the more unfair—and unsustainable—the tax system becomes,” says Gardner. “From a broader economic development perspective, and from the perspective of the public interest, there's nothing to cheer about here and certainly nothing to replicate.”
SUMMARY: Union membership has been on the decline in the U.S. for decades, and is currently half of what it was in the 1980s. How are unions adapting in an era of stagnant wages and a growing “sharing economy”? Hari Sreenivasan talks with Harley Shaiken of the University of California, Berkeley and Mary Kay Henry, president of SEIU.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): For more now on the state of labor, we're going to by Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, and Harley Shaiken, a professor and labor expert at the University of California, Berkeley.
Professor Shaiken, let me start with you.
When we think of the labor movement, we certainly think that it's smaller than it used to be, but what are the challenges that the movement is facing today?
HARLEY SHAIKEN, University of California, Berkeley: Well, there are many challenges that are out there right now, but it's a particularly critical and urgent time for the labor movement and I think for the United States more generally.
Over the last three decades, labor has declined from representing one out of every five members to one out of every 10 today. But recent polls from Bloomberg and others indicate that over half of people polled would like to join a union.
How does that square with 11 percent being in unions? And, here, I think we're looking at tough employer opposition, laws that don't facilitate a free choice, and some broader changes in the economy.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Well, Mary Kay Henry, how do you square that gap, if people are interested still in being part of a union, but the reality is that they're not?
MARY KAY HENRY, President, SEIU: Twenty million people have got more money in their pockets just in the last four years because 200 fast food workers had the guts to make a decision to strike and possibly lose their job, threaten their whole family's stability, and make a demand that people laughed at four years ago, $15 in a union, and now it's a standard against which people are organizing saying, hey, why do I have to wait so long to get to $15?
Or, in Birmingham, Alabama, the city council raises wages. The Alabama state legislature overrides it.
HARI SREENIVASAN: In Scandinavian countries, they have almost set a wage floor, even without having a minimum wage, because about 80 percent of the people, say, in Denmark are already unionized. Right? The private sector says, to be competitive, I have to raise my wages up.
Is the inverse happening in the United States? With such a small unionized population, it seems the private sector doesn't see unions as much of a threat or an incentive to try to pull their wages up by themselves.
MARY KAY HENRY: Right.
And the absence of government, working people, and employers sharing a vision for what everybody deserves in the country, we have the grossest inequality that our generation has ever seen in this country.
And fast food workers are asking themselves, hey, if McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King can provide $20 in Denmark, where 80 percent of the people have a union, why can't they do the same thing in the United States of America?
Union supporters had reason to cheer earlier this month when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's hated “right to work” law was overturned by a Dane County Circuit Judge. Unfortunately, the decision is all but certain to be overturned by Wisconsin's conservative Supreme Court. But contained in the case is a line of questioning over the constitutionality of the right-to-work concept that has quietly been playing out in federal courts.
The result could be that all right-to-work laws are nullified—and sooner than you might imagine.
“RTW” takes money and power from unions, but is that a ‘taking?'
The logic that the Wisconsin judge leaned upon in his decision has its origins in a federal case called Sweeney v. Pence, in which unions made an unsuccessful attempt to overturn Indiana's recent right-to-work statute on constitutional grounds. Although the unions themselves did not raise this argument in the 2014 case, Chief Judge Diane Wood argued in her dissent that “right-to-work” provisions violate the U.S. Constitution's Takings Clause.
“This is a law,” says Marquette Law Professor Paul Secunda, “that compels one private party to provide benefits to another private party with no compensation.” He is convinced that right-to-work laws, which permit represented workers to quit their union and stop paying fees while simultaneously obligating that union to continue to spend resources representing them, are an unconstitutional “taking.”
If the issue makes its way up to the Supreme Court, and the justices agree with Secunda, the result could overturn the section of the National Labor Relations Act that allows states to pass right-to-work measures as well as the statutes in all 26 states that have passed them in one fell swoop.
The Wisconsin case won't get there. Because Wisconsin is in the same 7th Circuit that rejected the “takings” argument in Sweeny v. Pence (making it, for now, a settled matter there), unions filed their case in state court over the state's constitution.
But West Virginia and Michigan are states that recently passed right-to-work laws, and they are both in different federal court circuits. Unions in those states could challenge the constitutionality of right to work on the federal level. Unions in Idaho already have a case pending, which is a particularly exciting prospect as that state falls within the liberal 9th circuit. (Keep an eye out for Operating Engineers Local 370 v. Wasden.)
The “takings” approach is not without its critics. Seattle University Associate Professor of Law Charlotte Garden notes that Judge Wood's interpretation of the Takings clause is one more commonly advanced by anti-regulatory conservatives, and that labor taking up the cause could have unintended consequences. “There's a difficulty of applying existing ‘takings' law in this kind of context,” she says. “Takings” is generally applied to property, she says, and what's being taken from unions is the labor of their staff.
As an alternative strategy, Garden points out that the NLRB has indicated an openness to considering whether unions in right-to-work states can charge a fee to non-members who want to file a grievance.
Any rulemaking by the Board on right to work can expect to be challenged by business interests, which could open different constitutional questions about the law. The Indiana unions actually argued in Sweeney v. Pence that the Taft-Hartley amendments to the NLRA were only meant to apply to questions of compelled union membership, not fees for service. But I believe there remains a compelling argument about legislative intent.
Remembering our history will be vital to success
The judges who rejected the “takings” logic in Sweeney vs. Pence argued that unions weren't uncompensated for their duty to represent all workers in a bargaining unit. They wrote, “we believe the union is justly compensated by federal law's grant to the Union the right to bargain exclusively with the employer. The reason the Union must represent all employees is that the Union alone gets a seat at the negotiation table.” This is a bunch of ahistorical nonsense that betrays a lack of understanding of labor relations and power dynamics.
But why should we expect a couple of judges to get this right when most union activists are so muddled on the history and effects of the duties of exclusive representation and the union shop? To win, we need to understand our history and have real clarity on our goals to regain power.
When the National Labor Relations Act was written, unions were “members-only” organizations that competed with each other. They contested for power in the same workplaces over who would make the best bargaining demands, who could extract the bigger concessions from management and who could organize the most successful job actions. Employers hated this.
In pursuit of labor peace, employers began signing contracts with unions as the “sole and exclusive representative” of their workers. These early contracts gave employers a one-year guarantee that there would be no new union demands and no strikes. Unions went with it because it helped knock out the competition. The NLRB, which had been certifying unions as representing their members only, also went with it and now certifies unions as exclusive representatives, exclusively.
Agency fee originated not merely as compensation for the financial costs of representing all the workers in a unit, but for the political costs. During World War II, patriotically motivated unions pledged not to strike, and were rewarded with government-dictated wage freezes. Workers protested by quitting their unions. In order to keep unions from dropping their no-strike pledges, the War Labor Board began to reward unions a “maintenance of membership” rule which prevented workers from quitting the union during the term of a contract. This evolved into the union shop and agency fees.
The combination of exclusive representation and agency fee does contain the potential for real power and real wins for unions, as well as labor peace for employers. But it also tends to make unions more conservative and less militant. Exclusive representation without agency fee is the worst of both worlds, and should be resisted.
For three quarters of a century the only way that the NLRB would “certify” a union was as the exclusive representative of all of the workers at a represented workplace, mostly with the union's understanding that it could bargain for a contract clause that obligates represented workers to pay some fair share of the union's expenses.
This “union certification” gives collective bargaining the force of law that an arm of the federal government—the NLRB—will drag an employer that refuses to recognize and bargain “in good faith” with a certified union to court to force them to. So, for a union to tear up this “certification” to represent all of the workers and say, “we only represent our members now” carries the risk of losing the backing of the NLRB—but the potential reward of forcing the courts to grapple with the tradeoffs of forced representation without taxation.
To win big, we need a union in a right-to-work state that is genuinely willing to cede exclusive representation to kick out the scabs.
What I think this would look like is that union, just prior to the expiration of their current contract, filing a letter with the employer and the labor board disclaiming representation of the entire bargaining unit but demanding to bargain for their members only (and subsequently refusing to bargain over a no strike clause). We've got a much stronger case if it's brought to federal court by an employer complaining that a union won't represent all the workers than one brought by a union complaining about a loss in agency fee revenue.
It is time to start using the courts more strategically
The idea that the Supreme Court could swing from seriously considering forcing the entire public sector to go right-to-work in this term, to weighing the very constitutionality of right-to-work laws two or three years later might seem too fantastical, but such is the strange lack of case law over the underlying legal justification for requiring that a union represent all the workers but forbidding them to mandate dues and fees for that service work.
“This isn't stare decisis at all,” says Paul Secunda, describing the Latin term for the legal obligation of judges to stand by settled decisions. “You've got one decision from one circuit court. This is hardly settled case law.”
As I've noted, unions have tended to shy away from judicial strategies, and, on right to work in particular, labor has long favored a legislative solution. Repealing the Taft-Hartley Act that contained the right-to-work amendment to our nation's main labor law was the top legislative priority of the AFL, the CIO and its merged successor from the time of its passage in 1947 well into the 1980s.
There were 12 right-to-work laws on the books—all in former slave states—at the time of Taft-Hartley's passage. They had no force of law, as the federal NLRA preempted them—that is, until Taft-Hartley. And again, a close look at the legislative intent might reveal that Congress merely meant to allow states to ban union membership—not agency fees—as a requirement of employment. Or, more crudely, they may have basically been saying, “Let the Confederacy secede from the New Deal.”
The AFL and the CIO, which by 1947 had both abandoned organizing the south, seemingly wrote the former Confederacy off at the time. Since labor lost little to no membership as a result of those first 12 right-to-work states, little brainpower was devoted to challenging the constitutionality of the scheme. Likewise, when right to work next spread to western and plains states like Arizona and Nebraska, labor similarly wrote them off.
When right to work first spread to a bedrock labor stronghold, Indiana in 1959, the move was so controversial that within eight years labor had managed to overthrow the Republicans, who supported it in all three chambers of government and repeal the law. This win—the only instance of a right-to-work law being repealed legislatively—may have ultimately been counterproductive, giving unions false hope that killing right to work is a matter of making sure the bad guys don't win re-election.
The labor movement of 1965 could entertain such fantasies. The labor movement that has seen bases of union power in Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and West Virginia go “right-to-work” within the same half decade must wake up to the fact that it will take more than elections to reverse the damage. It will also take a judicial activism agenda for labor, like I have advocated.
And ultimately, working people in America will gain no new rights without stoking a hell of a lot of chaos, through strikes and more. But we'll also gain no new rights without legal demands like the Operating Engineers Local 370 v. Wasden case hanging out there. It is now up to the sisters and brothers in other “right-to-work” states—Michigan, West Virginia and beyond—to join the fight.
SUMMARY: The Supreme Court split 4-4 on a case on whether unions can collect fees from government employees who choose not to join. The outcome was an unlikely win for unions and a stark example of the impact of Justice Antonin Scalia's death. Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the new dynamics of the divided court.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): We turn now to the Supreme Court, where today’s 4-4 split was an unlikely win for labor unions, and a stark example of the impact of Justice Scalia’s death.
For more on today’s highly anticipated decision, and the new dynamics of the divided court, we are joined by Marcia Coyle, chief Washington correspondent for “The National Law Journal.”
So, welcome back, Marcia.
MARCIA COYLE, The National Law Journal: Thanks, Judy.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Actually, two interesting developments at the court today, but let’s start with that labor union case first.
Remind us of the — what the arguments were on each side. And this took place when Justice Scalia was still alive.
MARCIA COYLE: That’s correct.
The arguments were heard earlier this year. The case was brought by a group of California public schoolteachers who were not members of the public employee union in California. They claimed that having to pay what are called agency fees or fair share fees to the union that actually is required by law to represent all of the public school teachers violated the teachers’ First Amendment speech and association rights.
During the oral argument, Judy, it appeared that the court was going to rule for the teachers. It looked like the decision might well have been 5-4, with the five conservative justices in the majority and needing Justice Scalia to make that majority.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, today, we learned that the court is divided. The eight justices on the court are divided, one-line statement.
MARCIA COYLE: A very common way they handle 4-4 ties or splits. It’s called a per curiam decision, an unsigned decision in which the court simply states that the decision below is affirmed by an equally divided court. We don’t know who voted how.
The Supreme Court on Monday appeared ready to deal a major blow to organized labor as it considers the free speech rights of government workers who say they shouldn’t be forced to pay fees to public sector unions.
The high court’s conservative justices seemed inclined during 80 minutes of oral argument to overrule a four-decade old precedent that allows public unions to collect “fair share” fees from non-members to help cover the costs of collective bargaining.
A group of California public school teachers claims those mandatory fees violate the First Amendment rights of workers who disagree with the union’s positions.
Justice Anthony Kennedy rejected arguments made by lawyers for the state of California and the California Teachers Association that the current fee system is needed to prevent non-members from becoming “free riders” who get all the benefits of union bargaining and grievance procedures without paying for it.
“The union is basically making the teachers ‘compelled-riders’ on issues with which they strongly disagree,” Kennedy said.
Arguing in support of the union, California Solicitor General Edward Dumont said the state needs a reliable bargaining partner that is funded by all the workers it represents. He said the fees for collective bargaining typically apply to non-political issues such as mileage reimbursement, working hours and other mundane issues.
But Chief Justice John Roberts said even routine matters can become politically charged if they involve how the state spends money.
“That’s always a public policy issue,” Roberts said.
The California teachers want the high court to overturn a 1977 precedent that allows public unions to collect money from non-members to help cover the costs of collective bargaining as long as the money doesn’t go to political causes. The court in that case, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, said the arrangement was justified to prevent non-members from becoming free riders.
But the teachers argue that unions have become more political over time. They say even a push for higher salaries and pension benefits raises political questions about the best use of tax dollars for cash-strapped localities.
A federal district court ruled against the teachers, saying the outcome was clear under Abood. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed.
Arguing for the teachers, Michael Carvin said if the current regime is upheld, every public employee in California is essentially subsidizing “the governor’s political war chest.”
Justice Elena Kagan warned that the challengers bear a heavy burden to overturn a nearly 40-year-old case on which thousands of contracts and millions of employees rely.
Half the states already have right-to-work laws banning mandatory fees, but most members of public-employee unions are concentrated in states that don’t, including California, New York and Illinois.
Labor officials fear that union members will leave in droves if they realize they can get all the benefits of representation without paying for it. Union advocates say the lawsuit is part of a conservative agenda to weaken powerful labor unions, known for reliably supporting Democratic candidates and policies. The teachers are backed by the conservative Center for Individual Rights.
The unions argue that the First Amendment applies differently to public employees performing their jobs. They assert that the state has a strong interest in promoting efficiency and avoiding costly workplace disruptions by designating the union as the exclusive bargaining representative for workers.
For decades, the growth of union workers in government has helped compensate for steep losses in manufacturing, construction and other private industries where unions once thrived. About half of all union members are now in the public sector, which has a membership rate of 36 percent. That’s more than five times higher than that of the private sector, at 6.6 percent.
A decision in the case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, 14-915, is expected by late June.
SUMMARY: Can teachers who are not union members be required to pay some union dues? That question is being weighed at the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in a case that could have wide ramifications for organized labor. Judy Woodruff learns more about the case from Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal.
SUMMARY: Senate Democrats blocked debate on renewing fast-track negotiating authority for President Obama, deemed vital for winning passing a Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. Opponents of the bill, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, say details of the negotiated plan have been kept secret by the White House. Gwen Ifill reports.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): One of the president’s remaining top legislative goals is to get a major new trade accord with Asia. But he suffered a stinging defeat today in the opening battle to gain the authority to speed a deal through Congress. The magic number to start a full Senate debate was 60 votes. But, in falling short, it showed just how polarizing the disagreement over international trade really is.
MAN: On this vote, the yeas are 52; the nays are 45.
GWEN IFILL: In the end, trade politics put the President at odds with many in his own party and in line with most Republicans.
SEN. ORRIN HATCH, (R) Utah: We’re talking about President Obama’s top priority, his top legislative priority, and one of the most important bills in this President’s service as President of the United States of America.
SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER, (D) New York: We know the global economy is a rough sea. And Republicans are asking us to pass a trade package that forces the American worker to navigate those waters in a leaky boat. We want to plug up those leaks.
GWEN IFILL: The result, at least for now, is that the Senate has blocked renewal of the fast track negotiating authority that Mr. Obama wanted. That would allow Congress to approve, but not amend, future trade deals.
It’s deemed vital to winning passage of a Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. TPP, as it’s known, would include 11 mostly Asian nations that, together with the U.S., account for some 40 percent of the global economy. Supporters say it would bring greater prosperity by removing tariffs and other barriers and opening trade.
The President visited the sportswear manufacturer Nike last week, which announced the deal would create allow them to create 10,000 American jobs.
SUMMARY: Supporters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership say the deal would bring greater prosperity by opening trade, but opponents say it fails to include labor protections and could cost jobs. In the first in a series of conversations about what’s at stake, Gwen Ifill talks to Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO about why he opposes the trade deal.
SUMMARY: Supporters of a proposed trade pact with Asia ran into a roadblock Tuesday when a test vote on giving President Obama fast-track authority failed in the Senate. Judy Woodruff talks to Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, a co-sponsor of the fast-track legislation, about a new compromise reached by lawmakers and why he supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
SUMMARY: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is one of the more vocal opponents in the debate over granting President Obama fast-track authority on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. Judy Woodruff talks to Warren about her concerns about transparency and how American workers may be hurt.
SUMMARY: Days after Senate Democrats blocked debate over the president’s fast-track authority, the Senate put the trade deal with Asia back on track. To get a business perspective on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Hari Sreenivasan talks to John Murphy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents 3 million businesses and employers and has been pushing hard for the deal.
A hand-lettered placard, reading “McDonald’s: Stop Fooling Around, $15 and a union,” caught the spirit of the crowd of at least 3,000 protestors in Chicago for a march to a McDonald’s restaurant in the downtown Loop area connected to the Chicago Board of Trade. In 236 cities in the U.S. and roughly 100 more around the world from Sao Paulo to New Zealand and from Glasgow to Tokyo, according to protest spokespeople, fast food and other low-wage workers joined together to pressure employers like McDonald’s to raise their workers’ pay.
Organizers claimed that it was the largest protest by low-wage workers in U.S. history. And it may very well rank as one of the broadest global worker protests ever undertaken against multinational corporations—one reinforced by recent investigations and lawsuits in Europe against the company for violations of labor, health, safety, tax and other laws.
With its intense public relations campaign, the campaign amplifies the actions of fast food workers—some of whom walk off their assigned shifts as in a traditional strike. For brand-sensitive consumer product companies, many organizers believe, such bad publicity can cost companies greatly—and potentially open up new organizing possibilities.
These protests have also changed the political climate, both locally and nationally. Seattle and Sea-Tac in Washington and San Francisco have raised their minimum to $15 an hour. The same change may be possible sometime soon in both Los Angeles and the District of Columbia. In Chicago, politically embattled Mayor Rahm Emanuel agreed under political pressure to raise the minimum to $13 over several years—far above what he would have contemplated a short while ago. The movement is likely to keep pressure over the coming year on Democratic candidates, even presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton, to advocate the higher pay levels.
Some established unions have played key roles in building this movement over the past two and a half years, most notably the Service Employees International Union—which has largely staffed and bankrolled the Fight for $15, but also by unions such as the United Food and Commercial Workers, the initiator of OURWalmart, and in Chicago, the small but militant United Electrical Workers, who founded Warehouse Workers for Justice. WWJ members—including some from a warehouse/assembly plant in the Chicago suburbs that makes paper cups for McDonald’s—joined in the April 15 rally.
The ranks of the April 15 rally expanded with the participation of workers from many industries beyond fast foods, such as home care and day care workers, student and college campus workers, airport workers and many more (many of them existing or potential SEIU members). Raising the minimum to $15 an hour would help nearly all of them. But conditions for workers in many of these low-wage industries are also worsened by management practices, such as employing many part-time workers, some of whom have erratic schedules and income.
For example, full-time UPS workers typically start at around $18 an hour, but part-timers usually make only around $11 an hour, even though they all belong to the Teamsters union. Indeed, as the Fight for $15 movement expands, it is picking up support from many workers who have low-wages despite having union contracts. Even starting assembly workers or parts plant workers in a traditionally high-wage and unionized industry such as automobile manufacturing would benefit from setting a $15 benchmark for pay.
Darrel Tucker, 52, started work part-time for UPS at $8 an hour in New York when he was recruited by a temp agency from his temporary home in a shelter. Now he has advanced to a full-time slot at close to $19 an hour. “One of the reasons I’m involved is I understand what it’s like to struggle to make ends meet,” he says, although he still relies on publicly subsidized housing in high-rent New York.
Indeed, one of the reasons that the demonstration was called on “Tax Day” was to emphasize how much low-wage workers rely on public services provided by taxpayers as a result of employers, such as McDonald’s, not paying adequately, as a recent report from the University of California at Berkeley revealed.
Work should pay enough for a decent life, SEIU president Mary Kay Henry said at an early morning protest in the San Francisco bay area, and protesting workers found allies joining them in mutual support from religious groups, community organizations, and social justice movements, such as #BlackLivesMatter.
Tim Sylvester, president of Tucker’s Local 804 of the Teamsters and a candidate for the international union presidency, says he encouraged his members to participate on April 15 because “member-to-member mobilization is the best way to show corporations we have the power.”
Fight for $15 is still largely a movement of workers without a formal and legally recognized union structure. But they are a union in deed if not name by virtue of their direct, collective actions and their ideas. Indeed, their daring act of setting what seemed an implausible goal of virtually doubling most of the country’s base wage in one giant leap, not with timid incremental steps, inspired workers around the country.
The worst-paid workers in America have been the mainly silent and most extreme victims of the rising inequality and wage stagnation for the past 40 years in America. Their occupations have also been—and are projected to be—the fastest growing part of the workforce. According to recent research by the National Employment Law Project, around 42 percent of all workers earn less than $15 an hour.
Disproportionately young, female and people of color, they are both the least unionized workers in the country and typically the most sympathetic to the idea of forming a union, even if they have little direct experience with organized labor. They have also long been seen as a fluid, unstable workforce that would be extremely difficult to organize.
But many have shown that they are willing to act, even if they don’t have a majority with them, and through those actions win support not only from co-workers but also from the general public. They are putting the passion and impulsiveness of youth behind a moral project that has inspired widespread recognition of the legitimacy of their demands.
They have had to overcome the skepticism of many and the inaccurate dismissal of their work as simply temporary, unskilled, and teenager, entry-level work that didn’t deserve decent wages. For example, one ex-military colleague of Tucker’s said that McDonald’s workers should not be paid wages that would be higher than many more experienced and skilled workers, especially since many of them couldn’t even take his order correctly.
But don’t tell that to Nancy Salgado, 28, single mother and college student studying psychology, and a long-time McDonald’s worker in Chicago. She witnessed how “year after year the corporation makes lots of money but workers don’t. So you don’t notice it when you’re living in your own little world. But seeing other workers and understanding their struggle is my strength. After all, $15 an hour is not a rich life, just a way to pay the rent and bills.”
For many years, there has been a widespread sentiment that fast-food and other low-wage service workers would be impossible to organize. SEIU, later AFSCME, and a few other unions have made progress, especially with those whose pay comes from government sources (such as home health care givers). Serendipitously, on April 15, Good Jobs Nation was also formally demanding that Congress act on the federal government’s shameful record as the largest direct or indirect employer of low-wage workers in the country, as huge numbers of its contractors pay minimum wage.
The question is still open for debate in the private sector. For example, the Communications Workers have started a drive to organize bank workers, whose jobs are unstable and poorly paid in the U.S., but unionized, more skilled and much better paid relative to national standards throughout most of the world. Yet it is unquestionably difficult in the U.S. as the long-running campaign of the UFCW to organize Walmart has found.
Organizers are by necessity wildly hopeful and prepared for the worst at the same time. One continuing question arises about campaigns such as Fight for $15: Can the labor movement make the conversion from a populist movement to a self-sustaining workplace organization? Is there an “endgame” to the very effective but also very expensive campaign, an endgame that results in unionization? That, after all, is the oft-forgotten half of the Fight for $15—and a Union (without management interference).
“A union is very important,” Salgado says. “We’re not only fighting for $15 an hour but also to form a union without retaliation. Having money without a union means we’re still not protected, because we don’t have any security.” She expects McDonald’s to fight back, but says the recent raise won’t fool many workers. “They’re just trying to calm us down.”
Salgado is not easily calmed partly because she recognizes that even after she graduates from college, she might still have difficulty finding a job in her chosen field and may have to rely on jobs like those at McDonald’s. And the mutual support she found in the movement helps to give her greater understanding of the importance of what she and others are doing.
“We’re all leaders in this fight,” she says. “We are all committed to change our lives.”
SUMMARY: A labor dispute between shipowners and longshoreman on the West Coast has been going on for months now. This weekend, the President dispatched labor secretary Thomas Perez to California to try to resolve it. For more, economist Christopher Thornberg joins Alison Stewart from Los Angeles.
ALISON STEWART (NewsHour): In Canada today, 3,000 members of the Teamsters went on strike.
They are in a dispute with the Canadian Pacific Railway over wages and benefits. Analysts say a prolonged strike would affect the flow of oil, lumber, auto parts and other products into the United States.
Another labor dispute between ship owners and longshoremen has been going on for months now on the West Coast of this country. And, this weekend, the President dispatched Labor Secretary Thomas Perez to California to try to resolve it.
For more about this, we are joined now from Los Angeles by Christopher Thornberg. He is an economist and a founding partner of Beacon Economics.
So, Christopher, tell me, what is at the center of this dispute, and why has it gone on for something like nine months?
CHRISTOPHER THORNBERG, Founding Partner, Beacon Economics, LLC: Well, we have to remember that, you know, there is a long history of tension between the longshoremen and the various owners of the shipping companies that move products in and out of those ports.
This time around, the contract was up for renewal. Those negotiations had been carrying on.
I know the workers at the port have been working under the old expired contract for a number of months.
Contract negotiations haven’t been going very fast.
And, as a result of that, there’s been kind of this, if you will, guerrilla action going on between both parties.
It’s somewhat of a work slowdown by one side of the equation, and, of course, these kind of weekend-long lockouts on the other side of it. And, overall, the tensions are just getting hotter and hotter.
Steven Greenhouse has been here before.
Nearly a month after his retirement, the august former New York Times labor correspondent spoke to union staffers, labor journalists and sympathetic academics at the American Labor Movement at a Crossroads conference in Washington, D.C. The title, he notes, is strikingly similar to a similar event he held in 1982, while in law school at NYU (“The Labor Movement at the Crossroads”).
The title made more sense three decades ago. Today the New Deal model of unionism would be more aptly described as being at the gallows.
The speakers, for the most part, seem well aware of that. With the exception of an outlandishly upbeat opening speech from Secretary of Labor Tom Perez—“The arc of the moral universe bends towards those who want to expand opportunity!”—the conference seemed to take its inspiration from the evident end of the 20th century union model.
Conferences of this type lend themselves to pontifications on the evergreen question “what is to be done?”—an exercise that often leads to presentations full of banalities. For the most part, such presentations were mercifully missing at the conference. A panel on community-labor alliances proved apt at naming everything the shrinking labor movement should be supporting, but provided precious little insight into how it can be expected to pay to ramp up such campaigns. On an earlier panel, the immanently quotable president of SEIU Local 775, David Rolf described the need for new forms of labor organizing.
“The old model isn’t coming back," Rolf said. "Many of us in the labor movement have been waiting for that mythical pendulum to swing back since sometime in the 1980s.” Rolf later told In These Times that Workers Lab, a program he helped form to fund innovative new organizing efforts, had begun making decisions about which proposals it would fund.
In terms of actual ideas, minority unionism seemed to hold the greatest hope—even if many attendees would probably have preferred that it didn’t.
Currently, American labor law requires “exclusive representation” across the nation; workers can be represented by only one union per bargaining unit, and it must represent everyone after being voted in by a majority of workers. But exclusive representation has been under assault almost since its inception. The Taft-Hartley Act landed the first blow, allowing states to establish right-to-work laws permitting private sector workers to refuse dues to a union (although the union is still required to represent them).
Last year’s Harris v. Quinn Supreme Court decision seems to bring a similar challenge in the public sector. Currently, union members who do not want to pay full dues (or, presumably in most cases, pay anything at all to a union) do not have to officially join the union, but must contribute “agency fees” to compensate the union for the resources it is legally required to expend on their behalf. But Justice Samuel Alito expressed disdain for this standard in Harris V. Quinn. Once he secures the necessary votes, it is very likely right-to-work will be coming to the public sector.
Minority unionism would grant workers the right to join a union even if the total number of union supporters does not represent a majority of the workplace. The union, meanwhile, would only have to bargain for and represent those workers who support it. This would allow private sector unions to escape from the bind created by right-to-work laws under exclusive representation while eliminating one of the more unpopular and confusing aspects of contemporary labor law—the requisite membership required of those who may be opposed to the very idea of a union. Some scholars believe the NLRB could easily tweak its standards to allow for private sector minority unionism; non-federal public sector workers are regulated by state-level laws, which would have to be amended state-by-state to allow for such arrangements.
The very fact that minority unionism is a hot topic of discussion at a D.C. labor conference is a sign of how badly organized labor’s hopes have been dashed. The architects of New Deal labor law pushed for majority representation and exclusive bargaining because a union that speaks for the entire workplace is likely to have more influence and can generate enough resources to fund both organizing and political campaigns. But the spread of right-to-work laws, the likely end of agency fees, and the members-only Local 42 that the UAW recently formed in Chattanooga seems to have forced establishment leaders and intellectuals to grapple with the idea.
University of California-Irvine law professor Catherine Fisk spoke longest in favor of minority unionism. (A small swarm of admirers hovered around her at the podium after her panel.) But her pitch was coached in ambivalence.
“Members-only unionism is better than no unionism and that’s the choice we face—it’s not like we can just turn our backs on right-to-work,” Fisk told the audience. “I’m not advocating members-only bargaining as though it were the best strategy in an ideal world. It’s not. There’s a reason why people smarter than I am decided in the early 1930s to enshrine majority unionism and exclusive representation. But we don’t live in that world anymore.”
The NLRB has not hinted that they will be altering labor standards to accommodate minority unions. But the Chattanooga UAW local could force the issue. There are also several states where public workers now have to labor in conditions that could allow for such a model. In 2011, Tennessee banned exclusive representation for teachers and now requires members-only bargaining. Fisk calls it “a terrific natural experiment.”
Minority unionism is the norm in other nations, such as New Zealand. In 2010, academics Mark Harcourt and Helen Lam performed a comparative study between the two nations and estimated that minority unionism could raise U.S. membership rates by as much as 30 percent. And in his new book, labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan argues that such unions could actually produce a more militant and powerful labor movement, as unions would not have to worry about pleasing ambivalent or anti-union members and could focus exclusively on representing strong union supporters.
But few other experts seem to share such optimistic analysis. The takeaway from Labor at a Crossroads seems to be that the remnants of the shattered American labor movement have been forced into a position where they just need to try something.
“We should try [minority unionism]… Our method should be to fire a lot of bullets, not one big cannonball,” Rolf told In These Times after Fisk’s panel. “I don’t know if minority membership is the answer, but it must be tried. We should look at things that have been tried elsewhere and things that have never been tried before, things we can prototype and test. The impulse to throw up a fortress”—a reference to conference panelist and veteran labor strategist Rich Yeselson’s recent argument for fortifying union strongholds until the next upsurge in worker militancy—"and protect what we have is not how species service, we survive by adaption.”
Greenhouse did not offer any specific proposals in his speech, nor did he adopt the strong rhetoric of Rolf. But while his diagnosis was delivered in a measured tone, the message was just as bleak. He reviewed labor’s successes since he took over the New York Times labor beat, over ten years after the conference he organized on labor’s future. After ticking off some organizing and political successes in the subsequent years, he seemed to tacitly acknowledge that if something doesn’t give, there won’t be any need for a sequel conference 30 years from now—because there won’t be any labor movement left to discuss.
"Last night I had dinner with a top labor official who said to me, 'We are at a moment in American history where the labor movement is weaker than ever before,'” Greenhouse concluded. “'But never before—considering the position of American workers and wage stagnation—has there been a time when we need the labor movement more. There’s a lot of frustration among American workers, …a lot of anger and alienation. The question is how can that anger, upset, dismay be converted into an effort to create a fairer America?'”
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): A sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that some corporations can opt out of the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage mandate because of religious objections. The 5-4 decision comes two years after the justices upheld the president’s health care law, and it leaves the Obama administration to look for another way to make sure all women who want it have access to contraceptive care.
As word of the decision spread, cheers erupted outside the court from opponents of the contraceptive coverage mandate.
KRISTAN HAWKINS, Students for Life of America: The main takeaway is that our government overreached yet again. And our government cannot force individuals to violate their freedom of conscience and their freedom of belief.
JUDY WOODRUFF: On the other side, supporters of the mandate voiced disappointment.
MICHELLE KINSEY BRUNS: Clearly, the court is just out of touch on the will of the American people on this. Birth control is not controversial. It’s really not, except for a very small extreme religious minority.
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JOSH EARNEST, White House Press Secretary: The ruling allows the bosses of these women to essentially step in and say, well, I have a religious concern, so you’re not allowed to make your own decision about whether or not you would like to benefit from these services. We’re going to make sure that they aren’t provided. We strongly disagree with that. We believe that Congress should take action to fix it.
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ELIZABETH WYDRA, Constitutional Accountability Center: I agree with Justice Ginsburg, who said in her dissent that the majority’s ruling was startlingly broad. And I think that’s right, because for the first time in more than 200 years of free exercise law, the court has said that a for-profit privately owned corporation can exercise religious free exercise rights, something that has been thought to apply only to living, breathing individual human beings, and not to artificial corporate entities.
SUMMARY: The Supreme Court delivered a setback to organized labor with a 5-4 decision on whether public sector home-health workers have to pay union dues. Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal analyzes the arguments and implications with Judy Woodruff.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Now: A showdown for big labor raises questions about its future in the South and beyond.
Jeffrey Brown has our look.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Two weeks ago, employees at this Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga voted against joining the United Auto Workers. It was close, 712 to 626, but the outcome ended the union’s two-year-long effort to organize the plant.
Officially, Volkswagen was neutral, but it had made clear it wanted to create an employee management council at the plant, and, legally, it can’t do that without union involvement.
Frank Fischer is CEO of V.W.’s Chattanooga operation.
FRANK FISCHER, CEO, Volkswagen Chattanooga: I want to thank all of our Chattanooga production maintenance employees for their participation in this election to decide the question of union representation. They have spoken. And Volkswagen will respect the decision of the majority.
JEFFREY BROWN: For its part, the UAW hoped a win in Chattanooga would launch it toward organizing 20 foreign auto plants across the South and reverse a long decline in its membership.
In 1979, the UAW’s ranks peaked, at 1.5 million members; 35 years later, that number has plummeted to around 390,000. The UAW’s efforts in Chattanooga ran into strong opposition, including from Republican Senator Bob Corker, a former mayor. He insisted unionization wouldn’t have provided any real benefits.
SEN. BOB CORKER, R-Tenn.: The pay out there is already above what UAW workers make that have worked the same amount of time. I don’t see how they can improve the environment that they work in or the safety. We have probably the number one environmentally-sound building in the world. And so this was about one thing, and I think the employees realized that.
JEFFREY BROWN: The UAW has filed a formal objection with the National Labor Relations Board, charging Volkswagen workers were unfairly influenced and intimidated by outsiders. But five V.W. Chattanooga workers filed their own petition yesterday, asking the NLRB to block any revote. They accused the company and the union of colluding to force unionization.
SUMMARY: Jeffrey Brown gets debate from Linda Chavez of the Center for Equal Opportunity and Kate Bronfenbrenner of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University on the significance of Volkswagen auto workers in Tennessee rejecting UAW membership and the outlook and importance of unions for today’s workers.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): They started voting yesterday in the snow at the V.W. plant in Chattanooga, at issue, whether to join the United Auto Workers. The vote comes in an era when many foreign automakers have moved to Southern states, where overall union participation is low, and as UAW membership has fallen dramatically, from 1.5 million members in 1979 to just over 382,000 in 2012.
JUSTIN KING, Volkswagen Employee: I’m proud to be working at Volkswagen.
JEFFREY BROWN: Hoping for a win in Chattanooga, the union has released YouTube videos of V.W. employees who are voting yes.
JUSTIN KING: Volkswagen will be stronger when they come together with the UAW, because that combines not only Volkswagen’s history of working with labor, but it also adds in UAW’s experience of working in the U.S. market.
JEFFREY BROWN: Volkswagen itself has remained officially neutral on the question. But it does want to set up a German-style works council to allow employees and management to collaborate on decision-making. Labor experts say by law that means the plant must first unionize. But support for the union is hardly unanimous.
SEN. BOB CORKER, R-Tenn.: I think everyone in the community knows that I have tremendous concerns about the UAW being a part of our community in this way.
JEFFREY BROWN: Among others, Republican U.S. Senator Bob Corker, once the mayor of Chattanooga, and a group called the National Right to Work group (conservative anti-union shill) argue that unionization will jeopardize jobs. And Republicans who control the state legislature have threatened to withdraw millions of dollars in tax incentives for Volkswagen if the UAW wins.
SUMMARY: Workers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee voted to reject what would have been United Auto Workers’ first successful organization of workers at a foreign automaker in the South. Jim Efstathiou of Bloomberg News speaks with Hari Sreenivasan about the significance of the vote.
SUMMARY: Gwen Ifill talks to Marcia Coyle of the National Law Journal about two cases heard at the Supreme Court. In one, non-unionized health care workers argue they shouldn't have to pay for contract negotiations. Then, can an author's heir claim copyright infringement against the 1980 movie "Raging Bull" decades later?
JEFFREY BROWN: In November, machinist union workers at Boeing voted down a new contract extension. Pensions were the most contested issue. After Boeing offered several revisions, a new vote is taking place today, with results expected tonight.
The stakes are high: thousands of jobs and the building of Boeing's new 777X plane. If the union approves the contract, Boeing says it will go ahead and build the plane in unionized factories in Washington State, the company's historic manufacturing home. If there's another no-vote, Boeing says it may well go elsewhere. And 22 other states responded to a solicitation from the company with proposals to build the new jet in their areas.
Joining us now: Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in labor issues, and Richard Gritta, a professor of finance at the University of Portland, an expert on the airline industry.
Well, Harley Shaiken, and start us off. Explain the pension and other issues here and the dilemma for the union members voting on this.
THE 211 Bar and Grill is a little watering hole near Michigan’s Black Lake, in a place that natives call “up north.” Its walls are adorned with prizewinning pike, deer heads, even a wolverine. But its most striking ornament is a patch of wall where visiting autoworkers proudly scrawl their union affiliations: “Fighting Local 600.” “Local 22 — Hamtramck.”
That wall testifies to more than 75 years of union power in Michigan. Given that history, many were surprised this week when Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, signed legislation preventing unions from forcing workers to pay dues. But, in fact, it’s been a long time since Michigan was a workers’ paradise.
The 211 Bar opened in 1946, a turning point for labor. That year saw one of the greatest strike waves in American history, and the United Automobile Workers elected the indomitable Walter P. Reuther its president. By 1950, he had forged the “treaty of Detroit,” ushering in an era of prosperity. Autoworkers won decent wages, health insurance, unemployment benefits and a pension plan. Unionization benefited nonunion workers too, because even nonunion employers needed to offer higher pay and benefits to compete with union pay packets.
Unionized workers used their wages and benefits to become homeowners. They could put their kids through college. They did not have to fret about bankruptcy when a medical crisis struck. They were cushioned against the scourge of cyclical unemployment.
And they could even get a taste of the good life, buying little summer cottages and hunting cabins in places like Black Lake. In the 1960s, the U.A.W. even built its retreat and conference center there.
Michigan’s unions, which at their height represented 45 percent of the state’s workers, became a powerful political force. Detroit’s Labor Day parade was a mandatory stop for Democratic presidential candidates (though, tellingly, President Obama skipped it in 2012).
Labor leaders advised Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Reuther stood with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on behalf of racial equality (even though some rank-and-file white unionists were skeptical), and he worked with Kennedy and Johnson to expand education, antipoverty and health care programs.
On the state level, even Republicans could not disregard unions. Gov. George Romney, who came to politics as a former auto industry executive, supported Michigan’s 1965 law giving collective bargaining rights to public employee unions.
That influence and prosperity were hard won — and fragile. No sooner did labor gain political clout than its opponents began trying to curb its power. In 1947, a coalition of pro-business Republicans and Southern Democrats pushed through the Taft-Hartley Act, which allowed states to pass right-to-work laws. Within two decades 19 states, all in the South and Mountain West, had right-to-work laws.
Low union density allowed these Sunbelt states to attract employers in search of low wages and weak regulations. Job flight — first to nonunion states, then to low-wage bastions overseas — hit hard, especially in Michigan. Union membership dropped to 17.6 percent of Michigan’s work force in 2011. In comparison, anti-union and early right-to-work states like Alabama and Arizona had higher union density in 1964 than Michigan today.
Meanwhile, income inequality has spiked, middle-class wages have barely improved and blue-collar jobs are lower paying, less secure and less likely to offer health care and pension benefits. It’s no coincidence that incomes have stagnated as union power has waned: the historian Colin Gordon found that inequality had been greatest in right-to-work states and that declining union membership accounted for a third of the rise in inequality during the 1980s and ’90s.
Today, unions face high obstacles to organizing, from corporate anti-union campaigns to weak enforcement of labor laws. The strike, once crucial to union bargaining power, is now inconsequential: it depends on community support, which is hard to muster when fewer than a fifth of a state’s workers are in unions.
This doesn’t mean Michigan’s unions are powerless. But they have used their dwindling resources to influence elections and shape policies like taxation, health care and infrastructure spending, rather than confronting employers directly. At a moment when the voting machine has replaced the picket line as the last bastion of union strength, right-to-work advocates hope to weaken what remains of the movement’s clout. Without a strong voice representing them, Michigan workers will remain outmatched in what was already a tough defensive battle for economic security.
In Michigan, it’s no longer a given that a blue-collar job is a ticket to the middle class. The scribbled names on the 211 Bar wall might well be the last traces of the disappearing world of the once prosperous Michigan worker.
SUMMARY: What will the passage of 'right to work' laws in Michigan mean for unions in what had once been a stronghold for organized labor? Judy Woodruff talks to Forbes.com contributor Micheline Maynard in Ann Arbor and Bill Ballenger of Inside Michigan Politics, who explain why unions' political power has weakened.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Michigan, a state considered a cradle of the union movement, today struck a blow against organized labor. The Republican-dominated state legislature approved laws that deny unions the right to require membership in exchange for a job.
More than 12,000 people gathered outside the state capitol in Lansing to protest the move. Inside, they chanted "Shame on you" at Republican Gov. Rick Snyder. And late today, Snyder signed the bill.
For more on all, we're joined by Micheline Maynard, a contributor to Forbes.com and former Detroit bureau chief for The New York Times, and by Bill Ballenger, editor of Inside Michigan Politics.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Michigan, home to the United Auto Workers and one of the most heavily unionized states in the country, is suddenly ground zero in the national debate over workers rights, as the Republican lawmakers who control the state's legislature prepare to cast a vote tomorrow that could permanently alter the political landscape.
Hundreds of people descended on the state capitol building in Lansing last week to protest a move to make Michigan a right-to-work state. Republicans running the State House and Senate have approved a pair of bills to allow workers to hold union jobs without joining the union.
Organized labor was furious.
GLORIA KEYES, UAW Member: You will have people that will be working right alongside of you that will not have to pay union dues, but you pay union dues, but will still be able to get all the benefits from being a union member.
GWEN IFILL: Democrats in the legislature complained that Republicans rammed through the bills with no hearings or public comments.
