Employee Free Choice Act 'supported by Catholic social teaching'

“The present legal and moral framework that is intended to assist workers to form unions is badly broken,” a group of Catholic scholars declare in a public statement. Consequently, they are lending their support to the proposed Employee Free Choice Act for its being “rooted in and supported by Catholic Social Teaching.”

The statement, signed by more than 140 members of the Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice, was published in the June 28 issue of the National Catholic Reporter and will appear in America magazine in July.

“An a priori presumption for unions” is embedded in Catholic social teaching, according to the statement. “Catholic teaching states that the right to organize belongs to workers alone and cannot be abridged or annulled by civil or ecclesiastical authorities. The method or venue that workers choose to form a union is also their choice: workers may say yea or nay, stand or sit, sign statements or cards, or hold a secret ballot election.”

Provisions of the Employee Free Choice Act “strongly reflect the Catholic position that the decision to form or join unions is always the workers’ choice,” the group says, and lists the bill’s chief provisions, all of which business groups vigorously oppose.

The full text of the statement and its signers can be found here


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Save Capitalism? Well, that depends…

...That depends on the kind of capitalism. Some kinds aren't worth saving.

Not the kind that, as a result of the current financial crises, is inflicting more than $2,000,000,000,000 in total losses on the United States and the world.

Not the kind that values the manipulation of money over the production of goods and services.

Not the kind that treats labor as a commodity, a thing like shipload of coal or garbage.

Not the kind that furiously opposes legislation such as the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, which would help give workers and their organizations a right now enjoyed by business people and their organizations.

Not the kind that uses free trade and investment agreements to grant global rights and privileges to business and business organizations without any commensurate responsibilities.

Not the kind that uses its money and muscle to acquire and exploit vast tracts of land in distant lands no matter the harm done to indigenous peoples.

Not the kind that generates unprecedented luxuries for the few while millions and millions live in misery.

“Greed Is Good (to a point)” is the title of an essay by Fareed Zakaria in the current Newsweek. That’s catchy but grossly misleading. It’s like writing an essay on teen-age pregnancy and titling it “Lust Is Good (to a point).”

But Zakaria wisely recognizes that “the fundamental crisis we face is of globalization itself.” He goes on to explain:

“Technology has created worldwide supply chains, companies, and customers. But our politics [i.e., policymaking] remains resolutely national. The tension is at the heart of the many crashes of this era – a mismatch between interconnected economies that are producing global problems but no matching political process that can effect global solutions.”

For the ful text of Zakaria’s essay, see News Week on line at
http://www.newsweek.com/id/201935.

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Workers punished in war against unions

Private employers in the United States are relying more than ever on coercive and punitive tactics against workers seeking their legal and moral right to union representation.

Punishments include firing, threatening to fire, threatening to close the worksite, reducing wages and benefits, close monitoring of personal activities, and various forms of harassment, which in combination create an atmosphere of fear.

Further, employers often frustrate unionization by delaying the secret ballot vote that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) conducts to decide on union representation. In the most egregious cases, those elections were stalled by three to five years.

Evcn when the NLRB does hold an election and even when the union “succeeds in making it through all the hoops that it takes to win the election,” employers can fight on by actively resisting the workers’ right to a collective bargaining contract. In fact, according to NLRB data for the 1999-2003 period, 52 percent of newly formed unions had no collective bargaining contract one year after a successful election, 37 percent none after two years.

Those are some highlights of scandalous employer behavior, legal, illegal, and quasi-legal, described in the study No Holds Barred: the Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing released May 20.

“Our labor law system is broken,” Cornell University professor Kate Bronfenbrenner. author of the five-year study, concludes toward the end of her 31-page report published by the American Rights at Work Foundation and the Economic Policy Institute.

A Three-Front War

Yes, the report documents that the system is broken. But it also offers the latest evidence that many individual employers and the key employer organizations in the United States are waging an aggressive war against unions and against a basic human right – the right of workers to form a union and to have it operate as a union.

So it should be no surprise that American organized business is also waging that war on two other fronts (neither mentioned in the new report):


-- It is fighting tooth and nail against the Employee Free Choice Act, which would go a long way toward fixing a broken system.

-- It is internationalizing that anti-union and anti-worker war by its relentless opposition to having free trade and investment agreements protect the rights and interests of workers and worker organizations in the way those agreements already protect the rights and interests of business people and business organizations.

In an interview published May 20 in the New York Times, Randall K. Johnson, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce vice president, questioned Dr. Bronfenbrenner’s objectivity, but did not address the substance of her report. As of 2 p.m. May 20, I could find no relevant statement on the Chamber’s Website.


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West Wing cast joins pro-union campaign

With business organizations pouring uncounted millions into their fight against the Employee Free Choice Act, three top members of the West Wing cast came to Washington recently to lend their support to that proposed bill.

The three West Wingers – Martin Sheen, Bradley Whitford, and Richard Shiff – recorded a video to help kick off labor’s “Faces of the Employee Free Choice” campaign.

“The Employee Free Choice Act,” Martin Sheen says in the video, ”means a stronger America for all of us.” Here what they all said.



What can you do?

Check the American Rights at Work organization to learn how you can help. Click here.

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The TRUST GAP: yesterday's and today's

The TRUST GAP
Pharaoh in all his glory would have envied today’s CEOs their perquisites and ever-sweetening pay. Too busy living the cosseted life, America’s managerial elite have lost touch with the humble employee. Workers’ faith in top management is collapsing. CEOs who don’t come down from the heights are in trouble.

Those words appeared on the cover of the December 4, l989, issue of Fortune magazine, which I just found in a file of material I collected back then while writing an encyclopedia article on exorbitant executive pay.

Fortrune’s graphic indictment of 1989 applies today, but with crucial differences. The managerial elite still live as modern-day Pharoahs, but now they are joined by their peers in the shadowy financial world. And it is not just the faith of the humble workers that has collapsed; the public trust, the trust of the people at large. is in shambles. And, whereas the “trouble” of two decades ago faded away without serious repercussions, the crisis today is shaking the nation.

The contrasts with the past are striking. In 1990 the average CEO made 107 times more than the average worker. Now, according to the latest data, that ratio is 334 times to one. But until now exorbitant CEO compensation has not provoked a populist reaction, partly because of a widespread belief that, after all, the bosses earned it. That assumption has been shattered for at least two reasons.

First of all, even companies in bankruptcy or near it have brazenly rewarded their chiefs with sky-high pay and matching bonuses. The bonuses, especially, ignited unprecedented outrage.

Secondly, in recent years our great leaders of American enterprise have presided over a massive export of U.S. jobs, particularly to a neo-Communist state, China, to the point that our respected National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) is really the U.S. Association of Asian Manufacturers.

These Pharaohs, who would never tolerate a governmental role in supervising elections for corporate boards, are militantly opposing the Employee Free Choice Act, a union-friendly bill in Congress. The NAM and its allies are zealously devoted to maintaining the present restrictive system, which requires the federal government to run a referendum before a union is allowed to exist and operate in any workplace.

There is a strong case for freeing up that system. It is supported by an impressive number of noted economists, even Professor Jagdislh Bhagwati.


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Holes In President's Trade Agenda

After reading the government’s new report, “The President’s Trade Agenda: Making Trade Work for American Families,” I asked myself: will President Obama be willing to go all-out to pass the Employee Free Choice Act? My hunch was that he won't be.

I may turn out to be wrong (I hope I am) , but the thrust of his trade policy statement suggests otherwise. Yes, it may seem strange to link domestic labor legislation to foreign trade issues, but there are many connections. Let me describe a few of them.

My overall impression of this agenda, prepared when most of Obama’s trade people were not yet on board, is that it is weak on worker rights. It makes no mention of the key worker right, the right to unionize. If the report truly reflects the President’s position, it seems to follow that President Obama will also be weak on restoring the American worker’s right to unionize.

The agenda is very strong on continuing U.S. support for a “rules-based system of global trade,” with the World Trade Organization institutionally at the top.. But it says nothing about a huge hole in the WTO’s rules. Those rules are now one-sided. They protect the rights of business people and their organizations in thousands of pages, but contain not one single page protecting the rights of labor and its organizations.

The agenda praises Congress for making progress in upgrading adjustment assistance to workers made jobless by globalization. But trade adjustment assistance, a favorite prescription of Larry Summers, is a palliative and no substitute for reorienting trade to make the international labor market less of a jungle that it now is for many millions of working men, women, and children.

The agenda promises to “build on the successful examples of labor provisions in some of our existing [bilateral, non-WTO] agreements.” But it leaves the successes unnamed. Under sunlight, not one of the labor provisions in existing agreements qualifies as amodel to emulated.

The agenda is eloquent in expressing the benefits of foreign trade, but says nothing about how it is built on a huge global production system where sweatshops flourish. Nor is there any recognition of the shameful role that American multinationals like Nike and Wal-Mart play in that system.

Apart from what this report says and doesn’t state, however, the crucial test for the Obama administration is in whether it will sign a pending free trade agreement with Colombia, the world’s deadliest place for unionists. For this holdover from Bush negotiators, the administration plans to “establish benchmarks for progress” that would clean it up it for Obama’s signature.

Benchmarks? What kind of benchmarks? A reduction of the union assassination rate to 50 or 60 percent?

Compromises are normal in foreign trade policy. The pressures from trade enthusiasts and business lobbyists are incredibly powerful. But at some point there comes a decision on an issue so noxious that you must have the guts to say NO. The Colombia FTA is that point.

In domestic policy, too, compromises are normal. Organized business, grown fat under the viciously anti-union policies of the Bush administration, is waging the campaign of campaigns to bury the Employee Free Choice Act, with mounds of cash to gain gravediggers in the Senate

President Obama will have to invest a large amount of his own political capital to persuade the Senate to restore freedom of association to American workers. Will he? Hoping won’t make it so.


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‘Card check’ for unionizing gets scholarly OK

A group of Catholic scholars “committed to Catholic social teaching concerning the human rights of workers to organize employee unions” is pressing for the adoption of the Employee Free Choice Act.

“Badly broken” is how the group calls “the present legal and moral framework” that is supposed to safeguard freedom of association for American workers. In a statement that invites others to sign, the Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice praises the Employee Free Choice act as “rooted in and supported by Catholic Social Teaching.”

The statement summarizes three features of the proposed legislation, which is being reintroduced in the Congress after being adopted in the House and getting bogged down in the Senate last year:

1. Recognizing the right of workers to form a union through filing signed cards (known as “card check”) that state their decision to form a union.
2. Mandating mediation and arbitration if a first contract cannot be negotiate within the fist 90 days.
3. Imposing stronger penalties on firms that violate worker rights.

“Workers can also choose a secret ballot election if that is their choice,” the statement ads.

A longer expression of support for worker rights is contained in a policy paper adopted when the Catholic Scholars group was founded in mid-2008.


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39 economists OK employee free choice law

Thirty-nine leading American economists, including two Nobel laureates have publicly endorsed a proposed law that will make it easier for workers to unionize. In a full-page ad in the February 25 Washington Post, they call the Employee Free Choice Act. “a critically important step in rebuilding our economy and strengthening our democracy by enhancing the voice of working people in the workplace.”.

After a review of the present cumbersome government procedure for workers to get a union legally recognized, the statement says that the proposed law “would give workers the choice of using sign-up—a simple, established procedure in which workers sign cards to indicate their support for their union—or staging [the existing National Labor Relations Board-style] election.”

The statement concludes:: “In recent decades, most bargaining power has resided with management. The current recession will further weaken the ability of workers to bargain individually. More than ever before, workers will need to act together. The Employee Free Choice Act is not a panacea, but it would restore some balance to our labor markets.”

Kenneth Arrow of Stanford University and Robert M. Solow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are the two Nobel laureates among the 39 signers. Another prominent signer, surprisingly, is Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University, the prolific defender of free trade.

U.S. business people, as organized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers, are engaged in a vigorous lobbying and PR campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act.

The Economic Policy Institute, which coordinated the economists’ public statement, has developed a comprehensive analysis that, in effect, rebuts the arguments used to attack the proposed law. For example, the law is not as radical as its opponents make out.

Since 2003 more than half a million workers have formed unions through the majority sign-up system. Among the employers who have agreed to remain neutral in organizing campaigns and recognize unions through majority sign-up are the leading wireless phone company AT&T Mobility and Kaiser Permanente with its huge chain of hospitals and health plans.

In a brief filed with the NLRB, Kaiser Permanente explained that it did so because it “recognized that the protracted and often adversarial election process frequently undermined the ability of everyone involved to focus on the primary mission of providing quality health care.”


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