Union-Busting, the Latest Ugly US Export

Posted by Tula Connell, Firedoglake at 11:28 AM on February 28, 2008.

We all know that when it comes to providing health care, maternity leave and retirement security for all their citizens, Britain, France and all the rest of "old" Europe make the United States look pretty pathetic.

For instance, Britain provides 72 weeks of paid maternity leave while even South Africa, at the low end of the spectrum, offers 12 paid weeks. The United States? Zero.

The list goes on and doesn't get any better.

But it's not enough for greedy corporations to endlessly lobby for their anti-employee agendas in Congress. They now are exporting the most insidious methods of preventing workers from attaining fundamental workplace freedoms: Union-busting.

Union-busting is a $4 million industry in the United States. When faced with a group of workers who want to form a union, U.S. employers all too often turn to these firms, packed with corporate lawyers who, for a steep price, provide them with all the dirty tricks they can undertake within a hair of the law. The same hasn't been true in Europe. Until now.

To better coordinate efforts against multinational union-busting, the AFL-CIO and our counterpart in Britain, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), earlier this month agreed to share information about the activity of union-busting firms in the United States and Britain. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber signed a joint agreement Feb. 12 to work together to eliminate the intimidation of workers who want to improve the quality of their families' lives by forming a union. Both will jointly lobby governments and relevant international bodies to restrict the activities of the union-busters, develop a shared database of union-busting activity and create "Busting the Union-Busters" training materials. (Click here to read the agreement.)

The agreement is the first major step to continue the global solidarity of our Global Organizing Summit in December. To coincide with the partnership, London School of Economics and Political Science scholar John Logan released a report that highlights how this poisonous export is a direct threat to the welfare of Britain's working people.

Union Avoidance Consultants: A Threat to the Rights of British Workers points out that even though some 60 million Americans say they would like to join a union, employer intimidation and tactics used by union-busters have thwarted efforts to join unions.

Writes Logan:

The United States has an entire industry dedicated exclusively to stopping workers from forming a union. Several of these U.S. consultants are now operating internationally and are seeking to expand their business in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. It is essential that union-busting is not allowed to flourish on this side of the Atlantic.

Over at the Detroit Medical Center, Ceferina Sharpe knows all too well what U.S. union-busting is like. Sharpe, who has worked as a registered nurse for 35 years, tried to form a union with her co-workers in spring 2007. They want to improve patient care through better staffing levels--and get health care they can afford.

As soon as management learned the nurses wanted a union, the harassment started. Staff is required to attend meetings with supervisors who interrogate the nurses about their support for the union. Management illegally monitors the nurses' activities, using video cameras and keeping tabs on nurses who attend union meetings, according to charges filed by the union with the National Labor Relations Board. The charges also accuse the hospital of singling out and harassing nurses who are trying to exercise their freedom to form a union.

Sharpe is originally from the Philippines, where she says management respected nurses. But in the United States:

You don't have any respect.

The perspective of those outside the United States helps clarify what we often can't see in our own backyard.

Gregor Gall, professor of Industrial Relations at Britain's University of Hertfordshire, recently returned to the United Kingdom after a trip to this country and had this to say about just how extremist U.S. employers are when it comes to workers seeking to form unions.

Having just visited the U.S. for an industrial relations conference, it's hard to fully comprehend just how anti-union employers are there. While not wishing to let employers in Britain off the hook for their anti-unionism, their American brothers and sisters are in a different league all together.

Among the estimated 2,500 U.S. lawyers and management consultants who spend their days plotting how to ensure workplaces are free of anything resembling worker democracy, those at Jackson Lewis are among the most virulent, as reported recently by journalist Art Levine. He describes a Jackson Lewis union-busting seminar he attended last year, in which the lawyers encouraged employers in the audience to take a leading role in denying their workers their freedom to form a union.

Here are just a few of the comments of what the lawyers told Levine and the other seminar participants:

* If a supervisor sympathizes with the workers who want to form a union, one of the lawyers jerks his tie upward against his neck to suggest a hanging.

* Tell employees stories about other workers in a union going on strike and losing their jobs to replacements because "It's lawful. What happens if this statement is a lie? They didn't have another strike, there were no replacements? It's still lawful: The labor board doesn't really care if people are lying."

* Firing workers for seeking to form a union is illegal under current labor law, so Jackson Lewis encourages employers to make sure they fire union supporters for other reasons.

It's clear we need to level the playing field so U.S. workers don't face such employer harassment when trying to form unions, and that's the main reason we in the union movement have been working hard for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. Joining a union isn't just about the workers who become union members. It's about all of us.

As Ceferina Sharpe and her colleagues at the Detroit Medical Center know, the issue isn't just about staff. They want a union because until they get one,

everything at the hospital is decided by finances, not patient care.

Tagged as: labor, unions, europe, union busting

Tula Connell is the managing editor of the AFL-CIO blog.