Corporate Spin-Doctor to go After Teachers' Unions

By Michael Mishak and Patrick Coolican, Las Vegas Sun. Posted November 6, 2007.

Richard Berman has attacked Mothers Against Drunk Driving, tobacco opponents and advocates of healthier food.

The Washington lobbyist and adman does it with panache, a gleeful smile and all the subtlety of a shiv thrust into the gut.

He's been compared to the dark-hearted protagonist of "Thank You for Smoking" except, as one commentator put it, the book and film's character is a "pale reflection" of Rick Berman.

His next seemingly benevolent target: teachers and the unions that represent them.

At the Conservative Leadership Conference in Sparks last month, Berman announced a plan to roll out a multimarket media campaign attacking teachers unions as impediments to education reform.

He won't say where the campaign will run, but Las Vegas and Reno would seem to be prime candidates, especially given the Nevada State Education Association's recent announcement that it will go to the voters for a 3 percentage point increase in the gaming tax for schools and teacher salary increases.

What's not in doubt is that when Berman goes after the teachers, it will be brutal.

At the Sparks conference, he approvingly quoted mobster Al Capone: "You can get further with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word."

Political and labor observers are watching closely because as Berman acknowledged in his Sparks speech, his attack on teachers unions is really a small front in a much bigger battle over the future of the labor movement and its role in American politics. It's not clear Berman cares at all about education policy. His real target is the broader labor movement.

"Who's afraid of the big, bad union?" Berman said, announcing the title of his presentation. "I think everybody should be afraid of them."

What's really at stake is the Employee Free Choice Act, labor's top priority in Congress. The measure would make it easier for workers to organize, stiffen penalties for employers that violate labor law and mandate that once workers form a union, the employer must come to the bargaining table or submit to mediation and arbitration.

If passed and signed, the measure would allow unions to organize workers by getting them to sign a card rather than going through a campaign that ends with an election.

Employers say elections are the fairest method. Unions say the campaigns give employers the opportunity to frighten workers into voting against organizing by firing them or threatening to fire them.

The card-check system last prevailed in 1947. If it becomes law again, it will help unions organize Wal-Mart and other large retailers and service industries.

Berman's effort comes as labor, typified by the Service Employees International Union, has grown more aggressive about organizing, hammering out voluntary agreements with employers to recognize workers through card checks. Las Vegas' Culinary Union, for instance, has had an exponential growth in membership during the past two decades, primarily because of voluntary card-check agreements negotiated with casino operators.

At the conference, Berman described the consequences of the bill's passage: Union density in the public sector would double and private-sector unions would get a windfall of billions of dollars in dues, which in turn would be converted to campaign money to win more elections. "If you don't believe this can happen, you don't understand politics."

In short, he says, "it will be the unionization of America … The cost of losing is huge. It will change politics in this country forever."

Berman knows that politically and in the public's eye, the labor movement is enjoying a minirenaissance.

According to a recent Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, with a plurality, 35 percent of respondents, saying they would like to see unions have more influence. Labor's popularity hit its trough in 1979 and 1981, garnering 55 percent support.

Berman's campaign is nothing new, said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Labor has been the subject of coordinated attacks consistently during the past century, notably in the 1930s, when large corporations such as DuPont and General Motors formed the "Liberty League" to challenge the newly minted Wagner Act, which gave workers the right to organize and bargain collectively.

From 1933 to 1938, union membership doubled, and it almost doubled again by 1947.

Lichtenstein, who also directs the university's Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy, said anti-unionism usually comes at times when labor asserts itself or enters new territory. Now, he said, is such a time.

Despite the fact that union density is at an all-time low (12 percent), labor experts predict reforms such as the Employee Free Choice Act could lead to explosive growth. "It's always darkest before the dawn," he said. He called Berman "extraordinarily clever" and "disgusting."

Berman clearly revels in these descriptions.

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