Washington Post: A War Against Organizing

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/02/AR2009060202967_pf.html

By Kate Bronfenbrenner
Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Angel Warner, an employee at a Rite Aid distribution center, sat next to me recently in a congressional briefing room and described what happened when she and her fellow workers tried to form a union in their California workplace. She talked about the surveillance, constant threats and harassment they endured; how she and other workers were repeatedly taken aside and interrogated, one on one, about how they planned to vote; how two co-workers were fired; and how the rest lived in fear that any day they, too, might get a pink slip. The union filed numerous charges of unfair labor practices and eventually won the organizing election. But three years after the campaign began, Warner and her fellow Rite Aid workers still don't have a contract.

Like most U.S. companies, Rite Aid takes full advantage of current labor law to try to keep workers from exercising their full rights to organize and collectively bargain under the National Labor Relations Act. Far from an aberration, such behavior by U.S. companies during union organizing campaigns has become routine, and our nation's labor laws neither protect workers' rights nor provide disincentives for employers to stop disregarding those rights.

Late last month I published a study, "No Holds Barred," that was presented at the hearing at which Angel spoke. I looked at a random sample of more than 1,000 union elections over a five-year period to determine the parameters of employer behavior during union representation elections in the private sector and the limitations of the labor law system established to regulate that behavior.

In 34 percent of the elections I studied, companies fired employees for union activity. In 57 percent of elections, employers threatened to shut down all or part of their facilities, and in 47 percent, employers threatened to cut wages and benefits.

In 63 percent of campaigns, supervisors met with workers one on one and interrogated them about their union activity or whether they or others were supporting the union. In 54 percent of the elections, supervisors used these one-on-ones to threaten individual workers.

The bottom line is that there has been a steady decline of workers' rights in the past several decades. Colleagues and I have examined this issue in a series of studies over the past two decades. My new data show that employers are more than twice as likely as they were in the 1990s to use 10 or more tactics -- including threats and firings -- to thwart workers' organizing efforts, and they are more likely to use more punitive and aggressive tactics such as interrogations, discharges and threats of plant closings, while shifting away from softer tactics such as social events, promises of improvement and employee involvement programs.

FULL story at link.