Labor & Employment Law

NY Times: Nation?s Labor Laws Weak and Irrelevant

By James Parks

It took a decade before registered nurses at the Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Mo., were able to join National Nurses United using the NLRB voting process.

The New York Times reports that the 75-year old National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the nation?s main labor law, is not getting better with age, but has become irrelevant for most workers and employers.

Reporter Steven Greenhouse highlights a new paper by Harvard Professor Richard Freeman, which finds that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), created by the NLRA, has not improved the process by which workers decide if they want a union. Instead, it has turned union elections in the private sector ?into massive employer campaigns against unions.?  You can read Greenhouse?s entire article here.

?Far from a laboratory conditions experiment in democracy,? he wrote,

the N.L.R.B. process turned into the same costly fight between unions and firms that union organizing was before the act, albeit in a different venue with different weapons.

Greenhouse quotes Freeman saying that

if unions were stronger, the United States might not have the highest income inequality in the developed world or stagnant real earnings for all but the highest paid. He also said that if unions were stronger, a liberal coalition ?would presumably have greater countervailing power? to Wall Street and have helped push through stronger financial reforms.

Freeman says penalties in the labor law are too weak to deter employers from breaking the law. For instance, if a company illegally fires employees leading the effort to create a union, the law requires the company to pay back pay, minus whatever earnings the workers had after being fired. But the law does not require the company to pay fines or punitive damages. In other words, the “penalties” are a slap on the wrist at a cost too minimal to deter employers.

The article also points to one study that showed how workers seeking to form unions under the National Labor Relations Board process that around 80 percent of such efforts in the late 1980s and 1990s occurred outside that process. This usually happened among government employees not covered by the NLRA, or by in the private sector where union organizers succeeded in getting employers to accept unions through card-check. (Card-check is the process under which unions are recognized when a majorioty of workers sign cards favoring a union.)

To make it easier for workers to join a union if they want, the Times lists several of Freeman’s suggestions, such as:

• Strengthening the penalties against illegal actions by management and unions and recommending penalties against individual managers or union leaders who break the law.
• Amending labor laws  to protect supervisors from being fired or punished if they want to remain neutral or silent and not have to express their firm?s anti-union views during an organizing drive.
• Holding early voting at neutral venues instead of having unionization elections held at the work site on a single day.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on October 29, 2010 (boomark / email).