Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 06:34:39 +1000
From: sjwright-AT-vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au (Steve Wright)
Subject: union-busting


>from the latest issue of Covert Action Quarterly
(http://www.worldmedia.com/caq/ )


LABOR SLAPS THE SMUG NEW FACE OF UNION-BUSTING by David Bacon

Unionbusting has traditionally been a dirty business, dominated by
consultants, law firms, and private guards conducting scorched-earth
campaigns against unions in strikes and National Labor Relations Board (
NLRB) elections. It still is.

But just as unions have begun a period of transformation, becoming more
committed to organizing and better at it, unionbusting has expanded. The
state of the art now includes sophisticated efforts to forestall organizing
drives by creating company-dominated organizations in the workplace and by
manipulating demographics to create a "union-proof"work force. Whole
industries are now contracted out, so that workers, in the eyes of the law,
are no longer even the direct employees of the corporations that
nevertheless control their lives.

Two years ago, the highest profile union organizing group in the country,
Justice for Janitors, met some of this new corporate thinking head-on.
Having previously organized most janitors in California's Silicon Valley and
neighboring Alameda County, Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
Local 1877, one of the country's fastest-growing unions, moved its
organizing crew to Sacramento, the state capital. Its target was Somers
Building Maintenance, a key employer with large and profitable contracts to
clean state buildings and the facilities of major corporations, including
Hewlett-Packard.

After winning workers' support, Local 1877 asked Somers to recognize the
union based on a check of authorization cards. *1 The company refused.
Within weeks, an ex-supervisor and the wife of another supervisor began
going through Hewlett-Packard buildings at night, collecting signatures for
the Couriers and Service Employees Local 1, a little-known union not
affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Somers quickly recognized Local 1, signed a
contract with no wage increases, and began giving preferential treatment to
workers affiliated with the company union. Meanwhile, workers claiming to be
Local 1 representatives threatened Local 1877 supporters; two workers were
attacked and beaten. *2

Eventually, the NLRB issued a complaint, calling Local 1 a company union.
Somers settled the charge and kicked the organization out.

Somers' company union marked a new and sophisticated effort to defeat one of
today's unions most successful strategies typified by Justice for Janitors'
campaigns.Many union observers credit the effort to the West Coast's premier
anti-union law firm, Littler, Mendelssohn, Fastiff and Tichy, ranked No. 2
on a national list of unionbusters maintained by the AFL-CIO. The firm is
the largest specifically anti-labor law firm in the country, with 270
attorneys in 20 cities, and revenues of $72 million in 1995.

Somers and Littler tried to find a weak point in Justice for Janitors'
campaign strategy, which rallies many-sided pressures on building owners.
Union organizers build community coalitions to mount boycotts, document
violations of worker protection laws, and file barrages of court actions.
Union members and supporters conduct rallies, demonstrations, and sit-ins,
often using civil disobedience to back up organizing efforts.

But at Somers, while SEIU Local 1877 mounted pressure from outside the
workplace, the company used Local 1 to create a climate of fear among the
workers themselves. Those who supported the company union were given better
treatment,and some were even chosen as stewards. Somers created a small core
of employees who identified strongly with the company, while supporters of
Local 1877 had to fight just to keep their jobs.

Somers found another ally in Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), who held hearings
of the House government oversight committee to push a longer-term Republican
agenda entirely barring corporate campaign tactics such as those used by
Justice for Janitors. Marlene Somsak, a public relations spokesperson for
Hewlett-Packard, referred to the campaign as "the use of neutral parties as
battlegrounds."

OFF WITH ITS HEAD

Employers and their political allies want to force union organizing drives
back into the legal process of NLRB elections, while the whole Justice for
Janitors strategy is an effort to avoid them.That says a lot about how
distorted the legal system has become. "Sometimes I think the National Labor
Relations Act should be repealed," comments AFL-CIO Organizing Director
Richard Bensinger bitterly. "What could be worse than this?"3

Joe Uehlein, past secretary of the AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Department and
now director of its Department of Strategic Campaigns, points out that
classic unionbusting has always been reactive. Employers respond both to the
prospect that workers might organize a union and to the specific tactics
unions use. "We set the battlefield; they have to react to it," he
asserts."That's why they want to make us deal with the NLRB. They control
that process, and they know how to win using it."4

And win they do. Unions lose about half the NLRB elections, and more in
larger companies than smaller ones. Even worse, they win contracts with only
half of the companies where workers vote for union representation. Bensinger
explains that "NLRB elections force unions into a propaganda war in which
they have to convince workers that life can be better in the future if
they're organized." Management has a full array of weapons. Using a barrage
of legal tactics, anti-union law firms try to carve out a bargaining unit of
workers with a minimum of union support. They delay elections as long as
possible to give management a chance to reverse union support through
intense, one-on-one conversations with supervisors. In captive audience
meetings that workers are forced to attend, management issues threats and
promises and asks for "a second chance." Unionbusters show videos depicting
violent strikes, while carefully-coached management representatives tell
workers they'll have to strike if the union wins.

"In the meantime, the union is excluded from the workplace entirely and has
no way of stopping illegal activity before the voting takes place,"
Bensinger says. "The fact is, workers don't really have the right to
organize unions." *5

Unionbusting consultants have thrived as the legal process has grown more
and more skewed. When Local 2850 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union
(HERE) began its organizing drive at the Lafayette Park Hotel in an upper
class San Francisco suburb, hotel managers brought in the American
Consulting Group (ACG, No. 31 on the AFL-CIO list). *6 In short order, the
hotel fired two of the most active union supporters and laid the necessary
bedrock of any anti-union campaign: fear. Nationally, the AFL-CIO estimates
that one in ten workers participating in a union organizing campaign is
fired."Preemption is the unionbusters' philosophy,"explains Local 2850
President Jim Dupont. "Their approach is `take the head off before it has a
chance to grow.'"7

When the Lafayette Park fired Socorro Zapien, management undoubtedly knew
she was a union supporter. According to Dupont, the hotel had sent a spy to
union meetings. *8 The hotel denied the charge to the NLRB. She was accused
of taking a chocolate bar, a charge she denied, and going early to her
coffee break. Zapien had no previous disciplinary record. Nevertheless, the
NLRB refused to demand that the hotel rehire her. The board follows the
Riteline decision, which says that if there is any business reason unrelated
to union activity for a firing, no matter how unlikely, termination is
legal. Even if the board does finally order reinstatement, the process can
take years and workers have already learned the price for supporting the
union.

At the Lafayette Park Hotel, the firings were combined with raises and
increases in benefits. Unions suspect that ACG consultants trained
supervisors to identify and isolate pro-union workers, pressured the
undecided, and helped form anti-union employee committees standard
unionbuster tactics during NLRB election campaigns. "After all that, there
was no way we could have a fair election there," Dupont says. *9

Local 2850 countered with an increasingly common step among unions that find
the NLRB process fails to protect workers or to penalize employers for
illegal action: It turned to direct pressure. HERE organized pickets and
enlisted immigrant rights activists and religious supporters to march
against the hotel. It also announced a boycott. Weddings, parties, and
conferences were canceled, either in solidarity or because of the
unattractive atmosphere. The union spread its activity to two other northern
California hotels owned by the same company. This is just the kind of
campaign that Rep. Hoekstra and congressional Republicans are trying to ban
through legislation.

ACG responded with extensive public relations work to undermine the boycott.
It pressured city council members to pass a city ordinance (later found
unconstitutional) against the marches, and tried to restrict the union
through injunctions against the union's free speech and direct action
tactics. ACG also brought in another consultant, Lupe Cruz, to deal with the
mostly Latina, immigrant work force.

The Lafayette Park Hotel campaign is still going on. Unions adopting this
approach have to have a long-term commitment. But it often succeeds where
the NLRB process fails. After a similar four-year fight by Local 2 at San
Francisco's Parc 55 Hotel, management gave in and signed a contract.

BLOOD & GUTS STRIKEBREAKERS

The classic strategy for breaking already-organized unions hiring scabs
received its blessing from the Reagan administration in its handling of the
PATCO strike in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan ordered the firing of
7,000 air traffic controllers. It was baptized in fire in 1983 in the bitter
Arizona copper miners' strike at Phelps Dodge. That two-year-long strike was
"really the start of the modern process of permanent replacement of strikers
by scabs," according to Joe Uehlein. "We still haven't, as a movement,
understood its impact, much less recovered from it." *10

Since Phelps Dodge, the list of companies hiring scabs to break strikes is a
roll call of the major class battles of the 1980s and 1990s: Continental
Airlines, Eastern Airlines, International Paper, Greyhound, Caterpillar,
Hormel, Watsonville Canning and Frozen Foods, Diamond Walnut, Pittston,
Wheeling-Pittsburgh, USX, and many others.

Not all of these battles have been won by employers, but the pattern of
attack is basically the same. In 1995, management of the Detroit News, owned
by Gannett Publications, and the Detroit Free Press, owned by Knight-Ridder,
put demands on the table to replace cost-of-living raises with merit
increases and to replace union jobs with non-union positions. Knowing the
terms would be unacceptable to unions and hoping for a strike, they made
arrangements with national consulting firms and with the local police. Four
months before the strike, the Detroit Newspaper Agency, a joint operation of
both newspapers to share production and distribution facilities, promised to
compensate the Sterling Heights Police Department for overtime costs from
shepherding scabs into the plant. By the time the strike was a year old, the
newspapers had paid out $2.1 million. *11

The newspapers also lined up hired guns to handle scabs, legal affairs, PR,
and security. A good-sized industry of such support institutions exists. One
of the largest companies specializing in providing replacement workers,
BE&K, maintains a data bank with the names of hundreds of workers who travel
the country from strike to strike. The newspapers contracted with one of
BE&K's rivals, Alternative Work Force (AWF), for 580 scabs. They also
brought in the veteran anti-union law firm of King and Ballow (No. 29 on the
AFL-CIO list). *12 This company has masterminded a series of newspaper wars
in Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, and San Francisco, among other cities.
Standard legal strategy during strikes rests on convincing friendly judges
to issue injunctions to virtually eliminate picketing, so that scabs can
pass freely in and out.

To guard the scabs, the newspapers first hired Huffmaster Security, another
company which, like AWF, has made lots of money in the newspaper wars. *13
In the first four months of the strike, Huffmaster and AWF were paid $2.3
million for supplying 480 guards and 580 scabs. Huffmaster, which is suing
the papers for $1.6 million more, *14 was replaced by a larger, even more
notorious, security firm, Vance International, whose guards sport black
uniforms and combat boots. The effect is startling, as Cleveland teachers
learned in fall 1996 while they prepared to strike. "When uniformed
out-of-state security forces invaded a Cleveland high school ... complete
with shields, bulletproof vests, cots, and in some cases sidearms, we now
realize that the education of Cleveland children [was] the last thought on
the minds of the state officials running strike preparations," commented
Ohio State Representative Vermel M. Whalen. *15

Nor is the menacing image purely for show. In Detroit, 20 Vance guards beat
striker Vito Sciuto with a stick, breaking his skull. In comments to a
reporter afterwards, a Vance employee said the guards wanted "to hurt
people." *16

This reputation makes money for Vance; its 1995 strikebreaking activity
grossed $90 million of the $25 billion private security industry. *17 But
its real success, according to company founder Chuck Vance, lies in its use
of video cameras. During the strike at the Pittston Coal Co., for instance,
Vance collected thousands of hours of videotapes. Courts hostile to miners
in the coalfields used the tapes to justify $64 million in fines against the
United Mine Workers, fines later overturned by the Supreme Court.

The tapes are also useful after a strike is over to ensure that active union
members are not rehired and that "troublemakers" are dealt with. While there
is basically no punishment for companies if scabs threaten or injure
strikers, the NLRB has held that any striker who threatens scabs, or even
insults them, can be fired. When the United Auto Workers struck Caterpillar
in Peoria, Illinois, Vance's Asset Protection Team pushed and shoved
strikers and family members in order to provoke confrontations it could
video. Guards followed strikers to their homes.Caterpillar striker Ron
Heller monitored a police radio conversation mentioning a list of
"troublemakers."In later legal action, he uncovered records that indicate
Vance supplied a list of active union members to local police.

The results, so far, have pleased the management of the Detroit papers.
Frank Vega, CEO of Detroit Newspaper Agency, said "we would have waited
three or four more contracts to get to where this strike has gotten us."18

THE MODERNCOMPANY UNION

Companies use different tactics in dealing with workers trying to organize
than they use to break existing unions like those conducting the newspaper
strikes. Not far from the Lafayette Park, another, larger, hotel chain is
implementing a sophisticated strategy to block union organizing before it
starts. The Hyatt Hotel in Sacramento has set up peer review committees
where workers can go with problems they can't resolve with their
supervisors. The committees consist of two supervisors and three employees
chosen by the aggrieved worker from a list of employees who have gone
through conflict resolution training. The important part of this process,
according to HERE 2850's Dupont, is that"it creates the semblance of
justice."19 In other words, it seems like workers don't need a union to
resolve their problems.

After General Electric defeated a union drive at its Mattoon, Illinois plant
in 1991, it hired Caras and Associates of Columbia, Maryland, to set up
similar peer reviews. The strategy, designed to stave off a second
unionizing effort, also insulated the company from discrimination
complaints. "Once [government] investigators see the peer review approach,"
noted GE specialist Jack Hoffman, "they usually don't even go through the
paperwork." *20

Peer review committees are only a small part of a much larger picture.
Modern personnel practices in large corporations try to inoculate workers
against the idea of organizing or taking sides against management. This
sophisticated unionbusting strategy is a modern-day version of company
unionism.

Much of this strategy was developed in Silicon Valley during the Cold War.
*21 From the beginning, high-tech workers have faced an industry-wide,
anti-union policy. Robert Noyce, who helped invent the transistor and later
became a co-founder of Intel Corp., declared that "remaining non-union is an
essential for survival for most of our companies. ... This is a very high
priority for management here." *22

Expanding electronics plants were laboratories for personnel-management
techniques for maintaining a "union-free environment." These techniques,
which focused on the team method for organizing workers, were later used
against unions in other industries, from auto-manufacturing to steel-making.

Silicon Valley hearings of the Commission on the Future of Labor Management
Relations, the Dunlop Commission,held in January of 1994, gave the public a
first-hand look at high-tech labor/management cooperation. According to Pat
Hill-Hubbard, senior vice president of the American Electronics Association,
"employees have become decision-makers, and management has practically
disappeared."23 Doug Henton, representing Joint Venture: Silicon Valley, an
industry/government policy group, was even more blunt. "Unions as they have
existed in the past are no longer relevant," he said. "Labor law of 40 years
ago is not appropriate to 20th century economics."24

In the high-performance workplace, asserted Phuli Siddiqi, an Intel worker
who gave part of her company's presentation, work teams give employees a
voice. She described "worker ownership of projects and products," and the
company's employee recognition program, "Pat on the Back." *25

In the early years of the electronics industry, companies paid relatively
low wages, but they attempted to equal, and sometimes surpass, union
benefits, providing medical and dental plans and even sick leave.
Hewlett-Packard even promised never to lay off workers.

Today, however, permanent jobs are being abolished. Half the work force in
many large electronics plants works for temporary agencies, without any
benefits, and at much lower salaries. *26

"The company always told us they had to be competitive," said Romie Manan, a
worker at National Semiconductor Corp.'s non-union Santa Clara plant:

     "Increasing the company's profitability, they said, would increase
     our job security. That was the purpose of our workteams. Then the
     company took the ideas contributed by the experienced work force
     in Santa Clara, which they got through the team meetings, and used
     them to organize new labs with inexperienced workers in Arlington,
     Texas, where wages are much lower. The experienced workers lost
     their jobs. The team meetings stole our experience and ideas, and
     didn't give us any power to protect our jobs and families.27"

Manan lost his own job, as did more than 30,000 semiconductor workers on
production lines in Silicon Valley in the last 10 years.

Through its 50-year existence, the semiconductor industry has successfully
prevented workers from organizing unions by combining the lure of labor-
management cooperation with the threat of job loss. This model of
unionbusting does not depend on outside consultants, but on the expertise of
companies' own human relations departments. The strategy is less reactive
than the traditional approach and is in place on a constant basis, whether
organizing attempts are in progress or not.

The ideologues of this approach consider union organizing drives a
punishment for companies which have failed. Kirby Dyess, Intel's vice
president of human relations, says that when workers organize unions, "it is
a failure of management." *28

Although many of the new structures for labor/management cooperation are
currently illegal, corporations are lobbying hard to change that. After the
Republican sweep of the 1994 elections, both the Senate and House passed the
Team Act, which weakens the portion of the NLRA Section 8(a)(2) which
prohibits company unions. Looking for labor support in 1996, President
Clinton vetoed the bill. Congressional observers, however, think that its
reintroduction is still possible.

A "UNION PROOF" WORK FORCE

Modern unionbusting combines the paternalism of the company union with
another sophisticated strategy designing a "union-proof" work force. This is
also a spin on old ideas. John Sayles' film Matewan, for example, recalls
the effort by coal operators in the 1920s to bring immigrants of one
nationality or race to scab on the strikes of another.

In Los Angeles, cleaning contractors in office buildings in the mid-1980s
dumped their largely African American union work force, shed their union
contracts, and hired immigrants.

Today in the Midwest and Southeast, the burgeoning poultry industry is using
the same strategy. Some of the largest food corporations in the world, such
as ConAgra, systematically recruit immigrant workers. They believe that an
immigrant work force has several advantages: In the eyes of managers,
immigrant workers not only have low wage expectations, but are less likely
to support unions because they face an unknown and unfriendly environment,
immigration problems, and are ignorant of their rights.

While profitable in the short run, however, using immigrants as a bulwark
against unions may prove to be many companies' undoing. In Los Angeles in
1991, hundreds of immigrant janitors were attacked by police as they marched
for the union in Century City. Public outrage was so great that the building
owners and contractors were forced to sign new union agreements. The battle
put Justice for Janitors on the national labor radar screen.

Immigrant construction workers in southern California were also brought in
to replace a higher-wage work force in the 1980s. But a movement organized
largely by immigrants themselves first struck drywall contractors in 1992,
and then framing contractors in 1995. They won union contracts for thousands
of workers in some of the first bottom-up, grassroots organizing drives in
the construction industry since the 1930s. *29

Many immigrants bring militant traditions with them from their home
countries, and have high expectations of social and economic justice. The
Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project has established a new center for
immigrant-based organizing, to support mobilizing drives in the largest
concentration of industrial workers in the world.

With the new welfare reform bill and preexisting programs to force welfare
recipients into the job market, employers have seen another source of a
potentially "union-proof" work force. Cities have already begun looking at
workfare recipients as a pool of low-cost labor that can replace unionized
employees.

Last August, negotiating with a gun to its head, New York's Transit Union
was forced to agree that 500 union jobs cleaning subways would be eliminated
through attrition, while hundreds of workfare recipients took over those
tasks. *30 While a few workfare recipients may eventually get permanent
jobs, that transition was clearly not what the Metropolitan Transit
Authority had in mind. Its goal is a work force of subway cleaners paid the
equivalent of minimum wage for doing the same job that union employees now
perform for a much higher one.

New York City uses a growing number of workfare recipients and will expand
its workfare work force to 60,000 by 1998. Many of the city's unions have
criticized the municipal workers' union, the American Federation of State,
County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) District Council 37, for not
mounting a more aggressive challenge to the city's growing workfare program.
Stung by the criticism, District Executive Director Stanley Hill finally
called for a moratorium on expansion beyond the present 35,000 enrollees.
*31

Public employee unions have historically supported jobs for welfare
recipients and unemployed people. But workfare, they say, offers no
solution, because there's no guarantee of an eventual permanent job paying a
liveable wage. "When you flood the labor market with workfare recipients,"
explains Fran Bernstein from AFSCME's national office, "you see enormous
wage depression for the bottom third of the work force. That's intentional."
*32

What unions want is a basic bill of rights for workfare recipients,
including the right to the same wage and treatment given other employees,
the right to organize unions, and protection from unfair and arbitrary
discipline. *

Private employers are also eyeing the possibilities. Marriott Corp., which
made one of the first efforts to bring workfare into its work force,
emphasizes that it supports and counsels recipients about problems such as
tardiness, rather than simply disciplining or firing them as it does with
other workers.

But for workfare recipients, the weekly benefit check is all that stands
between them and the streets. That's an advantage to a company like
Marriott, which has mounted a scorched-earth fight to keep its regular
employees from organizing unions. Employers contend recipients are not
workers at all, and have no right to organize or file complaints against
health and safety dangers or discrimination.

In September, President Clinton urged expansion of workfare in the private
sector. "We cannot create enough public-service jobs to hire these folks,"
he said, adding that "this has basically got to be a private-sector show."
*33

But with no guarantee about maintaining existing wage levels or protecting
the rights of workfare recipients, welfare reform pits them against
currently-employed workers in a race to the bottom. It promises to transform
jobs that can support families into ones that can't, and to rob the people
who perform them of security, job rights, and their dignity as workers.

CAN THE BUSTERS BE BEATEN?

"For over 10 years, employers have been ruthless and sophisticated,"
Bensinger says, "and there have been a lot of seminars given by unionbusters
cashing in on their interest." *34

It's clear that employers have their eyes on unions' most innovative
strategies. Following the election of John Sweeney in October 1995, the No.
1 law firm on the AFL-CIO's list, Jackson, Lewis, Schnitzler and Krupman,
gave seminars to drill employers on the "The AFL-CIO's `Union Yes'
Campaign." The conference prospectus noted the increase in the AFL-CIO's
organizing budget,the rising interest in "militant and creative new
organizing tactics," including "obstruct the economy" and "go to jail," and
advertised sessions on the peer review committee strategy and the
Electromation case, which bans modern company unions.35

Like unions, unionbusters learn from experience. After years of seeing the
United Farm Workers hold big marches during organizing drives, for instance,
last year strawberry growers in Watsonville, California, organized their own
march of workers opposed to the union. Understanding the importance of
public opinion, growers hired their own PR agency, the Dolphin Group of Los
Angeles, to manage their image.

Direct activity by anti-union consultants and law firms, and their
strikebreaking guards, is a big obstacle to the survival and growth of
unions. But in the long term, the new face of unionbusting may prove to have
an even greater effect. The newest and fastest growing industries
electronics, biotechnology, and others have developed an anti-union
structure which workers have yet to crack on a large scale. The use of
chronic unemployment and social policies such as welfare

and immigration reform pits workers against each other in desperate
competition.

Fighting against unionbusting, therefore, is not simply a matter of using
more intelligent and innovative tactics. Labor has to fight for a social
agenda that includes the repeal of welfare reform, and supports racial and
gender equality and equity between immigrant and native-born workers.

Organizing the unemployed may prove to be as important as organizing in the
workplace. Just preserving the overall percentage of organized workers takes
more than 400,000 new union members a year, a rate the AFL-CIO has yet to
achieve. While trained, full-time organizers are necessary, as is a
commitment to using more sophisticated and militant strategies, clearly the
15 million US union members must become more involved in union activity.
That requires structural changes within unions, increasing the involvement
of ordinary members in decision-making, and reducing the often-wide gulf
that separates leadership from rank-and-file.

In US labor history, large-scale union organizing has always been part of a
broader social movement fighting for the interests of all workers, organized
and unorganized, employed and unemployed. The company unions, the violence
of strikebreakers, and the lack of legal rights which faced workers in the
1920s were swept away a decade later.

The upsurge among millions of American workers, radicalized by the
Depression and left-wing activism, forced corporate acceptance of labor for
the first time in the country's history. That activism mobilized the power
of workers to overcome obstacles not dissimilar to those of the present.
They projected a vision of social and economic change that went far beyond,
and directly in contradiction to, the prevailing wisdom of its time.

The current changes in labor may be the beginning of something as large and
profound. If they are, then the obstacles erected by present-day
unionbusters can become a historical relic as quickly as did those of an
earlier era.

-------- End Forwarded Message --------


--
The power to deprive an individual of their thought, their will, and
their personality is the power of life and death.

                                           -- P.J. Proudhon (amended)




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