Guardian UK: State of the union-bashers

State of the union-bashers
You may think Britain's anti-unionism is bad: in America, industrial relations are reaching an all-time low
Gregor Gall

January 9, 2008 6:00 PM | Printable version


Having just visited the US 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 altogether. A few facts give some indication of this.

In 2005, over 31,000 workers were disciplined or fired for union activity - that's one every 17 minutes of the year. And the number of workers being disciplined or fired is increasing - between 1993 and 2003, the average was 22,633.

How do we know this? The state body, the National Labour Relations Board (NLRB), publishes annual figures showing the number of cases where it orders an employer to either rehire or compensate workers when they are penalised for union activity, or when they try to unionise a workplace in order to gain union recognition.

In the late 1970s, unions organised around 7,500 recognition elections per year via the NLRB, with a 37% success rate. By 2006, they organised just 1,600 (albeit with a higher success rate of 57%). The NLRB has been increasingly stuffed full of George W Bush appointees, making the original intention behind the 1935 National Labor Relations Act that set up the board null and void.

These bald figures hide a lot more. Research has found that 49% of employers threaten to close their operations when faced with unionisation attempts and 91% of employees are forced to have one-to-one meetings with supervisors to dissuade them from joining when attempts are made to unionise workplaces.

Even when workers successfully unionise and gain union recognition, only a third of these agreements ever lead to collective bargaining. So two-thirds of employers that concede union recognition say to themselves "we've lost the battle but not the war" and they get another opportunity to stymie union recognition by simply refusing to bargain. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/gregor_gall/2008/01/state_of_the_union-bashers.html