Union Suppression

Yeah, I worked for a couple companies that didn't allow unions. One was because they wanted to foster a more personal relationship between employees and employer, and they did a good job of it. The other was Wal-Mart, and so evil to the core.

Of course, I heard some of my grandfather's stories about labor wars. If the two sides haven't gone back to beating each other to death with bats in back alleys and dumping the corpses into the nearest body of water, then the labor war isn't back at full cry yet.

Optomistic take on things. :-)

I appreciate your pointing out Kate Bronfenbrenner's latest paper, which has been getting quoted a lot in the media without attribution. After reading it, you can't argue that unions are thriving or that management is behaving more magnanimously these days. Highly-organized and vicious anti-union campaigns by employers and their consultants have become the rule, rather than the exception, because of weak labor laws and ineffective enforcement against management.

As the other comments to this posting show, we need a new kind of union in this country, one that harks back to the founding principles of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, see http://www.iww.org/) in 1905. The style of union that has thrived under the NLRB's rules has elitist characteristics that divide the working class up into "the union side of the shop" and the workers who are excluded from unions. Such unions are always fighting for their turf at the expense of other workers. They have tended to make common cause with organized crime and even management-funded think-tanks before making effective alliances with the "employees at will" who work in the same field or under the same employer. Now that the UAW has been effectively de-fanged, it probably will not be attracting many new members.

Maybe the "Employee Free Choice Act" will allow groups of workers who have been excluded to organize on the tried-and-true principle of "An injury to one is an injury to all". New unions will have open membership that is not tied to a particular job description or work-site, and they will collect dues directly from members, rather than through payroll deductions. They will not subscribe to such principles as "What's good for General Motors is good for the UAW". Union membership will not terminate on being laid off.

I recommend John O'Connor's song, "The Ballad of Labor Law" for a quick musical tutorial on how our laws got this way. His webpage is at http://johnpauloconnor.wordpress.com/music/we-aint-gonna-give-it-back/ , and his last.fm page is at http://www.last.fm/music/John+O%27Connor