White House’s Summit on Unions Is a One-Sided Affair
This post originally appeared at MarketWatch.
The White House convened a Summit on Worker Voice on Wednesday, an attempt to persuade workers of the value of unions and collective bargaining.
According to the White House website: “The White House and the Department of Labor is [sic] bringing together workers, labor leaders, advocates, forward-leaning employers, members of Congress, state and local officials and others to highlight the relationship between worker voice and a thriving middle class.”
One speaker will be Ari Haseotes, CEO of Cumberland Farms. Haseotes will discuss the advantages of offering health insurance and paying above minimum wage. Other speakers will include a dock trucker from the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach area who is a member of the Teamsters and who is active in opposition to independent contractors. Also speaking will be a Pasadena, Calif., nurse who was heading a union organizing drive at her hospital.
Union efforts in Washington are not limited to the White House. The Obama-appointed National Labor Relations Board is doing all that it can to reverse the decline in union membership from 20% of wage and salary workers in 1983 to 11% in 2014.
The NLRB has instituted “ambush elections” that require elections to be held about two weeks after the petition for union representation, rather than after five or six weeks, as was the case previously. The shorter time period prevents employers from scheduling meetings to tell workers about the potential disadvantages of union representation. Still, these speedy elections can only be used to certify unions, not to decertify them. If workers want to decertify their unions, they sometimes have to wait as long as two years.
The NLRB has allowed the use of “micro-unions,” small groups of workers within a company who want to be represented by a union even though a larger majority does not choose representation. Examples are shoe salesmen at Bergdorf Goodman’s, or cosmetics workers at Macy’s M, -0.93% But the NLRB does not allow small groups of workers in unionized firms such as General Motors GM, +2.30% or Ford F, +2.52% to choose to eschew union membership. The process only works one way.
If the NLRB made it as easy to leave a union as it does to join, one could believe they were working on behalf of workers. The plight of workers trapped in a union is one that the agency and the White House choose not to address. Unions are like Roach Motel ads: You can check in, but you can’t check out.
Some of these disaffected unionized workers were represented at the Summit on Workers’ Empowerment held at the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday.
One speaker was Megan Kelly, a flight attendant for Allegiant Air. She told the audience that she has seen no benefit from having a union. Although it is almost five years since the Transport Workers Union was voted to represent the Allegiant flight attendant group, the union has yet to secure a contract. Furthermore, even though Kelly resides in Florida, a right-to-work state, airlines fall under the jurisdiction of the Railway Labor Act, so she cannot quit the union. The Railway Labor Act does not have an opt-out clause, even in right-to-work states. The Allegiant flight attendants are now attempting to decertify the TWU.
Another speaker was Karen Cox, who works as a lift-truck operator at a cold-storage facility in Rochelle, Ill. Cox came into work one day in 2012 to find her workplace unionized by the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. She found out that under “card check,” a union is allowed to bypass a secret-ballot vote by gathering signed union cards from just over half of workers.
Cox told the audience that many of the people who signed those cards had no idea that the union could take their signatures and set up shop in the workplace. The workers took the vote to decertify the union in August 2013, but the NLRB in Illinois impounded the ballots and locked them up in Peoria while it addressed the union’s appeal. Then, the NLRB ruled that their votes did not count, and they cannot get rid of the union.
Similarly, Jesse Rojas, an agricultural worker from California, told the audience that agricultural workers have held an election to decertify the United Farm Workers, but the ballots have been impounded and uncounted for almost two years.
Some workers do manage to get rid of their unions. One example is James Perialas, a teacher in Roscommon Public Schools in Michigan, and the president of the independent Roscommon Teachers Association. Perialas told the audience that his fellow teachers felt the Michigan Education Association pursued its own priorities, charged too much and was not speaking for them. In 2012, they voted to disaffiliate from the Michigan Education Association and form their own union. They got better service and now pay 40% less in dues.
Some workers successfully defeat union-organizing efforts. One who spoke at Heritage on Tuesday was Mike Burton, who built automobiles in Volkswagen’s VLKAY, +9.60% Chattanooga, Tenn., plant for almost five years. Although Volkswagen supported the efforts of the United Auto Workers to unionize its Chattanooga plant, Burton and many of his co-workers did not see value in paying dues to the UAW. He led the anti-UAW effort, and the union lost its election in February 2014.
Kelly, Cox, Rojas, Perialas and Burton have not been invited to the White House Summit on Worker Voice. Their stories are not part of the White House narrative, namely that joining a union will raise incomes and catapult workers into better living conditions. If that were true, then the NLRB would be as enthusiastic about letting workers leave unions as it is to force them to join.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth is a senior fellow and director of Economics21 at the Manhattan Institute. Follow her on Twitter here.
Interested in real economic insights? Want to stay ahead of the competition? Each weekday morning, e21 delivers a short email that includes e21 exclusive commentaries and the latest market news and updates from Washington. Sign up for the e21 Morning eBrief.