* Let's say a company has departments A, B, C, D, and E. Workers in departments B and E have created very strong shop-floor organizations, capable of acting collectively in their own interest, using tools of industrial struggles. Workers in departments A, C, and D, while doing jobs in some respects similar to and in other ways different from those of workers in departments B and E, have not built such shop-floor organizations yet, and they may not be interested in doing so for a long time. If workers in B and E pursue a routine path to collective bargaining, employers are likely to push to include workers in A, B, and C. into a collective bargaining unit for the purpose of an election. The arbiter who determines a collective bargaining unit is the NLRB (see the section "The Employee Representative" in "Basic Guide to the National Labor Relations Act" at <http://www.nlrb.gov/nlrb/shared_files/brochures/basicguide.asp#employeerepresentative>), not workers in B and E. Whether or not workers in A, B, C, D, and E share "a community of interests" is a judgment call. If the NLRB decides that workers in B and E can go ahead and organize themselves as a bargaining unit, the workers will have an edge in the election; if the NLRB decides otherwise and rules that all workers in A, B, C, D, and E constitute an appropriate bargaining unit, the company has an advantage in the election.
* Suppose that a company has a mixed work force of full-time and part-time employees. Part-time employees are part-time in the name only -- they work more or less full-time doing the same jobs as full-time employees' but without full-time employees' levels of wages and benefits. Full-time and part-time employees manage to organize a very strong shop-floor organization together, many part-time employees, who earn less, being among the most militant in the shop-floor struggle. But "part-time and temporary workers, even though legally classified as employees, commonly are excluded from bargaining units on the grounds that they do not share a sufficient community of interests with more permanent employees.126 Thus, they are not within the group represented even if a union is successful in obtaining exclusive representative status" (Stephen F. Befort, "Labor and Employment Law at the Millennium: A Historical Review and Critical Assessment, " Boston College Law Review 43.2, <http://www.bc.edu/schools/law/lawreviews/meta-elements/journals/bclawr/43_2/02_TXT.htm>, 2002).
In short, the scope, composition, method, timing, etc. of shop-floor struggles are determined by workers themselves who engage in them; the scope, method, timing, etc. of an NLRB election aren't.
>Second (and all the more so absent a realistic "Yes" answer to
>question immediately above), it is open to the private sector
>employer in the U.S. to respond to the worker(s), who otherwise
>presumably in the scenario posited above would be "employees at
>will" and thus (by definition), lawfully dischargeable summarily
>"at [the employer's] will" (even if that "will" is perversely
>arbitrary), thus answer with a, "You're fired!!" response;
On a micro level, making trouble can get you fired, but not making trouble can get you fired, too. That's what "at will" employment means. Employers have no obligation to reward the meek and mild with job security. On a macro level, the less trouble the working class makes, the less security the class enjoys. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>