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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0901.frank.html
The Little Unions That Couldn’t
Card check is worth fighting for—except for the "card check" part.
By T. A. Frank
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EFCA carries no visible price tag. It’s simply a revision of existing labor laws that makes forming a union easier for employees. But if anything is likely to unite a dispirited Republican minority, EFCA is it. (Recall that United Auto Workers wage scales were what rallied Republican senators to defeat the auto industry bailout bill in December. A leaked Republican National Committee memo described that vote as a "first shot against organized labor.") For big business—and the GOP—the threat of a revived labor movement elicits far more terror than health care reform or stimulus packages. After all, health care and federal spending can be good for the bottom line; unions, not so much.
Contentious as it may be, though, EFCA is also one of the first pieces of legislation that congressional Democrats, or at least those closest to organized labor, want to see passed. The bill would strengthen a variety of laws and procedures that govern how employees choose whether or not to join a union. These are technical issues—ones that most voters, especially affluent ones, never think about. But they’re huge for millions of low-wage workers and the companies that employ them.
In Washington, the rhetoric over EFCA has centered on one specific element of the legislation called "card check." Under the proposed new law, if a majority of employees fill out cards authorizing a union to represent them, the union is automatically certified. Currently, employers can demand a secret-ballot election among employees to reaffirm the results. EFCA would eliminate this option. Republicans have called this a threat to liberty and democratic values. Democrats counter that it’s essential to protecting workers against employer coercion. But this squabble is a distraction. In reality, card check is the least important part of a very important bill. The following story should help explain why.
The setting is Lancaster, California, a city in the Antelope Valley, about seventy miles north of Los Angeles. If there’s anything charming there, I imagine the mayor would like to know about it. The landscape is one of long avenues with warehouses, malls, fast-food outlets, and ubiquitous young colonies of brown-stucco villas born at the height of a destructive housing mania. (And why such a dismal shade of brown? And how many thousands were built?) It’s in cities like this that specialists apply green spray paint to the dead lawns of foreclosed homes in order to keep up neighborhood appearances, such as they are. The area enjoyed a boom after California made it a special enterprise zone in 1997, but that ended when the real estate bubble did. Jobs here have long been scarce.
In 1998, the drugstore chain Rite Aid Corporation broke ground on a million-square-foot distribution center, constructed on eighty-eight acres of land purchased from the city of Lancaster for $1. The following year, the distribution center began to hire. "It was very exciting," recalls Angel Warner, who landed a job in production before switching to inventory control. "For a long time, this area had been depressed." The number of employees grew from several hundred to over a thousand.
These were decent jobs. Employees started at a modest $10 an hour, but they received benefits, and after a few years some workers could earn over $15 an hour. Carlos Rubio started as a temp in 2000, and then, after a few months of probation, he was hired as a full-time employee at $10 an hour. "I put in so many hours my wife thought I was cheating," Rubio recalls. Like most of his coworkers at the time, he liked the company and his supervisors. "We had a manager, Rick, a nice guy, who inspired us," he says. "Even though things were crappy, he inspired us." In 2002, the Teamsters tried to organize workers at the warehouse, but Rubio, like most of his coworkers, voted against the effort. "They were too pushy," he says. Besides, he was content with his employer.
But Rick left in 2004, and a new management team came in. Surprisingly quickly, the atmosphere changed from collegial to hostile. Mandatory overtime increased, which was good for those who needed extra money but bad for those who had children and needed predictable hours. Managers no longer listened to employee feedback. "They treated you like crap," Rubio says. "They talked to you like you were a kid." One manager became known for saying, "If you don’t like it here, you can work at McDonald’s." Worst of all, to boost employee performance, Rite Aid had introduced productivity reporting software called ProRep. Each task would carry a certain code, which corresponded to a quota. Rubio says the software was "awesome," but that Rite Aid implemented it in a way that was unfair and inflexible. Soon, workers at the distribution center began to fear for their jobs.
For instance, suppose that your job was to pull boxes—a task that consists of driving a forklift over to the merchandise, elevating yourself in an operator’s cab, and venturing out onto the pallet to load it with boxes. According to ProRep, workers were responsible for loading 100 boxes an hour—whether the boxes were twenty pounds apiece or fifty pounds apiece. Another problem was that ProRep measured employees by weekly totals, regardless of how many days they had worked. If you called in sick one day—or were asked to stay home—the software made no allowance. So you’d miss your quota. Sometimes the codes didn’t correspond to a given task, so an employee could do exactly as instructed but still fall short on numbers.
Younger employees tended to adjust—they could summon the extra energy to lift fifty-pound boxes at a twenty-pound-box pace, or work through their breaks—but the older ones had more trouble. So did employees who were out of favor with management, because they tended to be assigned to more strenuous or disagreeable tasks. Soon, firings began, in a grim public ritual in which the unlucky employee was summoned over the intercom system, marched past his fellow employees on the factory floor, and soon after escorted from the building.
As a rule, dismissals were triggered when you failed three times to meet your quota. This, while harsh, is legal, but an important safety net exists for employees who are dismissed for insufficient productivity: they must receive unemployment benefits. But, the workers told me, the company usually found a way out of this. When ex-employees filed for unemployment, Rite Aid would counter that they had been dismissed for some reason other than productivity—errors, or insubordination, or truancy, or anything that didn’t require unemployment benefits to be paid. Rite Aid isn’t responsible for paying unemployment benefits of former employees, of course, but its premiums for unemployment insurance will rise if more ex-employees collect benefits. A few workers contested their cases and won, but most simply accepted the bad luck and moved on. (A Rite Aid spokesperson declined to comment for this article, citing ongoing contract negotiations.)
By 2006, with morale plummeting and management unwilling to listen to employee complaints, Angel Warner reached out to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, or ILWU, and before long a union campaign was under way. The ILWU took a patient and fairly low-key approach to the effort. "[The ILWU] saw the need for union representation," Warner says. "They also saw the need to educate workers." Union organizers held meetings once a week at a local hotel. Every worker who was interested in joining up was asked to sign a union authorization card—a card with an employee’s signature authorizing a given union to represent him or her.
By June of 2006, about three months after starting their campaign, ILWU organizers had gathered authorization cards from about a third of the warehouse employees. And now this story will feature a brief but crucial technical interlude on how things work when you’re trying to certify a union. If you have union authorization cards from at least 30 percent of the workers at your site, then you can file them with a federal agency called the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB. Once the NLRB has verified that the cards are genuine, then it will hold an election at the workplace a couple of months later and allow workers to vote a union in or out. If more than 50 percent of employees vote yes during the election, then the union is certified as the sole bargaining representative of the employees, and negotiations on a contract can begin.
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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0901.frank.html