Stuck on a One-Rung Ladder
Employers can and do violate the spirit and
the letter of the National Labor Relations Act
By William Lucy
Pity America’s 30-million workers who have few skills and not much education, in jobs that feature low pay and benefits to match. They’re stuck on a one-rung ladder, and nobody seems to care.
These dull, dirty, dead-end jobs have something in common. Almost all of them are non-union. And that brings up an issue that should be on the front burner of public policy rather than in the deep freeze.
Belonging to a union has major economic advantages. In 1996, for example, union workers averaged 33 percent more in pay than non-union workers — for men it was 26 percent more, for women 38 percent, for African Americans 42 percent, and for Latinos 52 percent.
Low-wage workers desperately need the advantages that unions offer. Polls show that they want unions, and, in fact, are quick to vote in favor when given the chance. So why haven’t we seen strings of organizing victories with poultry processors, strawberry pickers, Wal-Mart clerks, and in public agencies in places like South Carolina and Alabama?
Simply because employers can and do violate the spirit and the letter of the National Labor Relations Act, and they get away with it.
When highly skilled, highly paid workers, for whatever reason, want to organize, employers may vigorously resist, but once these workers vote for a union, employers generally tend to settle down and bargain a contract. But not low-wage employers. They routinely resort to lies and intimidation, harass and fire workers to quell organizing campaigns, even pressure local lenders and banks to refuse personal loans to workers or to call in mortgages. And when, despite the odds, low-wage workers manage to organize, employers stall so long on a contract that union membership becomes meaningless.
What all this boils down to is discrimination: economic discrimination. The law says that all workers have the right to join a union, but that’s not what’s happening in practice. That right is not being honored when low-skilled, low-wage workers are involved.
This is one playing field that demands leveling. In the public sector and health care alone, class discrimination against workers is denying millions of men and women their rights as workers — and as citizens.
If these workers are to have a chance to realize the American Dream — to be paid wages and benefits that admit them and their children into the middle-class — we have to do a little economic dentistry: We have to fit the laws and the regulations with some new teeth.
First, AFSCME and other unions need to make sure that the National Labor Relations Board gets what it needs to do its job — that Congress gives it the budget and the personnel that enable it to enforce existing laws.
We have to promote federal over-sight of what’s happening in the low-income workplace. This is sure to generate groans across Corporate America, but I didn’t hear any groans at federal oversight of the Teamsters Union or when the feds were called in against the Mineworkers. Fairness demands federal oversight on both sides of the equation — including employer conduct.
Above all, we have to establish that the opportunity of every individual worker to organize or join a union is a civil right that applies to every American worker — a civil right equal in importance to the right to vote. For low-income people it is probably even more important because it has major economic consequences.
Union membership and a union contract mean more than better wages. They open the door to more education, to training, to getting ahead, to better benefits. They open the door to the middle-class, and that’s what the American Dream is all about.
I can think of no better way of preparing America for the next millennium than for AFSCME and all of Labor to campaign to make sure that this right lives and prospers in every workplace in the land.
