Union actions encourage ‘professional’ employees

Bill Knight column for 10-21, 22 or 23, 2019

Within hours on Thursday, the United Auto Workers reached a tentative settlement in its 31-day work stoppage at General Motors, and the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike, both showing strength in the traditional job action. Such flexing of muscles also encouraged a renewal of another alternative approach to workplace democracy.

Autoworkers reportedly achieved substantial gains in a four-year contract, which could raise pay, include lump-sum payments and a signing bonus, maintain good health insurance, establish a corporate commitment to manufacture electric trucks at a plant set for shutdown, and improving times for temporary workers to become full-time and those paid “second-tier” wages to get regular pay. That’s all IF it’s ratified by a cautiously optimistic rank-and-file, who won’t return to work until the approval of a deal (the offer reportedly includes accepting GM closing three of the four factories they targeted for shutdown.)

Meanwhile, teachers had enough of slow bargaining, public attacks and disappointing offers, and 32,500 unionists hit picket lines even as negotiations continued.

Both actions assert determination to expand demands to benefit Americans beyond union members, from communities and small businesses hurt by cuts to schoolkids needing smaller classes and increased staff like librarians, nurses and social workers, plus to recover years of givebacks and cutbacks.

Before the 1980s, “unions were a formidable political force,” wrote journalist Nicholas Kristof. “It’s perhaps not a surprise that their enfeebling has been accompanied by a rise in far-Right policies that subsidize the wealthy, punish the working poor and exacerbate the income gap.”

If factory and public workers are fighting back, so are those often considered “professionals”: analysts, engineers, attorneys, physicians, etc.

Last month, Pittsburgh tech workers employed by Google contractor HCL Technologies USA – part of a multinational company based in India – voted to unionize with the Steelworkers.

HCL is trying to bust the upstart union, but Google is staying neutral, prohibiting HCL’s consultant from holding anti-union meetings on Google property and issuing a statement saying, “whether HC’s employees unionize is between them and their employer.”

Lower-income workers at such tech firms – janitors, guards, drivers – have unionized, mostly with the Teamsters, but professionals have been less inclined to consider the option to organize.

“Right now, the company sets the terms,” said HCL analyst Josh Borden. “There’s no room to negotiate anything. You take what they give you. The only way we see to improve things is to speak with one voice. I hope this lets all tech workers know that this is possible and extremely do-able.”

Meanwhile, employees at private institutions working as teaching or graduate assistants are resisting a September decision by Trump’s National Labor Relations Board that reversed a 2016 NLRB ruling that they have the right to bargain collectively.

“This is an evasive and insulting tactic,” said Brown University doctoral candidate Rithika Ramamurthy, “meant to deliberately devalue our work. People should know that the labor movement is building momentum and that the current model of the university is unsustainable and cannot continue forever.”

That’s one reason why UAW Local 2300 at Cornell University, representing more than 1,000 workers, is still going strong after more than 30 years, and many other higher-education workers have organized since.

In medicine, the Union of American Physicians and Dentists (affiliated with AFSCME and the AFL-CIO) and the United Steelworkers both organize doctors and other health professionals, who often cite problems with working conditions and disrespect by administrators.

“Solutions to these issues can be found in union contracts,” said Mandy Rae Hartz, with the USW’s Health Care Worker Council. “As physicians face increasing challenges to retain decision-making power over their schedules, personal economics, and even patient-care practices, forming unions is an effective way to regain professional and personal control.”

Private-practice physicians aren’t employees, unlike those who work for hospitals or other health-care consortiums, so they can’t unionize, but the NLRB in 1974 decided that non-supervisory physicians could unionize.

For example, in Minnesota, USW Local 9460, the Northland's Health Care Workers Union, represents doctors and other health professionals in 16 units such as the Pine Medical Center and clinics in Chequamegon and Essentia.

“For doctors and health-care professionals, a healthy work environment is the best way to take care of patients,” said Dr. Emily Onello, a physician in Lake Superior, Minn.