Union objections to Amazon outcome gain strength

 

Bill Knight column for 5-27, 28 or 29, 2021

 During days of National Labor Relations Board hearings, a worker at Amazon’s Bessemer, Ala., warehouse last week said company security guards there had keys to a mailbox that Amazon urged workers to use to vote in the unionization election this spring.

Kevin Jackson said he’d witnessed two guards use keys to open one of the slots on the mailbox.

Jackson’s allegation comes after the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which would have represented workers there if the union had won, challenged the results. Its Unfair Labor Practice charges include complaints about the mailbox, which the union argues created the perception that Amazon was running the election instead of the NLRB, and the impression that workers were being watched,

The NLRB had denied Amazon’s request to collect workers’ ballots at the warehouse, but the company got the Trump-appointed U.S. Postal Service leadership to place a mailbox outside the facility, near security cameras.

RWSDU is asking the NLRB to overturn the results due to improprieties such as the mailbox, Amazon firing some pro-union workers, and threatening layoffs or closing the warehouse. That said, such appeals can take months and have little impact beyond a “do-over” election conducted – at a place where the work force can be a lot different because of turnover.

A year ago, the union responded to requests for help from workers at the facility owned by Amazon, the nation’s second biggest employer (next to Walmart), with some 1 million workers. Organizing during a pandemic, the workers faced not just high turnover but an employer valued at $1.7 trillion.

Results from mail-in balloting in the first NLRB-supervised election at an Amazon site showed a 2-to-1 defeat for workers: 1,798 against and 738 for unionizing, with 505 ballots challenged.

However, especially noteworthy are the suspiciously low turnout and the votes for unionizing versus the number of authorizing cards signed beforehand.

The NLRB had accepted Amazon’s inflated number of employees in the proposed bargaining unit (5,805), which the union says included many managers. Still, workers gathered more than 3,000 signatures for an election.

So: 3,041 cast ballots (1,798 + 738 + 505) – a 52.3% turnout despite a typical turnout of more than 70%, meaning 2,764 workers didn’t vote. Some left the company during months of organizing, but more likely is Amazon intimidation or missing ballots,

The RWDSU faced obstacles such as COVID-19 restrictions on face-to-face meetings and few opportunities to warn workers about Amazon’s hardball tactics.

“There wasn’t enough time to prepare the masses for the union-busting campaign,” said RWDSU lead organizer Joshua Brewer.

Amazon’s campaign entailed:

* thousands of dollars spent on union-busting consultants,

* buyouts for some pro-union workers to leave,

* flooding workers’ phones with multiple texts daily,

* posting messages throughout the warehouse (even in bathroom stalls),

* requiring weekly “captive-audience” meetings with anti-union, often false, propaganda, such as claims that the corporation’s wages and benefits were great (despite a 2018 report in the Economist magazine showing “in the years since Amazon opened in Lexington County [S.C.], annual earnings for warehouse workers have fallen from $47,000 to $32,000, a decline of over 30%”), and

* hiring off-duty local police as security.

 

The outcome and aftermath for workers at that warehouse, throughout Amazon, and across the country were disappointing yet inspiring. Any assessment may be less postmortem than postpartum.

The loss isn’t a death knell, said Rutgers University professor Donna Murch.

“We must not confuse the failure of this specific campaign with the wants and aspirations of workers on the ground,” said Rutgers University professor Donna Murch “The Amazon drive is only one part of a larger tide of multiracial labor activism incubated in workplaces during the COVID-19 pandemic – activism that will undoubtedly grow as the lockdowns recede.”

Elsewhere within the corporate giant, RWDSU has heard from more than 1,000 workers asking to unionize; SEIU and Teamsters are active at Amazon sites in Minnesota and Iowa; and the independent Amazon Labor Union and Amazonians United are organizing at two Chicago-area facilities.

At a Staten Island Amazon warehouse, worker Derrick Palmer said, “We all wanted the union push to be successful in Alabama, but the fact that they had the opportunity to vote as a facility was historic. We have to take the bruises and pick it up where they left off. It’s going to be like a domino effect.”

Finally, besides getting endorsements across the political spectrum – Stacey Abrams and both Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) – the campaign showed other conservative support.

Oren Cass, a former campaign staffer for U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), said, “The behavior of firms like Amazon, as not only an economic but also a social and political force, is highlighting for conservatives that what’s good for profits is not always good for America.”

Job shortage isn’t due to greedy unemployed people

 

Bill Knight column for 5-24, 25 or 26, 2021

 Some businesses say they’re struggling to fill vacancies as the pandemic starts to ease; the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) says 42% of small businesses have unfilled openings; and the National Restaurant Association suggests people would prefer staying home and subsisting off unemployment insurance, which through Sept. 6 includes a $300 federal supplement to state benefits.

However, HALF of restaurant workers were denied benefits because their pay was too low to qualify, says the One Fair Wage (OFW) coalition.

The problem is more complicated than the alleged greed of the jobless, and the solution is simple.

Women have been harder hit, according to the Brookings Institution, which reports 40% had to drop jobs when schools and child-care services closed.

“Without childcare, it will be very hard for women to come back to work on an equal basis with men,” said Ariane Hegewisch of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Next, with just 60% of the country vaccinated, jobs remain risky and stressful.

There’s a shift occurring, too, as people re-think job choices and career options. Pew Research says 66% of unemployed Americans may change their field of work, and 53% of restaurant workers in an OFW survey said they’re considering leaving that industry.

Further, it’s hard to hire when many employers simultaneously have openings, and a labor shortage has been predicted for years with Baby Boomers retiring and younger generations are smaller.

Last, but far from least, many jobs have low wages and no benefits, and more people are wondering why they should have to have multiple jobs without benefits and STILL live in poverty.

“The very people we’ve deemed essential aren’t paid enough to cover their actual essentials,” said Karin Norington-Reaves of Chicago-Cook Workforce Partnership. “They contracted COVID-19 at higher rates; they died at higher rates. Yet we balk at them for utilizing the very [jobless] benefits to which they have contributed.

“In my nearly 10-year tenure as CEO of what has become the nation’s largest publicly funded workforce development system, where we have facilitated training and employment of over 70,000 people, I have never once heard anyone say they didn’t want to work,” she added.

Plus, workers ARE returning to work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent report, which showed the economy last month ADDED 916,000 jobs (including 176,000 at restaurants and bars), and new claims for state jobless benefit fell by 20%, and those seeking federal benefits also dropped: 15.5%.

Nevertheless, some states, including Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Montana and South Carolina (supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) are cutting jobless aid to force people to work bad jobs.

That’s “scapegoating” jobless people, said U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D- Ore.)

“A deeply disturbing trend is emerging with Republican governors cutting off enhanced jobless benefits months early,” he said. “Enhanced jobless benefits helped save the economy by ensuring millions of families could pay rent and buy groceries.”

Cutting jobless benefits will hurt the economy, too, since spending will drop.

“We don't need to end $300 a week in emergency unemployment benefits that workers desperately need,” added U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), “We need to end starvation wages. If $300 a week is preventing employers from hiring low-wage workers, there's a simple solution: Raise your wages. Pay decent benefits.”

NFIB said 28% of small businesses are raising pay, some employers say they’re offering bonuses to accept jobs. and McDonald’s announced it would raise pay at its company-owned locations (but that’s just 7% of its 38,000 restaurants).

Economists including Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell say if demand for workers exceeded supply, then the price of labor would be rising, but it’s not.

“We don’t see wages moving up yet,” Powell said, “and presumably we would see that in a really tight labor market.”

What’s needed is simple: improve pay and provide paid sick leave; have schedules with two consecutive days off; ensure workers have opportunities to advance and security from hazards and mistreatment on the job.

“Employers simply don’t want to raise wages high enough to attract workers,” says Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute. “Whenever anyone says, ​‘I can’t find the workers I need,’ she should really add, ​‘at the wages I want to pay’.”

In National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winters wrote, “Work is always about more than a paycheck,” said “but it is about the paycheck, too.”

When something’s broken, fix it

 Bill Knight column for 5-20, 21 or 22, 2021

 It’s not exactly newsworthy; just another annoying reminder:

FEDERAL LABOR LAW ISN’T WORKING.

That’s according to the Economic Policy Institute, whose April report shows that the current law’s useless – although the proposed Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act would make a real difference for many Americans who’d like to unionize.

MIT researchers in 2018 found that almost half of nonunion workers (48%) would join a union if they could — about 58 million workers.

The PRO Act would empower them to do so.

Nevertheless, a likely Republican filibuster (and three Democratic Senators who haven’t agreed to support the bill) make passage difficult – so hard that unions recently confronted Democratic leaders about it.

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), signed into law in 1935, is supposed to protect Americans from retaliation in the pursuit of organizing and bargaining. However, it no longer does after Congress weakened it through the Landrum-Griffin and Taft-Hartley acts, a series of court and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rulings, and anti-union aggression by employers.

Other laws covering similar situations are more effective.

“Anti-retaliation protections and remedies in the NLRA are much weaker than anti-retaliation and whistleblower protections in other labor and employment laws,” say EPI’s Lynn Rhinehart and Celine McNicholas. “This right is largely hollow because of fundamental and structural weaknesses in the NLRA [which] provides no real deterrent to employers retaliating against workers and interfering with their rights.

Under the NLRA’s surviving “protections”:

* Employers face no monetary penalties for illegally retaliating against workers for exercising their labor rights, and workers receive no compensatory damages when victimized by retaliation.

* Workers cannot pursue their anti-retaliation cases on their own; they must depend on the NLRB, which is often slow or fails to act.

* Workers who file cases before the NLRB don’t get their jobs back on an interim basis while their cases are pending, which means workers whose rights have been violated can be jobless and without pay for months, and if they’re reinstated, deductions are taken out of the back pay they get.

 

“The cumulative effect of these three shortcomings is that workers asserting their rights under the NLRA are in a far worse position than workers alleging illegal retaliation for exercising their rights under other labor and employment laws and other whistleblower-protection laws,” says EPI in its report, titled “Shortchanged.”

 “Because of these and other substandard protections, workers have been shortchanged billions of dollars in back pay and damages after being illegally fired for exercising their federally protected labor-law rights,” the study adds. “The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act pending in Congress would raise the baseline of NLRA anti-retaliation protections to more closely resemble modern whistleblower laws, providing more of a deterrent against lawbreaking by employers and making a real difference in the pocketbooks and lives of workers.”

Under the measure, workers facing illegal retaliation would have access to full back pay without deductions for time out of work, “front pay” if reinstatement isn’t feasible, damages to compensate for harm caused by the violation, and double the amount of workers’ back pay as damages.

Next, the PRO Act directs the NLRB to seek preliminary reinstatement of workers through courts when officials believe there’s cause to believe that retaliation charges have merit.

Lastly, the PRO Act establishes a private right of action so workers can pursue their cases in court if the agency doesn’t act in a timely manner.

Elsewhere in Washington the day before EPI released its study, a group of unions told Democrats’ campaign arm Party that lawmakers who fail to support the PRO Act won’t get financial help from labor.

(The Senate’s three Democratic holdouts are Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Mark Warner of Virginia. The measure has 47 Senate co-sponsors (45 Democrats and two independents), but needs 60 “yes” votes to overcome Republicans’ filibuster.

Losing campaign contributions from labor could be catastrophic for the Democratic Party, which received $244.8 million from organized labor in the 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020 elections ($71.2 million last year alone), according to campaign disclosures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Labor-law reform has been a priority for unions and Democratic leaders for years.

The House passed the PRO Act 224-194 under Trump, but it wasn’t brought up in last year’s GOP-controlled Senate. This year, the House on again approved it, 225-206, and it’s stalled in a Senate committee.