NLRB Blocks Industrial Democracy’s Path
Pioneers of industrial democracy, which seems to be spreading inexorably, were honored last week at a conference in Turin, Italy, by a U.S. delegation representing a faction of the Reagan Administration, numerous corporate executives, union leaders and counterpart delegations from other countries.
The spread of workplace democracy may be inexorable, but its progress could be shamefully delayed by some serious legal roadblocks thrown in its path in the United States last month by President Reagan’s appointees on the National Labor Relations Board and by a 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
Also hindering the concept is opposition among both conservative and labor militants who mistrust each other so much that they see no possibility of ending the traditional adversarial relationships between workers and employers.
The conference was sponsored by the International Labor Organization to praise and study several exciting experiments in labor relationships in various countries, including the one being conducted by the United Auto Workers, Toyota and General Motors in Fremont, Calif.
For the most part, the conferees wisely ignored the doubters and concentrated instead on solving the problems that inevitably accompany industrial democracy--just as problems are a natural part of political democracy.
They spent their time studying already-developed systems of labor-management cooperation that give workers a meaningful voice in corporate decision-making anywhere from the shop floor to the board room. Unfortunately, the more democratic a worker-participation program is in this country, the more trouble it faces from the NLRB and the Supreme Court.
The essential legal argument against workers joining management to help run the companies is almost frivolous: If workers have a significant amount of decision-making power, they are part of management and so are not “workers” entitled by law to elect a union and engage in collective bargaining.
Yet the whole point of industrial democracy is to give workers the right to be more than just “hands” in a company, only allowed to take orders from their “superiors.” And case after case has shown that worker participation increases both productivity and job satisfaction.
Nevertheless, the latest NLRB ruling on the issue held that faculty members at Boston University cannot have a union because they are part of the school’s “managerial” staff; in other words, the NLRB said the professors could not have both a union and their limited form of industrial democracy.
Similar reasoning was used in the earlier Supreme Court ruling which held that faculty members of Yeshiva University in New York were “managerial,” and so were forbidden to have union representation.
The NLRB said Boston University professors play an “effective and determinative role” in recommending faculty hiring, tenure, promotions and reappointments. True, the board admitted, all final decisions are made by the school’s president and trustees, but to the NLRB the critical point was that the faculty’s recommendations are usually followed.
In 1975, the university’s faculty voted overwhelmingly to be represented in collective bargaining by the American Assn. of University Professors.
Obviously, if the professors were truly final decision-making managers, the real managers--the president and trustees--could not have ignored the overwhelming decision of those professors to form a union.
The real managers finally did negotiate a contract with the faculty, but only under a court order. But now that has been overturned by the NLRB, based on the Supreme Court’s Yeshiva decision.
There is a far-greater potential for mischief in those rulings, which so far have involved only a relatively few professors.
Some of the workplace democracy experiments, such as those at Ford, Chrysler, American Telephone & Telegraph and at the planned GM Saturn plant in Tennessee, give significant, final, decision-making powers to the workers, not just the kind of primarily advisory powers that some professors have.
Using the current illogic of the court and the NLRB, either the unions or all of those marvelous advances in labor relations will have to be dumped.
Stephen Schlossberg, deputy undersecretary of labor who attended the Turin meeting, is also worried that the legal decisions will jeopardize ideal worker-participation plans outside the colleges and universities.
He has started a two-year study to explore possible obstacles put up by the courts and the NLRB to worker-participation programs, and rightly said in one report: “If we are going to be competitive in the global economy, we may have to blur distinctions between labor and management.” Also, the Labor Department has announced that it will issue a monthly newsletter to “encourage a less adversarial labor relations climate.” The first issue will deal with the potential problems for workplace democracy posed by the rulings of the Supreme Court and the NLRB.
What is really needed is legislation that will encourage industrial democracy, not illogical rulings that impede it.
Unions and workers must vigilantly guard against corporations that pretend to have industrial democracy but use it only as a facade to break unions or keep them away.
Also, as the NLRB now interprets the law, a company might well be able to legally take away the right of workers to have a union if it institutes some form of industrial democracy.
The labor-management relations that conservatives such as Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) seem to fear most are exactly the kind that would be most helpful in revitalizing the nation’s economy.
For instance, Hatch, in responding to Schlossberg’s report, correctly worried that it showed that even some members of the Reagan Administration want workers to be “partners with management in the operations of business enterprises.”
Hatch also fears that companies might be required to divulge their financial records to workers, and to negotiate such issues as moving a profitable plant to Hong Kong.
We need laws like those adopted years ago in many non-Communist European countries to help us realize Hatch’s fears so that one day industrial democracy will be as revered as political democracy in the United States.
New Attack on Chavez
A few years ago, many growers tried to cut down the growing influence of farm labor leader Cesar Chavez by accusing him of being a “follower of the Commie line,” as one put it.
He was, and for some growers still is, the devil incarnate.
But his enemies had an impossible task making that image of Chavez stick because the devoutly religious union leader had won the support of a substantial majority of the nation’s Roman Catholic Church hierarchy and leaders of most other religions.
Once again, Chavez is under attack. He is being used as a villain by opponents of Proposition 65, the anti-toxics initiative that seeks to prevent the discharge of toxic chemicals into the state’s water supply and require warnings to workers and consumers exposed to those substances.
Led by growers and by Chevron, its largest single contributor, the “No on 65” campaign is telling voters that, “If you think Cesar Chavez, bugs and drought hurt agriculture, wait till you read about Proposition 65.”
While his union is still small and struggling, Chavez unquestionably has done more to help farm workers than any other individual in modern times. And one of his major contributions was to make the public, and farm workers themselves, aware of the lethal dangers of pesticides and other poisons used in agriculture.
Chavez on Monday was given the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in New York for the contributions that he and all other Mexican-Americans have made to this country. The medal was authorized by Congress as part of the Statue of Liberty Centennial, and was presented in ceremonies attended by Cabinet members and other high officials. Similar medals went to representatives of 49 other immigrant groups.
The anti-Chavez propaganda put out by the “No on 65” campaign could, or certainly should, backfire as badly as the earlier dishonest effort to label him a Communist.
