Lewis’ Denunciation of Labor Laws Echoes 40 Years Later

There were faint echoes in Washington the other day of the late John L. Lewis’ thunderous denunciation 40 years ago of federal labor laws as “slave labor laws.”

The eloquent, bushy-browed Lewis was in his outrageous prime as head of the once-powerful United Mine Workers of America when he cried out that workers no longer could rely on the law to protect them from management retaliation if they tried to join unions. He got little support from other unions at the time.

Two weeks ago, though, union leaders, labor specialists and others told a Senate labor subcommittee, in effect, that John L. was premature, and perhaps hyperbolic, in his condemnation of the labor laws but that his criticisms then of the labor laws are generally valid now.

Next week, a House subcommittee will hold similar hearings in which witnesses will testify about the failure of the revised 1935 National Labor Relations Act to encourage union organizing and to prevent employer retaliation against workers for union activities.

Congress saw unionization as a way to help unite and strengthen workers so they would have a better chance of success in dealing with their inherently powerful employers.

The witnesses in Washington lack Lewis’s grandiloquence but their point is as unmistaken as his was then: The nation’s labor laws are hurting, not helping, most workers.

The hearings will not bring changes in the law--at least not until a less anti-union Administration moves into the White House. But they are laying the groundwork for change.

In the meantime, an increasing number of unions are following Lewis’ advice by bypassing the National Labor Relations Board, which administers the law.

They circumvent the NLRB because many employers use it to force long, costly delays in union representation elections and in settling unfair labor practice charges.

The delays work to the advantage of anti-union companies that pay lawyers and labor consultants an estimated $500 million a year to get or keep a “union-free environment.”

The union most actively pursuing the NLRB avoidance tactic is 1.3-million-member United Food & Commercial Workers, which organized 103,793 new members last year. But the UFCW calculates that only 8.3% of those members joined as a result of union representation elections conducted by the NLRB.

Most of the others came in by signing union authorization cards in such large numbers that their employers agreed, sometimes under the pressure of picket lines, to negotiate a union contract without going through the NLRB procedures.

Douglas H. Dority, UFCW organizing director, said the pressures on the companies by workers and their supporters helped “neutralize” employers’ anti-union campaigns.

By circumventing the NLRB, he said, more than 85% of the new union members won union contracts in 1987, leaving only 15% who have to continue trying to overcome stiff employer resistance.

In contrast, nationally, fewer than 60% of new union members get contracts even though their unions won NLRB elections.

The UFCW’s organizing successes, however, have been offset almost completely by membership losses due to work force reductions and the closing of retail food markets and other businesses with UFCW contracts. In other words, the net membership gain was only about 3,000 last year.

Only a few large unions can afford the cost of organizing in the 1980s.

The UFCW spent well over $60 million recruiting members in l987 alone just to prevent a serious membership erosion.

There has been an astonishing drop in the number of union representation elections conducted by the NLRB since President Reagan took office. The avoidance tactic at least partially explains the drop.

Even before Reagan, there had been a gradual decline in NLRB elections during both Democratic and Republican administrations for a variety of reasons, including legal maneuvering by companies waging anti-union campaigns and diminished organizing efforts by unions.

But there was a precipitous 55% drop after Reagan moved into the White House.

In 1980, the NLRB conducted 7,296 elections in which there were 478,827 eligible voters. The latest available count, for 1986, showed the board conducted only 3,363 elections for 208,936 eligible voters.

Some unions, like the UFCW, have had minimal membership gains since Reagan was elected. But the unionized part of the nation’s work force has dropped to 17% from 24% during the Reagan years, almost one-third, even though union workers earn 36% more than their non-union counterparts, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Minimal punishment for employers who violate the law, those long, costly delays in processing NLRB cases and then more delays as companies appeal their defeats through the courts, all add up to an eloquent appeal for changes in the law.

Increased worker antagonism toward unions often is blamed for the decline in union representation elections and the sharp reduction in union membership as a percentage of the work force.

But that explanation may be wrong. There are nearly 6 million government employees and about 40% of them are represented by unions. That is almost the exact same proportion of private sector workers who were in unions 32 years ago. Why?

One theory is that private sector unions have lost their popularity. But that doesn’t seem likely since there are few differences between the workers, or their unions, in the private and government sectors.

The real explanation must lie in the fact that government does not wage the intense, expensive campaigns that private industry does to remain union-free.

Also, government workers can fight back politically against politicians who wage anti-union campaigns, a weapon not available to private sector unionists.

Those private industry battles against unions have increased in the past few years as companies fight to reduce labor costs. Management does it partly because of deregulation and foreign and domestic competition but also because they just want to get a bigger and bigger share of the nation’s economic pie for company owners.

Harvard Prof. Richard B. Freeman said in a new study of labor unions that the “people who are really deciding about unionization these days are not workers but company managers who see it as cost-effective to spend substantial sums to keep unions out.”

Unions must do more themselves to regain their former membership levels.

But the nation’s labor laws must be changed to accomplish the original purpose of the law, which was to let workers themselves decide whether they want union representation.

McLaughlin’s Stand on Ruling Will Be Signal

President Reagan’s new Secretary of Labor, Ann McLaughlin, seemed to charm AFL-CIO union leaders at their recent winter executive council meeting in Bal Harbour, Fla.

But the only commitments they got from her were promises that she would listen to their concerns about the problems of workers and that she will continue to appoint task forces to help consider solutions.

Now a significant court decision has been issued that gives the pleasant, conservative McLaughlin an opportunity to achieve something constructive simply by doing nothing.

If she does not try to get a higher court to overturn the Jan. 29 ruling of U.S. District Judge Harold H. Greene, she will give tangible help, not just promises, to workers who must combat labor consultants working behind the scenes to fight unions.

Greene ruled for the United Auto Workers in a case against Kawasaki Motors and its attorney-consultants Tate, Brucker & Sykes. He ordered the consultants to report the income they received from Kawasaki for helping to prevent unionization of one of the company’s plants.

Under federal labor law, unions must report all expenditures for all purposes. But management consultants long have been exempted from the reporting requirement by the Department of Labor even though federal law specifically says consultants must report any agreement they make with a company to try to prevent unionization.

Greene said even former secretaries of labor have acknowledged that when Congress passed the reporting and disclosure law, it was concerned about “behind-the-scenes manipulations of employees by consultants” and therefore the cost of the consultants’ anti-union services “should be exposed to public view.”

As UAW attorney Larry Gold said, the ruling corrects a long-standing abuse of the law. It isn’t going to dramatically change the conduct of the consultants, but workers and shareholders will at least know which consultants are devising management’s anti-union strategy and how much they are getting paid for it.

The new secretary clearly would indicate that she does listen to advice from people other than employers if she doesn’t contest Judge Greene’s decision.