NLRB Shouldn’t Take Strife in Workplace for Granted

Elliot Newman, an obscure government official in Pennsylvania, recently struck another potentially devastating blow to democracy in the workplace.

Newman decided that the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh has some limited “managerial authority” at the school and therefore cannot have a union under Pennsylvania labor laws.

But, as Mr. Bumble precisely put it in Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist”: “If the law supposes that, the law is a ass--a idiot.”

Newman is only a trial examiner for the Pennsylvania Public Employee Relations Board. But if, as expected, his ruling is upheld by the board and the courts, it will have far-reaching implications.

In the first decision of its kind, Newman extended to a public university the same strained logic used in earlier cases involving private institutions of higher education.

Even more unfortunate, the decisions in those earlier cases stifling workplace democracy in private colleges and universities were made by the powerful National Labor Relations Board and were upheld, albeit narrowly, by a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court’s progress-stopping decision came in 1980, when it decided that Yeshiva University faculty members could not have a union to represent them because they have some voice in the school’s decision making.

Since then, faculties at more than 20 other private higher education institutions that work cooperatively with school administrators have also lost their right to negotiate with the administrators for union contracts.

The disastrous impact of these rulings by the courts and government agencies is that they are thwarting exciting developments in labor-management cooperation in higher education. However, a few states, such as California and Ohio, specifically allow unions at colleges and universities where there is an innovative, decision-sharing system.

Among the potential dangers of the decisions blocking workplace democracy is that they easily could be extended to the nation’s public schools, where decision sharing between teachers and school administrators is expanding rapidly in many cities around the country. Decision sharing has begun in such giant school districts as the Los Angeles system, the nation’s second largest, with 600,000 students.

The same illogic, unfortunately, also could hinder labor-management cooperation in government employment.

Even more potentially devastating, the decisions also can apply to private companies where the so-called Japanese style of management is becoming an accepted and increasingly popular method of both improving productivity and giving workers a meaningful opportunity to be decision-makers, not just order takers.

The rulings limiting workplace democracy made some sense in the past when often-bitter adversarial relations between employers and employees were the norm.

The idea then was that managers were expected to strictly enforce company rules fixed by corporate executives. Workers were expected to perform the tasks assigned to them and make almost no decisions themselves about their jobs.

That meant that, if managers joined unions, they were expected by their employers to fight within the union against the workers’ best interests and in favor of the corporate executives and company shareholders.

So the best course then was to keep management representatives out of unions, and the law was designed to do just that, thereby protecting the workers from “subversive” actions.

Managers still have no place inside unions. However, in today’s world of labor relations, cooperation between employees and employers has blurred the lines between managers and workers. The new system is increasingly replacing the old adversarial system. Workers themselves are, finally, getting some decision-making authority that once was left entirely to their often-authoritarian bosses.

Now, though, endangering this welcome shift toward cooperation, are the decisions by the courts, the NLRB and other government administrators. Those decisions warn school faculties and, indirectly, all workers, that if they do get a bit of power to make decisions on their jobs, they themselves become “managers” in the old, enemy-of-the-workers sense of that word.

And, as “managers,” these decision-making, rank-and-file workers must be excluded from unions of “real” workers, who are defined as those without significant decision-making powers in their workplace.

Many executives of private and public colleges applauded the rulings because they want to prevent unionization of their employees--the faculty members.

In other words, the laws, or the way they are being interpreted, allow those who really make the final decisions in the schools to block the faculties’ attempts to form a union.

The Newman ruling that has so far stopped unionization of the University of Pittsburgh faculty is being appealed by the American Federation of Teachers, whose president, Albert Shanker, has pointed up the absurdity of the decision.

The rulings mean that the court and government agencies will allow unions only for those faculty members who will fight with their employers most of the time, Shanker observed.

True, the NLRB has made a decision allowing a bit of worker-management cooperation in unionized private companies.

The board held recently that non-supervisory leaders of teams of workers in a factory can belong to unions of rank-and-file workers as long as the team leaders have negligible authority and are merely conduits of information between workers and supervisors.

But, as of today, almost all meaningful labor-management cooperation is in legal jeopardy. The rulings already issued may well put a chill on the cooperative idea across the nation, especially where management is looking for an excuse not to share any power with employees.

The importance of the existing and potential legal barriers to labor-management cooperation is outlined in a massive Department of Labor study of the issue that will be discussed by top government, labor and management leaders at a symposium in San Francisco on Thursday.

The growing practice of cooperation, and the extensive Labor Department study, should help persuade the courts and those who administer our labor laws to rethink their decisions about the meaning of the laws they say restrict workplace democracy.

If the problem is with the laws themselves, then the laws are no better than they were in Mr. Bumble’s day: “a ass--a idiot.” They should be changed promptly by Congress and the state legislatures that enacted them in the first place.

Small Union Hopes for First Big Break

First-ever negotiations will begin next week between the fledgling National Writers Union and New York’s Village Voice, one of the largest employers of free-lance journalists in the country.

The union was formed in 1983 and is still quite small, but it made a hefty 40% membership gain just last year. It now has 2,500 members in all, including book authors, poets, technical writers and free-lance journalists, including about 200 employed by the Voice.

A contract with the Voice, a weekly paper with a circulation of 147,500, would be a major achievement for the union, although it already has contracts with such other publications as Ms., Nation, Mother Jones, Musician, Columbia Journalism Review, Black Film Review and L.A. Weekly.

A union spokesman said the Voice, owned by Leonard Stern, who is also chairman of Hartz Mountain Industries, “is no longer a poor, left-wing publication but a respected newspaper, and we expect it to live up to its reputation as a progressive force in the city.”

Some authors, free-lance journalists and other writers have large incomes that are based on book sales and their reputations. Because of those relatively few wealthy writers, those in the writers union who are less well off may, like many unionized professional athletes, find it difficult to get public support in contract disputes.

But most free-lance writers are poorly paid and their fees are arbitrarily set by publications. They also get no fringe benefits. They apparently need a union at least as much as the pro athletes.