Right-Wingers May Help Unions Get Their Way at NLRB

Michael S. Dukakis might get a marvelous opportunity to immediately rescue unions from the conservative National Labor Relations Board, if he wins the presidential election.

It would be a delightfully ironic ending to the massive letter-writing campaign by the National Right to Work Committee to block Senate confirmation of President Reagan’s nomination of John Higgins to the NLRB. Two other Reagan-appointed NLRB members are going to leave the powerful agency soon.

That means that there would be three vacancies on the board if confirmation of the Higgins’ appointment is delayed until the Senate adjourns, probably in late September. Then the next president could appoint the majority of the five-member board upon taking office.

Only President Franklin D. Roosevelt was in a position to name a board majority all at one time. He appointed the entire board when the agency was created in 1935 to enforce the nation’s labor laws.

No president since then has had a similar opportunity, largely because the five-year terms of board members are staggered.

If George Bush becomes president, he, too, would have the chance to fill three vacancies at once if Higgins isn’t confirmed. But it is unlikely that his appointees would be as understanding of labor’s problems as Dukakis’ choices, since every major union in the country will be fighting to keep Bush from becoming president.

Bush isn’t going to reward his political enemies.

While the anti-union forces could inadvertently help unions in their battles with the NLRB, the chances are that the Senate will confirm Higgins despite the strenuous campaign by the National Right to Work Committee and its principle ally, the ultraconservative Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.).

The White House apparently is not putting on a concerted effort to push Higgins’ nomination through the Senate, and no one else is there to champion his appointment.

Senate Democrats would just as soon let the ultraconservative foes of Higgins delay his confirmation in hopes that Dukakis will win in November and name a liberal to the NLRB. Unions generally agree.

Still, Higgins has not generated any real opposition among Democrats and unions because the 48-year-old attorney is a generally respected moderate who has been deputy general counsel to the NLRB since 1976 and has served in the agency since 1968.

But Reed Larson, president of the National Right to Work Committee, called Higgins’ appointment “outrageous.”

Larson said that while Higgins and other recent Reagan appointees to the NLRB “curry favor with radical and violent union officials, it is a pipe dream to imagine that they will bring about any significant political advantage to President Reagan or future Republican presidential candidates.”

Higgins’ appointment would be good for labor because he is not anti-union and thereby seems to fall into the general category of recent Reagan appointees to the powerful agency.

Whatever happens to the nomination, the NLRB will not be the same under either Dukakis or Bush. It already has changed dramatically from the consistently pro-management, anti-union board Reagan initially created to one that still is management-oriented, but not hard-line right wing.

And that significant change is infuriating such strong conservatives as Helms and the Right to Work Committee.

Leaders of the committee undoubtedly are sincere in their decades-old battle against union shop contracts, which must be approved by a majority of workers in a bargaining unit.

Such contracts require all employees to pay dues or fees to the union since, by law, all of them must get the benefits won by the union in contract negotiations.

But, sincere or not, the committee thrives on its fund-raising efforts. It is using the fight against Higgins to make pleas for money in the hundreds of thousands of letters sent to potential contributors.

The committee leaders cannot abide him, but they reserve their most vitriolic attacks for his boss, NLRB General Counsel Rosemary Collyer, who also was appointed by Reagan.

The verbal and legal attacks on her by the committee have been so frequent and harsh that she recently said jokingly, “I’ve been told that someone has to work full-time to defend (me) from the Right to Work Committee.”

Larson, the committee president, wrote in one appeal for funds that “over the years, no other government bureaucrat has done more that Collyer to undermine the rights of American working men and women.”

She has been sued for approving, logically, a contract between General Motors and the United Auto Workers giving preferential hiring rights to current GM employees for jobs at GM’s Saturn plant under construction in Tennessee. Collyer has been sued for finding that the law allows unions to spend “agency fees” paid to the union by non-members for political purposes. That case is pending in the Supreme Court.

The complaints of her critics go on and on, and they haven’t even started denouncing her yet for her latest sensible plan: She intends to seek reinstatement of workers who are fired because of drug test results in cases when their employers fail to first bargain with the workers’ union about the drug-testing program.

Drug testing, she argues, is a mandatory subject of bargaining and a company cannot unilaterally set up such program.

The committee hasn’t been gentle, either, on NLRB Chairman James M. Stephens, denouncing the moderately conservative man as an advocate of “forced political and ideological coercion of American workers” by unions.

Reactionary critics of the NLRB long for the return of their ideological soul mate, Donald L. Dotson, who left as the agency chairman last December after years of feuding with other, less conservative board members.

The oddest part of the continuing attacks on the NLRB by extreme right-wing critics is that few management attorneys and executives regard the agency as it is now constituted as pro-union.

Unions, with good cause, hope Dukakis will be elected and fill the NLRB vacancies with appointees who are less oriented toward management than the current board.

And who knows, a victorious Dukakis might, for instance, figure Higgins isn’t the rascal the committee pictures him to be and appoint him again if Helms, the committee and its allies manage to block his confirmation in this session of the Senate.

Wrongs of City’s Privatization Righted

The danger of turning over jobs done by government employees to entrepreneurs was nicely dramatized on a small scale when the Los Angeles City Council privatized the jobs of about 400 school crossing guards three years ago.

The guards--90% of whom are women and most of them minorities--haven’t had a pay raise since being privatized. They work only about 20 hours a week and get almost no fringe benefits.

But now everything seems to have been set right again in just-concluded negotiations between Hugo Morris, director of public affairs for the Teamsters Union here, his associates and city officials.

An agreement has been worked out that would return the workers to the city payroll, boost their wages and provide them with health and pension benefits. It would even give them about $1 million of sick leave the city unconscionably deprived them of when they were shifted to the payroll of the private firm. That firm, All State Management, said it was losing money on the deal.

And it seems all this will be done at little, if any, increase in costs to the city since, among other things, the city isn’t trying to make a profit from the crossing guards.

The City Council is expected to approve the arrangement today. The council last year approved the deprivatization idea, on the condition that Teamsters Local 911, which represents the guards, could make the switch without any significant extra city payroll expenses.

Wells Fargo Guards Service, another private firm, sought the city school jobs, and said it could do the work for less money than city employees. Morris stressed that the company’s lower costs would mean lower wages and benefits for the guards.

But the firm lost out. That reportedly was primarily because it does business with racist South Africa and not because of the financial sacrifices the guards would have to make.

Maybe if the council approves the deprivatization plan, those low-wage crossing guards will have provided a valuable lesson to politicians who think turning government over to private entrepreneurs should be the wave of the future.