Bitter Tales of Two Struggles by Workers
A bitter labor dispute in Los Angeles involving mostly immigrant Latino Catholic cemetery workers and another in rural Georgia involving primarily black women show that our federal labor law still needs a major overhaul--but that the law can be better than none at all.
The National Labor Relations Board two weeks ago finally helped settle a battle between about 600 black women and the managers of two southeast Georgia plants that are owned by a giant New York-based curtain manufacturing company, S. Lichtenberg.
The case dramatized once again a serious defect in the law: It is so filled with legal loopholes that it took nearly four years for the workers to win a victory that should have taken a few months at most.
They won a first-time union contract vastly improving their wages and benefits. And about 200 of them will share more than $1 million in back pay that the government and the courts said they are entitled to because they were fired for union activity. That is illegal.
The women first sought help from the Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers Union in 1987, complaining about low wages, sex and racial discrimination and practically no benefits, such as health insurance.
It took almost a year before the NLRB conducted a secret-ballot election. The workers voted by a large margin to be represented by the union. But more months went by before the NLRB officially certified the union’s victory.
The company then exercised more of its legal rights, further delaying an end to the fight. It raised lengthy objections to the election and refused to recognize the union while its lawyers argued minute points of law.
The union returned again to the NLRB alleging, among other things, that the firm illegally fired pro-union workers and refused to bargain in good faith for a labor contract.
Company lawyers dragged out the procedure even longer, arguing that it too was entitled to all of the law’s protection, no matter how long it took. Usually, the more time it takes to process a case, the more discouraged workers get and the more opportunity a company has to fight the union.
Finally, though, the NLRB and the courts found Lichtenberg guilty of a host of the charges filed by the workers, who then won their significant gains.
But, as Jack Sheinkman, international president of the union, said last week, the tragedy was that the workers “had to go through years of harassment by the company that repeatedly denied them their lawful rights.”
In the other case, the federal labor law might well have helped workers in Los Angeles Catholic cemeteries, who tried to form a union shortly after the black women started their battle in Georgia. But the law was neither used nor followed.
Their struggle began more than three years ago, but Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, then an archbishop, waged a successful fight against the workers’ effort to form a union. He used many of the tactics of the Georgia curtain manufacturer.
The cemetery workers had sought help from the same union used by the Georgia women. Among other things, they complained that their average wage of about $7 an hour was far too low when compared to the average of $14.95 an hour paid to their counterparts in unionized Catholic cemeteries in San Francisco.
All but about 20 of the 140 workers signed cards asking to be represented by the union. Although Mahony rejected the cards, he said he wouldn’t think of denying the workers the “very rights and protection (of federal labor law) to which they are entitled in this country.”
He and the union agreed that the NLRB should conduct a secret-ballot vote to see if the workers really wanted a union.
But when hearings about the election began, Mahony reversed field. His lawyers argued before the NLRB that it should not conduct the election because it would illegally “entangle” the government in church affairs.
The NLRB stayed out. Mahony then agreed to an election run by the California Mediation Service. That took nearly a year to set up, allowing Mahony more time to wage his strong, anti-union campaign. But the union won the election by a narrow margin.
Mahony then said the workers had been “coerced” into voting for the union. Both sides asked a neutral arbitrator (Fred W. Alvarez, a management attorney who is Catholic) to rule on the accusation. The arbitrator ruled that the election was fair.
The process took so long, Mahony said, that the time for negotiations had expired. More months went by. The union agreed to yet another election, but that gave Mahony even more time to fight the union.
Several of Mahony’s tactics might have been ruled illegal under the NLRB rules that he said he wanted to follow. For instance, he gave the workers some pay raises while the dispute raged. (They are still more than $6 an hour below San Francisco Catholic cemetery workers.)
Also, the Cardinal warned the workers that their wages and benefits might be reduced if they voted for the union. And he fired some pro-union workers, saying their conduct was “inconsistent with the mission of the sacred ministry of Catholic cemeteries.”
Not surprisingly, the mostly Catholic workers last week voted against the union after pleas for them to do so by the Cardinal, one of the highest-ranking Catholics in the world. They could have voted the same way if the federal labor law had been applied. But the outcome of the vote might have been different if Mahony’s tactics had been ruled illegal by the NLRB. The workers might not have felt so pressured to vote against the union.
It seems so obvious: The law needs overhauling, as evidenced by the wasted years it took for the law to end the labor battle in Georgia. However, based on the cemetery workers’ case, use of the law certainly would have been fairer than no law at all.
