Put Fairness Back in U.S. Labor Laws : Republicans threaten to kill a bill that gives workers a chance for effective job actions.

It is nonsense to say that workers in our democratic country have the freedom to strike without fear of being of fired, when they can be “permanently replaced.”

Yet top Republicans in the Senate are promising to filibuster to death a bill that would end this absurdity.

The measure, titled the Workplace Fairness Act, easily passed the House. A Senate majority supports it, including some Republicans. But even the GOP filibuster, which may well kill it, isn’t enough for the union-haters. They want serious money from the public to wage more furious fights against labor.

To raise funds for the “Right to Work” Committee and its goal of a “union free” environment, Sen. Bob Smith (R-N.H.) says big money is needed quickly because if the measure passes, all hell will break loose. Here’s a sample of his ranting, in a national fund-raising appeal:

“America will be smitten by rampant inflation! Taxes will soar as union sympathizers in Congress go on a tax-raising spree! Unemployment will mount! Strike violence will wrack communities! Good jobs will be moved overseas and productivity will plummet!”

While his logic is skewed, all of Smith’s apocalyptic predictions are standard fare for the reactionary “Right to Work” Committee.

Yet it is the unions, weaker today then they have been in years, that should be raising money for a nationwide campaign to bolster the courage of those senators who want fairness for workers and should vote to break the filibuster gridlock.

Examples of the problems caused for workers by this contradictory law--firms can’t fire strikers, but can “permanently replace” them--are everywhere. A particularly egregious one is the strike by about 500 workers--mostly older Latinas--against Diamond Walnut Growers Inc. in Stockton. They were fired (“permanently replaced,” to use the firm’s euphemism) nearly three years ago after taking pay cuts of up to 40% to help the growers over a bad economic patch. They struck when the firm wanted even more cuts despite the healthy recovery of the walnut market and of Diamond Walnut.

Labor Secretary Robert Reich has just persuaded the firm to resume negotiations with the workers’ union, Teamsters Local 601, but management insists it will not make room for those it fired because they struck.

Even if the Workplace Fairness Act escapes the filibuster blockade, its provisions would really only return us to the days before 1981 when then-President Ronald Reagan permanently replaced striking air-traffic controllers. Employers had rarely used the “permanent replacement” weapon, which stemmed from a 1938 Supreme Court case, until Reagan set the pattern.

The Workplace Fairness Act would not in general bring fairness to labor laws. It does nothing about putting teeth in current laws that allow the National Labor Relations Board little power other than to scold law-violating employers.

Take one of the latest decisions by the NLRB in a typical case: The board ruled after a year of costly investigations and hearings that Pony Express, a trucking firm based in Charlotte, N.C., broke the law many times and illegally refused to “bargain in good faith” with the Teamsters union chosen by its workers to represent them.

The NLRB heard more than 120 charges against Pony Express, which has about 5,000 workers nationwide, and found a wide array of broken laws ranging from threats of reprisals against any worker found joining or even supporting the union to warning that the company would never reach a union-contract agreement, no matter what the union proposed.

Now what happens? The company can appeal to the courts, and ultimately, if it loses all of its many possible appeals, it could be firmly “ordered” to bargain in good faith. That could take months and even years, with still more appeals. That is not a winning scenario for any worker who wants a union.

The NLRB is a toothless tiger that can only growl loudly. While the board has a promising new chairman, former Stanford law professor William Gould IV, companies like Pony Express are unlikely to abandon the strategy that holds it is better to spend a few hundred-thousand dollars for union-busting lawyers than to let workers vote for a union and maybe get a few extra bucks in wages and fringe benefits.

The Senate should pass the Worker Fairness Act, then enact substantial labor-law reforms to give workers a real chance to have a union, as the Wagner Act promised 57 years ago.