Organizing as a Civil Right: How to Boost Labor and 
Reverse Inequality
By Daniel Adler
Rolling Stone
September 20, 2012
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/organizing-as-a-civil-right-how-to-strengthen-labor-and-reverse-inequality-20120920

These are dark days for the American labor movement -
and, not coincidentally, for the American worker.
Decades of globalization, technological change, and a
relentless assault by employers and right-wing
politicians have left unions gasping for air. Only about
7 percent of private sector workers belong to a union,
down from 35 percent at the height of labor's power, in
the mid-1950s. Public employee unions, now the core of
the movement, are hanging on, but they're taking a
beating, too - and not just from conservatives like Gov.
Scott Walker in Wisconsin; now even liberals are piling
on, as witness Mayor Rahm Emanuel's fight with Chicago's
teacher's union.

As labor has weakened over the past few decades,
American workers have lost much of their ability to
bargain over wages, hours, benefits, and working
conditions. At the same time -- and surely this is no
coincidence, income from productivity gains have gone
almost exclusively to the top 10 percent, while middle-
class workers have seen their incomes stagnate or
shrink. And with unions less able to supply money and
manpower to political campaigns, the Democratic party is
increasingly outgunned by the corporate-funded GOP,
further weakening labor's political hand.

Union decline looks irreversible. But it doesn't have to
be. Or so says policy analyst Richard Kahlenberg. A big
factor in labor's slide, he argues, is the failure of
current law to protect workers who want to organize a
union from employer retaliation, especially firing. In a
new book, co-authored with Moshe Marvit, Kahlenberg, a
fellow at the liberal think tank The Century Foundation,
proposes amending the Civil Rights Act so that it makes
firing a worker for attempting to unionize legally akin
to discriminating on the basis of sex or race. Under the
protection of civil rights law, workers illegally fired
for organizing would have access to far more effective
remedies than the ones provided by current labor law,
including damages, injunctions, discovery, legal fee
awards, compensatory and punitive damages.

In the preface to the book, Why Labor Organizing Should
Be a Civil Right, Tom Geoghegan, a noted labor lawyer
whom Kahlenberg credits with first coming up with the
idea, argues that bringing union organizing under the
protection of civil rights law would "change the culture
as much as the civil rights revolution did" for racial
and gender discrimination. Moreover, he adds, "Nothing
would do more to put a brake on the country's runaway
economic inequality."

RollingStone.com recently got Kahlenberg on the phone to
talk about the push to shore up the labor movement,
rebuild the middle class, and restore economic justice
by making union organizing a civil right.

Your proposal would make firing a worker for trying to
organize a union a violation of the Civil Rights Act.
But isn't that already illegal under existing law?

Yes, but the law is weak and the penalties fail to deter
employers from firing workers. Labor rights are
routinely abrogated. If you look at what goes on in the
private sector today, when an employee, or a group of
employees, tries to organize a union in order to protect
their interests, employers frequently fire the
ringleaders, and that puts a stop to the union
organizing effort because the leaders are gone and
everyone else is scared. There are thousands of
documented cases each year in which employees are
wrongfully fired for trying to organize a union.

Amending civil rights law is potentially a tall order.
Why not strengthen existing labor law through
legislation?

Labor law reform is always an uphill battle.
Progressives have been trying to improve it for almost
fifty years now, going back to Lyndon Johnson.

Right. Most recently, in 2009, Democrats and the Obama
administration tried to get the Employee Free Choice Act
enacted, which would make it easier to organize and
stiffening penalties for employer abuses, but the bill
didn't even make it to a formal vote in the Senate.

I personally support EFCA. I think it's a good idea. But
it failed in part because it was complicated, and
therefore easy for opponents to distort, and also
because it was seen as a fight between two sets of
special interests: Organized labor on the one hand and
business interests on the other.

Public employee unions, which are now under siege,
aren't covered by the country's key labor law, the
National Labor Relations Act. Why not? And would you
bring both private and public workers under the
protection of the Civil Rights Act?

The way that the law has developed in the United States
is that we have a federal labor law that covers most
private sector workers - not all, but most - and public
sector workers are protected under individual state
laws, which makes subject to the whims of the political
trends in the particular state they happen to live in.
It seems to me there's a strong argument for federal
protections for all employees.

Why is framing labor organizing as a civil rights issue
a better way to go?

We think that if we frame this in terms of civil rights
and anti-discrimination, the American public will
understand what is at stake, and understand the basic
issue of fairness.  If you put it to people, "Should an
individual be fired even if they're doing a good job at
work because they're trying to assert their fundamental
right to organize a union?" most people will answer,
"No, that's unfair, it's wrong, and it ought to be
stopped." And we think that simple message has a greater
chance of prevailing.

But still, amending the Civil Rights Act will require
Congress to act.

The only way that this legislation would move forward
would be under a Congress that is friendly to labor
rights and civil rights. So I think as a practical
matter, you'd need a Democratic Congress and a
Democratic executive. The next time that happens, we
think that it's important for progressives to have a
plan ready.

How do you reconcile the labor-movement emphasis on
solidarity with the individual-rights emphasis of civil
rights legislation?

I believe in solidarity. If that were a value that was
deeply woven into the American ethos, then I think it
would make sense to lead with that argument. The reality
is that we are a country that values individualism and
individual rights. And rather than battle against that
cultural emphasis, I think it makes more sense for labor
to advance collective rights in a way that fits into the
American story, which is that an individual standing up
for his or her rights shouldn't be discriminated against
for doing so. And so to my mind, rather than continuing
to butt our heads against the wall of American
individualism, it makes more sense to harness that sense
that individuals have rights in this country that ought
to be respected. One of the major roles of the
government is to protect individual rights.

How do you see the stakes in this fight?

Labor is under unprecedented assault. We really face the
prospect of a country without labor unions. And more
broadly, there are clear economic trends in this country
- growing inequality, decline in the middle class - that
coincide with the decline of the labor movement. Between
the 1940's and around the early 1970's, when labor
unions were strong, productivity gains were matched by
wage increases.  Since the mid seventies, productivity
has continued to increase, but wages have been mostly
flat. When you look at who gets the productivity gains
there, they're going today to the 1 percent, not to
workers, something that has been less apparent in other
countries with stronger labor movements.

Where is public opinion on this? Aren't people generally
ambivalent about labor unions?

The public is mixed on unions, but strongly support the
basic right of collective bargaining.

Short of your proposal actually going into law, how else
can labor rights be shored up?

Even short of legislation, I think it's important for
the labor movement to emphasize the rhetoric of civil
rights. The UAW is starting to do that with a campaign
organizing workers in the South, and I think that can be
very effective. The Civil Rights Movement in this
country is quite rightly iconic. If the labor movement
could associate itself more closely with the movement
and the need to promote the dignity of individuals and
of individual workers, then I think they'll have a much
better time explaining themselves to the public.

___________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate