Unionbusting Firm Likens Organizers to Terrorists

This article sheds some light on how the Jimmy John's workers lost their representation election.  If the general public understood that workers face intimidation, coercion and even firing during a union representation election, EFCA couldn't have been spun to sound like a nefarious plot to subvert democracy.  Did you get those crazy giant post cards from the Missouri Republican State Committee?  Like the "Robbin" Carnahan piece that said, "Robin Carnahan supports big labor's Card Check plan that would take away a worker's right to a secret ballot when deciding whether to join a labor union.  IT IS ESTIMATED THAT THE CARD CHECK SCHEME CARNAHAN SUPPORTS WOULD KILL 600,000 JOBS ACROSS AMERICA."    The voters who took the time to read the post card don't know the reality of union elections.  They probably imagine that a union election is similar to elections for state office(no intimidation or fear of losing their job).  They will never know unless the labor movement gets serious about organizing.

LRI's tactical continuum, modeled after the U.S. military's approach to defeating insurgents in Iraq. The "boom" is a union organizing drive.   (Image courtesy Labor Relations Institute, Inc., 2010)

Working In These Times

by Lindsay Beyerstein

The Labor Relations Institute helps keep workplaces 'left of boom"

Unionbusting is a multimillion dollar industry that has grown significantly since the 1970s. At least two-thirds of employers hire anti-union consultants to counter organizing drives.

According to economist John Logan, the unionbusting industry has evolved over the past few decades to focus on preventing organizing before it starts. Unionbusting is as old as unions. However, according to Logan, a new generation of consultants are "actively and aggressively creating that demand by encouraging management to fear the allegedly catastrophic consequences of unionization."

The Oklahoma-based Labor Relations Institute has taken fear-based marketing to new heights. LRI was reportedly hired to defeat an Industrial Workers of the World organizing drive at ten Jimmy John's sandwich shops in Minneapolis. One LRI white paper entiled "Left of Boom" likens union organizers to IED-planting Iraqi insurgents

The 2010 paper, available for free on LRI's website, argues that preventing unionization is a lot like defeating an insurgency. The report drives the point home with a photo of a military vehicle engulfed in flames. In Iraq, so-called "Left of Boom" (LOB) tactics are aimed at preventing insurgents from setting IEDs by identifying and disrupting the networks of influence that link bomb-makers to bomb setters.

"The military monitors, arrests, interrogates, and then turns over any members of the network to the Iraqi or Afghani governments for criminal prosecution," the paper explains. So-called Right of Boom" (ROB) tactics are steps taken to respond to an IED attack after it occurs.

The high-pressure marketing message is that your company should hire LRItoday to stamp out the slightest murmur of labor unrest. If you wait for the "boom"—the union organizing drive—it may already be too late, according to the paper. LRI claims that the very survival of your company may hinge upon keeping the union out. The paper asserts that organizing campaigns are often harmful to the physical and emotional health of workers and may even spark violence.

So, what's a terrified boss to do? Luckily, LRI is here to help. The first step is systematic surveillance and data gathering. The Institute's LOB tactics include surveys and structured interviews to identify dissatisfied employees and map out networks of influence within the workplace. ROB tactics include various "pushback" strategies to counter an organizing campaign in progress. 

According to yet another white paper, employees can be scientifically "segmented" into one of five "buckets," which correspond to one of five smily faces, depending on how positively they feel about the company. LRI claims that segmenting the workforce is a key step in preventing labor unrest.

As part of its suite of LOB services, LRI offers two kinds of unionbusting training for managers and supervisors: active interval training, and trip wire training.

"The active interval training is designed to teach supervisors how not to be a jerk," according to the paper. It's a self-paced online course.

Trip Wire training purportedly teaches supervisors to recognize "the often subtle behavioral signs of union organizing" so that they can trigger a "silent alarm button," according to another white paper on the LRI website entitled "Is There a Target on My Back?":

Here’s an example. Suppose a union meeting occurs one night, run according to typical organizer playbook. They are asked to do various things by the organizer – they are often told to keep things quiet and are encouraged to assume the worst about their management team. The employees who attended will behave differently the next day. If supervisors are properly trained to pay attention when “something doesn’t feel right” about how employees are behaving, we have created the tripwire.

The white paper doesn't specify what those subtle signs are. It's probably very expensive to find out.

If you want to get really far out on the left edge of the spectrum, you can hire a "fake union organizer" aka "Mystery Shopper" from LRI to attempt to infiltrate your company and identify vulnerabilities. The fake union organizer will contact your employees by phone and in the workplace and report back to you.

"The Shopper may also talk to people in the community – at bars or stores near the facility – to see what people say about the company, just like a union organizer would (the consultant is careful never to ask an employee what they think about unions)," according to the white paper. The faux organizer will gague how easy it is for an outsider to infiltrate the employee parking lot and the break room. The fake union organizer will even "determine how easy it is to get into the dumpsters, and what they might find in the trash that they could use in an organizing campaign."

Jimmy John’s Workers Narrowly Reject Union—and Underscore Potential Power of EFCA

This was an amazingly close vote given everything the workers faced from management.

By Lindsay Beyerstein

Octboer, 25, 2010
Working In These Times


Workers at 10 Jimmy John'ssandwich shops in Minneapolis on Friday narrowly rejected a bid to form a union by a vote of 87-85. If the Employee Free Choice Act (aka card check) were the law of the land, these ten outlets would already have a union. About 60 percent of the franchise's 200 workers signed pro-union cards asking the NLRB to hold the vote.

It seemed as if these Jimmy John's outlets were about to become the first unionized franchise in a national fast food chain. Jimmy John's has about 1,000 sandwich shops in 39 states.

A vote to unionize would have been a coup for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the union behind the Jimmy John's organizing drive. So far, the fast food industry has proved nearly impossible to unionize. Less than 1% of the U.S. fast food industry is unionized.

So, how did a comfortable margin of support with card check turn into a narrow loss at the polls? The same way it usually does with NLRB elections: The vote is scheduled and the workers become management's captive audience for anti-union propaganda.

Jimmy John's launched an aggresive anti-unionization campaign ahead of the election. The discrepancy between about 120 signed pro-union cards and 85 votes shows how powerful this kind of onslaught can be. The restaurants are owned by Mike Mulligan, a retired vice president of communications for SuperValu.

The pro-union faction is alleging widespread management misconduct in the run-up to the vote. It is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act for management to attempt to influence a vote by firing, threats of firing, bribes, or other inducements.

There are four charges pending against Miklin Enterprises, according to a board spokeswoman. Three of the four charges cite multiple alleged violations. Amongst other things, Miklin managers are accused of offering to pay an employee to vote in the NLRB election, firing two employees for pro-union activities, kicking a pro-union employee out of a "captive audience" meeting, and threatening to retaliate against employees for unionizing, according to charge documents provided by the NLRB to Working In These Times.

In September, Miklin managers also allegedly sent two pro-union workers home to shave, enforcing a policy that they never upheld before. The facial hair crackdown seems suspicious in light of Jimmy John's famously flexible dress code. Just last week, the New York Times reported that "[m]any of their young workers wear nose rings, beards and dreadlocks."

The NLRB will investigate the charges. If the investigators determine that the allegations have merit, the NLRB will file complaints against the company, which will be adjudicated by an administrative law judge.

The pro-union faction at Jimmy John's has vowed to fight on. "In a company with turnover approaching 50% each month, a majority at any given moment only means so much," said delivery driver Ayo Collins.

As Kari Lydersen reported for Working In These Times, the grievances of Jimmy John's workers are typical of the fast food industry: low pay, lack of sick days, no benefits, irregular and unpredictable hours, truncated shifts, and widespread sexual harrassment. In September, Jimmy John's employees rallied in support of supervisor Margaret Brickely, who was threatened with dismissal after she refused to serve spoiled meat. (This allegation is also cited in one of the charges filed with the NLRB.)

Jimmy John's website says of its employees: "Their hustle is part of how they live their daily lives, and they enjoy the fruits of a hard-earned entrepreneurial lifestyle."

The sandwich-makers and delivery drivers certainly hustle--often through the Minnesota snow, without hazard pay. But when it comes to enjoying the "fruits of an entrepreurial lifestyle," Jimmy John's is still the pits.

Pensions: The Next Casualty of Wall Street

More on the coming pension wars. Labor has to put up a huge fight to save our pensions.  Let's stay on top of this one.

by Mark Brenner, Labor Notes, Sept. 2009

Nobody wants to admit it, but the next casualty of the Wall Street meltdown will probably be your golden years. For years corporations have been trying to choke the life out of traditional pensions, working hard to get out from under the risk—and the cost—of providing for their retirees. Between last year’s credit crunch and changes to federal pension laws, they may get their wish.

Nearly $4 trillion worth of retirement savings were wiped out in the first weeks of the 2008 financial freefall. Half of the drop was concentrated in traditional pension plans, also known as defined-benefit plans. While most workers in these plans haven’t had their monthly benefits cut, unlike the 46 million people riding the stock market with 401(k) defined-contribution plans, the storm clouds are gathering.

Labor needs a strategy to protect what we’ve won. But holding our ground requires moving from defense to offense. If the pension crisis is going to be solved for union members, it has to be solved for everyone.

UNCOMFORTABLE ARITHMETIC

Even before the financial crisis, traditional pensions were a vanishing breed. Thirty years ago more than a third of the private sector workforce had traditional pensions. Last year that number was down to 16 percent.

THE PENSION CRISIS

See also: The Defined-Benefits Squeeze

Public sector: State and City Pensions Drenched in Red

For subscribers only: New Law Raises Pension Oversight, and Problems.Subscribe today!

Driving the decline were employers looking to get off cheap, eliminating pensions entirely when they could get away with it, and when they couldn’t, shifting to 401(k)s. These programs were legalized in 1978 and were originally designed to supplement traditional pensions. Now they’re choking them out like kudzu.

Corporations got a great deal, paying about half what they used to towards their workers’ retirement by the ’90s. Even more important—as anyone who has opened their 401(k) statement recently can attest—the move shifted risk off companies and onto us.

Traditional pensions were a collective solution to a collective problem. Young and old contributing together smoothed out insecurity for all. Now it’s just you and the stock market—with far less in your pocket.

Even before the crash, studies showed that 401(k)s leave workers with 10 to 33 percent of what traditional pensions provide. Given the 30-year squeeze on wages, most people haven’t saved much either, which explains why more than half of all 401(k) participants have less than $75,000 when they retire.

WHAT’S IN STORE?

Even for those with superior defined-benefit plans, the last 20 years have been rocky. Companies spent much of the 1990s gaming the system, siphoning off pension funds to pad the bottom line.

At the start of this year the nation’s defined-benefit pension plans had only about 75 percent of what they owed participants. Companies may need to contribute as much as $100 billion to cover these gaps.

Although Congress waived compliance with new pension rules this year, the law will eventually take effect, and will force employers to cover these pension gaps. Rather than clean up their act, more and more employers are looking for the exit. By April of this year nearly a third of America’s largest companies had frozen their pension plans.

Many others are invoking the nuclear option, declaring bankruptcy as a way to unload their pension plans on the taxpayers. Unfortunately, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), established in 1975 to backstop private sector pensions, is already reeling from a decade of high-profile and expensive pension defaults at companies like United Airlines and steelmaker LTV.

Nine of the 10 largest pension defaults in history occurred since 2000, leaving the PBGC with a deficit of $11 billion at the end of 2008. That gap could swell to more than $100 billion over the next few years, amounting to a backdoor bailout for big corporations, and a bitter pill for abandoned retirees.

Workers at Republic Steel saw first hand how it works when they had their pensions cut by $1,000 a month in 2002 by the PBGC and then cut again in 2004. Five workers from the Lorain, Ohio, plant committed suicide after the first time their pension was diminished. In the second round of cuts, retirees like Bruce Bostick, former grievance chair for USW Local 1104, saw their retirements fall from $1,047 a month to $125.

The situation for public sector workers isn’t much better. Although 80 percent of public employees have traditional pensions, those benefits are now in the cross-hairs of conservative and liberal politicians. Two-thirds of public sector pension plans are underfunded—to the tune of $430 billion—and state and local budget crises are pitting taxpayers against public employees from California to Maine.

ANCHORING RETIREMENT

For nearly 20 years the various financial bubbles—from the dot-com frenzy of the 1990s to the recent housing market run-up—papered over the urgent need to address the faltering retirement system.

Wall Street’s collapse last year revealed how the current patchwork of retirement plans is failing almost everyone. As with health benefits, union workers with stable pensions increasingly find themselves on an island of security in a sea of uncertainty.

But the water is rising rapidly.

As the debate over the auto bailout and state budget crises revealed, defending your own decent pension is tough work when half the workers in the country don’t have any retirement at all.

The PBGC—which has been swimming in red ink since 2002—is currently set up to pay less than half of what people were promised. If the funding gaps widen, it could fall to pennies on the dollar.

There will be calls to bail the PBGC out—which needs to happen—1.2 million people now depend on it. A sensible demand is to make it function more like the FDIC, by guaranteeing 100 percent of pension benefits up to a reasonable threshold.

But reform can’t stop there.

If it does, workers are on the same path as before the economic collapse, with a temporary reprieve. Employers will still seek to drive union workers down to non-union standards and dump more risk onto individuals.

We need to return to the original vision of Social Security: a program that (like in Western European nations) can actually pay for most of your old-age living expenses.

 

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It's Not the Teachers' Unions

Contrary to conventional wisdom on the right -- and now the left -- unions have actually been at the forefront of education-reform efforts.
The American Prospect, RICHARD D. KAHLENBERG | October 13, 2010 | web only

The resignation of Washington, D.C., Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee concludes the latest chapter in the ongoing war between free-market education reformers and teachers’ unions. Many Rhee supporters blame union opposition for the electoral defeat of Rhee’s boss, Mayor Adrian Fenty, and see unions as the biggest problem in education. In the much-discussed documentary,Waiting for Superman, in which Rhee is painted as a heroine, Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter declares, "It's very, very important to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. Teachers are great, a national treasure. Teachers' unions are, generally speaking, a menace and an impediment to reform."

The dichotomy (teachers good, unions bad), which has been a staple of conservative rhetoric for years, has taken hold among the center-left as well. Like Alter, the director of Superman, Davis Guggenheim, is a self-described liberal who nevertheless paints unions as the central problem in urban education and nonunion charter schools as the solution. They're part of a broader movement: Democrats for Education Reform, financed by hedge-fund managers, was created to represent voices within the Democratic Party that think teachers' unions play a destructive role -- voices like those of President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, both strong advocates of nonunion charter schools.

Indeed, it is fair to say that teachers' unions are today facing the strongest critique from the left and center-left since the 1968 New York City teachers' strike in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, which pitted the United Federation of Teachers' Albert Shanker against liberal Mayor John Lindsay, the Ford Foundation's McGeorge Bundy, black-power advocates, and many civil-rights leaders over teacher quality and control of the schools.

Is it possible, though, to praise teachers and oppose teachers' unions? Shanker questioned the logic when Sen. Bob Dole tried to drive the same wedge between teachers and their unions in a speech at the 1996 Republican National Convention. "Who started teacher unions? Who pays the dues that keep them going? Who elects the officers and determines union policies?" he asked. Moreover, polls find that teachers are generally supportive of their unions. For example, a 2003 Public Agenda poll, financed in part by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, found that 81 percent of teachers strongly or somewhat agreed that "without the union, teachers would be vulnerable to school politics or administrators who abuse their power." Likewise, 81 percent strongly or somewhat agreed that "without collective bargaining, the working conditions and salaries of teachers would be much worse."

Even so, might it still be true that teachers' unions are "a menace and an impediment to reform"? They don't seem to be stopping the Finns. As Guggenheim notes, Finland ranks the highest in the world in K-12 math and reading achievement, yet he fails to mention that almost all teachers in the country are unionized. Plus, some of the reforms to which teachers' unions are an impediment, such as nonunionized charter schools, don't seem to be working very well.Superman mentions in passing that only one in five charter schools produces "amazing" results, but in fact their track record is even worse than that: According to a large Stanford University study funded by pro-charter school foundations, only 17 percent outperform regular public schools to any degree; 37 percent underperform; and 46 percent have no impact. Even conservative supporters of charter schools like Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute and Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute have chided Guggenheim for saying that certain charter schools have "cracked the code" and know how to close the achievement gap. This sounds more like "ed reformers on crack," Petrilli wrote .

It is true that in the past, unions have protected incompetent teachers and opposed merit pay, but that's changing. Superman takes New York City's "rubber rooms," where teachers were paid to sit idly all day while they appealed their terminations, and the refusal of the Washington Teachers' Union to put Rhee's performance-pay plan to a member vote as exhibits A and B of unions' resistance to reform. But these are odd examples; the rubber rooms are now gone and Rhee's performance-pay program has been voted on and approved by members. Similar performance-pay plans have been adopted with union support in Baltimore, New Haven, Pittsburgh, and Denver.

Teachers' unions have also been at the forefront of efforts to root out incompetent teachers, though they often object to punitive evaluation systems that don't seek to help teachers improve and only rely on student test scores. The American Federation of Teachers supports a plan known as "peer review," in which outside expert teachers work with struggling educators to improve their performance, and recommend the termination of those who don't get better. In Montgomery County, Maryland, a National Education Association district, 177 teachers were dismissed, not renewed, or resigned under a peer-review program within the first four years of its implementation, compared with just one teacher who was dismissed due to performance issues in the preceding five years. Bad teachers are weeded out, but in a way that enhances the status of teachers by making education more like law and medicine, professions that police themselves.

Moreover, teachers' unions support a number of student-oriented reforms like stronger pre-K programs and common core academic standards, both of which have been shown to improve educational outcomes. Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, remarked recently that teachers' unions are often allies for very positive education programs, such as the effort to maintain socioeconomically integrated schools in Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina. Studies show that charter schools, on the other hand, have led to a re-segregation of schools.

As teachers' unions weather the storm of political attacks from Hollywood directors and Democrats associated with Wall Street, the silver lining is that the hallowed political coalition between civil-rights groups and teachers' unions -- which was ruptured during the 1968 strikes -- is today rock solid. Unions and civil-rights groups are the most important players in the coalition for genuinely progressive education reform. If we could only convince the upper-middle-class armchair pundits and filmmakers of the evidence, we might get real education reform after all.

Tomato Workers’ Struggle for Justice Moves to Supermarket Aisles

by Richard Trumka

The fight for justice for tomato pickers is headed to grocery store aisles across the country now that the top three food service companies and the four largest fast-food companies have signed agreements to improve wages and working conditions in the Florida tomato fields.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is gearing up to expand its Campaign for Fair Food to the Publix, Ahold, Kroger and Trader Joe’s supermarket chains, which together have tremendous market power in the produce industry. So far, only the Whole Foods supermarket chain has signed an agreement with the CIW.

The workers are demanding safer, more humane working conditions and a penny more per pound of tomatoes picked. Florida tomato pickers earn 45 cents for a 32-pound bucket of tomatoes, a rate that has not changed for three decades.

You can help the tomato workers. Click here to send an email todayto the CEOs of Publix, Ahold, Kroger and Trader Joe’s to demand they quit stalling and start working with the CIW to protect human rights in their Florida tomato supply chain.

Then, mark these dates on your calendar to join with farm workers from Immokalee and allies from across the country as they rally for farm worker justice: The first rally will be Feb. 27 in Quincy, Mass. at Ahold’s U.S. headquarters. Then, following a week-long tour back down the East Coast, they will protest again March 5 in Tampa, Fla. in Publix’s backyard.

Because of its high-volume purchasing power, the U.S. supermarket industry plays an active role in farm worker exploitation, CIW says in a press release, and:

…with great power comes great responsibility—both for the poverty and brutal working conditions from which they have profited for so many years, and for the work of reforming farm labor conditions in their supply chains that lies ahead.