RtW again?

The St. Louis Beason has a good story about the prospects of success for Right to Work for Less in Missouri: https://www.stlbeacon.org/#!/content/32356/onthetrail_rtw_analysis_senate. 

STAND WITH PANERA WORKERS

St. Louis based Panera Bread has some explaining to do.  One update to this story: President Obama has appointed three new members to the NLRB, so Panera needs to get serious and negotiate with the elected exclusive representative of it's Michigan workers.

Stand with Panera: Workers Protest NLRB Nominations Confirmation Hold Up
Community members stand up for workplace rights

Michigan AFL-CIO,
June 21, 2013 by Elizabeth Battiste
 http://miaflcio.org/2013/06/stand-with-panera/

(KALAMAZOO, MI) – On Friday, June 21, workers and community members gathered outside of Panera Bread to protest the hold up of nominations to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) which has resulted in specific instances of workplace retaliation for union activity at Panera Bread locations owned by franchisee Bread of Life.
In 2012, Panera Bread bakers at cafes along the I-94 corridor in Michigan voted to join the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM). More than a year since they voted to form a union, workers are still waiting.
“Even though we voted to form a union last year, we still face a hostile work environment,” said Kathleen Von Eitzen a Panera worker at the Battle Creek location. “In order to rebuild our economy here in Michigan and level the playing field for working people across the country, we need an NLRB that works.”

The NLRB ruled that the company violated Federal Law by failing “to recognize and bargain with the Union as the exclusive collective-bargaining representative of the unit.” The company appealed the decision to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. That court put the case on hold because its holding in another case throws into question the status of current Board members who were recess appointed by President Obama.
“I’m a customer service representative and CWA Local 4123 member, but I’m here to stand in solidarity with Panera workers and other workers who are facing these same fights every day,” said Annette Fox. “No one should fear retaliation from their employer for union activity. In fact, that’s illegal. I hope that the NLRB nominees are confirmed soon so that these workers can see justice upheld.”


One of the original Panera bakers has been fired by the company for his union activity, with little recourse due to the radical decision of the D.C. Circuit.
“I don’t want anyone else to have to go through what I am going through,” said Kyle Schilling, a union activist who was recently fired from a Kalamazoo Panera. “Justice delayed is justice denied.  The Senate must confirm the NLRB’s nominations so workers like me can get the justice we deserve.”
President Obama has nominated a bi-partisan package of nominees for the National Labor Relations Board. Without approval from the US Senate, the NLRB will be left without quorum to operate and make important decisions that affect workers every day.

Overtime is not answer, official says

Why don't Columbia city leaders understand that it would benefit everyone if they communicated with employee unions regularly.   Apparently the police chief and the city manager have not talked with the police association about using money saved from overtime to hire more officers.  Yet they say it won't work.  They should sit down to bargain in good faith with their officers.  Overtime may not be the entire answer, but if they listened to the association, they might find that it is part of the solution.

City staff still plans to pitch tax increase for hiring cops.

By ANDREW DENNEY and ALAN BURDZIAK
Thursday, August 15, 2013 at 2:00 pm

 Dale Roberts, the association's president, said yesterday the group isn't lobbying to eliminate police overtime completely, but a "tremendous cut" would be beneficial to officers who are stretched thin.

"The department has to have flexibility to have some overtime," Roberts said. He added that he has not discussed his pitch with Burton or City Manager Mike Matthes yet, but he has spoken with Burton before about overtime.

"We talked about looking at overtime as a measure as another way to demonstrate the need for officers," Roberts said. "That was the extent of it."


http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/local/overtime-is-not-answer-official-says/article_5574ca4c-05d0-11e3-a888-10604b9ffe60.html

National Labor Board Shutdown Averted as Senate Approves New Members

Working In These Times

Wednesday Jul 31, 2013 11:29 am

By Bruce Vail

The U.S. Senate on Tuesday approved the nominations of five members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), averting a threatened shutdown of the agency amid continuing attacks by Republican Party lawmakers that the Obama-era NLRB is too pro-union.
The votes confirmed a deal struck earlier this month that saw Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) withdraw his threat to overhaul Senate filibuster rules in return for Republican agreement to allow confirmation of a small numbers of presidential appointments to federal agencies. Among the contested appointments approved under the deal were Thomas Perez as the new Secretary of the Department of Labor, four new members of the NLRB and the re-confirmation of the board’s current chairman Mark Gaston Pearce.
With the confirmations fight concluded for now, the NLRB can resume its role of enforcing federal collective bargaining law without fear of imminent shutdown. An estimated 80 million private sector workers are covered by the rules of the NLRB, which would have been forced to suspend normal operations next month when the expiration of Pearce’s original term of office threatened to leave the agency without the legally required quorum to issue decisions or enforce its orders.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka applauded the confirmation votes, stating: “America’s working families applaud the Senate for confirming President Obama’s outstanding and highly qualified nominees to the National Labor Relations Board. This is the first time in more than a decade that the NLRB has been fully staffed. That is good news for all workers seeking to exercise the rights they are guaranteed by law. Those essential rights include the ability to bargain together for fair wages and living standards, and a workplace safe from abuse, harassment, and intimidation.”
“The challenge to this board is to go forward,” adds Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), who was critical of the original deal. The NLRB is facing a number of difficult legal challenges inspired by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Cohen tells Working In These Times, and is certain to face continued hostile scrutiny from Republicans in Congress. “The Republican Party of today doesn’t seem to believe in the concept of any workers’ rights at all, so the NLRB is going to have to fight its way ahead every inch of the way,” Cohen predicts.
Proof of this was provided during the Tuesday Senate votes themselves, Cohen adds. Two key votes in the process were passed on margins of 54-44, with all Republicans voting against labor-supported NLRB candidates. “Nobody raised any objections to the qualifications, or to the quality, of these candidates. They [Republicans] voted against them just because they seem to be opposed to any enforcement of workers’ rights at all.”      
The Senate deal was marked by unprecedented swiftness in the appointment and confirmation of two of the new NLRB members—Kent Hirozawa and Nancy Schiffer. Obama named the two to the posts on July 16, a hurried confirmation hearing was held on July 23, and the final confirmation votes concluded on the evening of July 30. Quick action was part of the Democrat-Republican deal in the Senate, which included agreement by the Democrats to jettison sitting board members Richard R. Griffin Jr. and Sharon Block, both of whom had received controversial “recess appointments” from Obama early last year.
Both Hirozawa and Schiffer enjoyed labor support, and were the subjects of the Republican anti-labor votes referred to by CWA’s Cohen. Hirozawa is currently the top lawyer on the staff of the NLRB Chairman Pearce, and Schiffer is a retired lawyer for the AFL-CIO, with experience in her early career working for the United Auto Workers.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the top Republican on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP), had raised questions at the hearing last week as to whether the pro-labor credentials of the two would prevent then from treating employers fairly once they became NLRB members. He seemed to speak for most Republicans when he issued the following statement Tuesday:

I am voting against two of the nominees...and I want to explain why. One is Mr. Hirozawa and one is Miss Schiffer. Both of them have excellent legal backgrounds, but the problem is that I'm not persuaded—and I hope I will be proven wrong—that they're able to transfer their positions of advocacy to positions of judge, that they can be impartial when employers come before them.

The other two nominees approved Tuesday are experienced labor lawyers associated with large law firms that represent corporations in legal struggles against their own employees. They are Harry I. Johnson III, a partner in the firm Arent Fox, and Philip A. Miscimarra, of the firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. Both were approved on voice votes, with no Democratic Party opposition recorded.
The final element of the Senate NLRB deal will fall into place in September, when ex-member Griffin is expected to be confirmed as the new NLRB General Counsel, a position that also requires Senate confirmation, Cohen further reports.
Griffin, formerly the top lawyer of International Union of Operating Engineers, is slated to replace Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon, who was appointed to the post by Obama in 2010, but never confirmed. Early reports of Griffin’s new appointment provoked howls of outrage from some ultra-conservative groups, but Cohen says top Senate Republicans have quietly agreed to his confirmation sometime after Labor Day.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the HELP Committee, summed up Democratic Party frustration over NLRB appointment fights in a statement on Tuesday: “The time has come to start a new chapter for the NLRB. It’s time to ratchet down the political rhetoric that has recently haunted this agency, and let the dedicated public servants who work there do their jobs. Indeed, I hope today’s votes mark a new beginning for the Board. A revitalized NLRB is a critical part of our continued efforts to rebuild a strong economy and a strong middle class.”
United Auto Workers and the Communications Workers of America are sponsors of InTheseTimes.com.

ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

Bruce Vail is a Baltimore-based freelance writer with decades of experience covering labor and business stories for newspapers, magazines and new media. He was a reporter for Bloomberg BNA's Daily Labor Report, covering collective bargaining issues in a wide range of industries, and a maritime industry reporter and editor for the Journal of Commerce, serving both in the newspaper's New York City headquarters and in the Washington, D.C. bureau.

Strikes, Alliances, and Survival

The American Prospect
HAROLD MEYERSON JULY 29, 2013

Fast-food workers walk today, while the AFL-CIO tries to build something bigger.

Fast-food workers in seven cities are set to walk off their jobs today in one-day actions, escalating what is quickly becoming a nationwide effort to win pay hikes in one of America’s premier poverty-wage industries. Backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the campaign is succeeding in publicizing the plight of low-wage workers in a growing number of states and cities.

How it goes about actually winning higher wages, however, remains unclear.

For its part, the AFL-CIO is preparing for its biennial convention this September, at which it will begin to hammer out some kind of formal affiliation or partnership with other, nonunion progressive organizations such as the NAACP and the Sierra Club. There are changes afoot within the union’s Working America affiliate—a Federation-run and –funded neighborhood canvass that has expanded from a purely (and brilliantly successful) electoral operation, building support for progressive Democrats among white working-class swing-state voters, to an organization bent on raising the minimum wages in selected states and cities.

The common thread in all these activities is a collective realization throughout the leadership of American labor that its traditional way of representing workers—organizing unions in workplaces—is no longer possible, at least for now. Employer opposition to worker unionization has become as predictable and routine as the sunrise, and the penalties that employers incur for violating workers’ legal right to organize are negligible. Labor’s attempts to persuade Congress to stiffen those penalties or allow workers to circumvent employer opposition to their campaigns have been mounted at least once a decade since the 1950s and have failed every time. As a consequence, union membership in the private sector is down to 6.6 percent of the workforce—a level so low that collective bargaining has effectively become extinct in America today.

Out of sheer existential necessity, then, unions have entered a period of experimentation. The fast-food campaigns that SEIU is backing won’t plausibly conclude with a contract with McDonald’s and Wendy’s. The more likely scenario is that those protesting will try to win minimum-wage increases for workers—either generally or in particular industries—at the city level, either through the vote of city councils or of voters at the polls. Nationally, there is substantial support for raising the minimum wage: A recent poll by Hart Research found 80 percent backing for raising the hourly wage to $10.10 and thereafter indexing it to inflation. Nonetheless, congressional and state legislative Republicans have been adamantly opposed to considering even more modest proposals. But some states, including California, permit cities to set their own minimum wages for some or all workers, and as cities tend to be more liberal, diverse, and unionized than states or the nation as a whole, they present targets of opportunity for groups seeking to raise the wages of workers in the retail, hospitality, home-care, and other low-pay sectors. Such efforts have occasionally succeeded; one recent stellar example, about which I write in my article on the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) in the forthcoming issue of the Prospect, saw voters in Long Beach, California, approve an initiative last November that raised the wages of workers in the city’s largest hotels.

Nonetheless, such campaigns, in the handful of places where they’ve succeeded, have taken years to build the level of community support required to prevail. In Long Beach, LAANE, working with the hotel union UNITE HERE, spent half a decade organizing in ethnic communities, among small businesses, and in every precinct of the city. Their victory confirms that such a campaign can succeed—but only after a long, comprehensive, and painstaking effort.

In a sense, the AFL-CIO’s effort to build a larger, more unified progressive force in American politics validates that model, for it comes after decades of efforts to bring together movements that once saw themselves as more opposed than aligned. Under the leadership of George Meany, the Federation’s president from its founding in 1955 until 1979, the AFL-CIO was relentlessly opposed to many of the newer social movements that arose in the 1960s and 1970s and battled labor in intra-Democratic Party fights. A handful of unions—AFSCME, the UAW, the Machinists, SEIU, and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers—welcomed 1960s radicals into their ranks; most reviled them as un-American or worse. Over the years, the antagonism between labor and the ranks of middle-class liberals, environmentalists, and feminists waned, but it wasn’t until John Sweeney became president of the AFL-CIO in 1995 that the Federation fully embraced the other tribes of progressive America.

Still, if some larger, more omnibus progressive organization begins to emerge at the AFL-CIO’s upcoming convention, it won’t be the result of some irresistible kumbaya impulse. It will be the outcome of a series of calculations that labor by itself is becoming too small and weak to have a positive impact on American workers’ lives, that the very act of representing the interests of the American working class has to be transformed if that class is to be represented at all.

In fast-food joints and at the highest levels of union leadership, American labor is sailing into uncharted waters. To remain where it is, its leaders are convinced, is to die.