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If, on November 6, Republicans win control of the White House and the U.S. Senate, and retain control of the House of Representatives, union members will face dark days ahead. Mitt Romney and Congressional Republican leaders have repeatedly expressed hostility toward unions, support for union-busting state governors, and their desire to change federal law and federal policies to weaken or eliminate unions.
ROMNEY: ANTI-UNION
Mitt Romney has promised to "stand up to union bosses." He has criticized the members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as "Big Labor cronies" and "union stooges" who have "wreaked havoc on the law", and he promises to appoint pro-management members. He's criticized President Obama for supporting "Card Check" legislation (the Employee Free Choice Act, which never made it through the Senate) and he promises to make it more difficult to organize a union.
On his website, Romney says he'll "amend NLRA (the National Labor Relations Act) to guarantee that all pre-election campaigns last at least one month." Under current NLRB procedures, elections take even longer than that, and a conservative federal appeals court recently struck down a new NLRB rule meant to speed up the process. Romney wants to make sure that his business supporters know he'll give them plenty of time to terrorize their workers with threats, interrogations and one-on-one meetings, if they ever try to unionize. His website - which reads like it was written by a union-busting consultant - says that to "freely" decide whether or not to join a union, workers need to hear both sides, and that includes hearing "from management about potential costs."
In a speech this year to non-union construction contractors, Romney promised "on day one" to "end the government's favoritism toward unions," saying he'll repeal the Davis-Bacon Act, which maintains decent wages on government construction jobs. He also said he'll "fight for right-to-work laws", a pledge he's made repeatedly. So-called right-to-work laws are really wage-cutting anti-union laws that weaken unions by creating incentives for workers to quit the union. Romney has also repeatedly praised anti-union governors such as Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich, and has promised to escalate their attacks on unions to the federal level.
Romney promises to outlaw voluntary card-check, in which management agrees to recognize the union if a majority of workers sign cards. The "labor" section of Romney's website makes his anti-union attitude clear from the first paragraph. Romney - who made multi-millions at Bain Capital by slashing wages and benefits, exporting jobs, gutting and closing companies - believes unions are bad for business. "Too often, unions drive up costs and introduce rigidities that harm competitiveness and frustrate innovation."
LESSONS OF THE BOEING CASE
In April 2011, the NLRB issued a complaint against the Boeing Company over its announced plans to move aircraft production work from a plant in Washington State, where workers are members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM), to a nonunion plant in South Carolina. The IAM filed an unfair labor practice charge alleging that the transfer of work was illegal retaliation against union workers, and after investigating, the NLRB general counsel agreed, and began legal proceedings to force Boeing to keep the work in Washington.
Many of us know instances of companies moving work to escape from paying union wages, or to punish workers for trying to organize or going on strike. The NLRB rarely does anything about it, and usually there's no proof of the company's anti-union motives. But in this case, the union and the NLRB had the smoking gun - a statement by Boeing CEO Jim McNerny in an October 21, 2009 conference call, posted on a Boeing website and quoted in the Seattle Times, that Boeing was moving the 747 Dreamliner work to South Carolina "due to strikes happening every three or four years in Puget Sound." That's pretty much a confession that the company was illegally moving work because workers had exercised their legal right to strike.
Republicans went crazy over this, and launched an attack on the NLRB and its limited power to protect union jobs from illegal management retaliation. And they blamed President Obama, even though the NLRB does not work for him. "The administration is acting like thugs... trying to bully and intimidate employers," said Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC). The majority of House Republicans voted for a bill to cut off funding of the NLRB - kill the agency by zeroing-out its budget. The bill failed because 60 Republicans joined the Democrats in voting against it. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) introduced a bill to defund the NLRB's work on the Boeing case only. How Congress can stop funding of a single case that an agency is working on was never explained, and Graham's bill went nowhere in the Democratic-majority Senate. Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA), chair of the House Oversight Committee, launched a witchhunt against the NLRB, subpoenaing a slew of documents about the Boeing case which his committee has no right to see because it's an ongoing legal case. Issa has called the NLRB "a rogue agency" which he threatens to "eliminate" or "statutorily change."
The NLRB is an independent, semi-judicial federal agency set up solely to enforce federal labor law - the NLRA. While its general counsel and the members of the five-person board are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, the agency is not part of the administration and does not answer to the president. (This is different from cabinet departments, such as the Department of Labor, which do work for the president.)
Recent Republican presidents have appointed NLRB board members who were hostile to labor - including professional union busters. But after Obama took office and the terms of Bush NLRB appointees began to expire, Senate Republicans filibustered to prevent confirmation votes on the reasonable people Obama nominated to replace them. With the NLRB about to come to a halt as it ran out of board members and could no longer legally make rulings, Obama in January 2012 used his power of recess appointment to fill three vacancies on the NLRB board while Congress was out of town. Republicans again screamed bloody murder.
Every Republican presidential candidate joined the Boeing chorus, crying that by enforcing the law, the NLRB was trampling on the company's "freedom." Mitt Romney praised South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley - who screamed loudest about Boeing case - and Haley endorsed Romney before the South Carolina Republican primary. Haley may be the most anti-union governor in the country. Unlike Scott Walker or John Kasich, she doesn't just go after public-sector unions, but has stridently declared that private-sector unions "are not welcome in South Carolina." When Haley became governor in 2011, she appointed "union-avoidance attorney" Catherine Templeton as head the state labor agency and assigned her the task of keeping unions out of the state - in other words, a taxpayer-funded union buster!
In a party-line vote in September 2011, House Republicans passed a bill to prohibit the NLRB from doing anything to stop companies from moving jobs, even when they admit that they're doing it for illegal anti-union purposes. Because Republicans didn't control the Senate or the White House, the bill went no further. But that bill - and the entire Boeing controversy - tell us that if the current breed of Republicans gains complete power in Washington, they are ready to tear up the labor laws in order to tear down unions.
Last September Romney named William Kilberg, Boeing's chief lawyer in the NLRB case, as co-chairman of his "Labor Policy Advisory Group", and announced that Kilberg will help shape Romney's anti-union agenda. In December the IAM and Boeing negotiated a settlement of their contract and the dispute over the movement of work to South Carolina, and the union withdrew its NLRB case. But Republicans continued bashing the NLRB over the Boeing case, as a way to bash unions and show their commitment to attack workers' rights.
MITT ROMNEY, JOB DESTROYER
Mitt Romney's championing of the "freedom" of multi-billion dollar Boeing to eliminate union jobs should come as no surprise. Romney became very rich at Bain Capital buying up companies, squeezing out costs by cutting wages and pensions, laying off workers, and in many cases, shipping work to China and other countries - all to make money for Romney and his Bain partners. The Obama campaign has been doing an effective job of exposing Romney's record at Bain, and during the Republican primaries even Newt Gingrich went after Romney as a greedy job-destroyer.
Joe Soptic, who worked at GST Steel in Kansas City, MO for 30 years, along with 5,500 other workers, says that after Bain took over the plant in 1993, "It was like working in the sweatshops of the 1930s. It was like going to war every day." Bain loaded the company with $125 million of debt, from which Bain made $40 million. "They're like vampires," says another worker. "They came in, sucked as much money out of us as they could."
Bain took away the workers' health insurance, cut pensions by 50 to 60 percent, drove the company into bankruptcy - and closed the plant. One GST worker says, "We view Mitt Romney as a job destroyer." Joe Soptic adds, "If he's going to run the country the way he ran our company, I wouldn't want him there."