We need organizing, not card check

The August Cemex ruling by the National Labor Relations Board has stirred up hope among the labor movement. After 40 years, the board finally responded to employer union-busting by requiring that the company recognize the union and begin bargaining.

A majority of cement drivers at Cemex signed authorization cards to be represented by the Teamsters and asked the company to recognize them. The company predictably responded with more than 20 unfair labor practices to break the union before the election. In response, the NLRB ordered the employer to begin negotiating without a representation election.

It is certainly way past time for the NLRB to punish union busting employers like Cemex. The ruling has been celebrated as an indicator of the Biden administration’s support for unions. The Ford Foundation funded American Prospect magazine even claimed it “makes union organizing possible again,” as if we ever stopped.

Due to loopholes, Cemex doesn’t require the boss to bargain with all majority unions demanding recognition. It doesn’t overturn the previous longstanding 1949 Joy Silk rule which required the employer to bargain with a union unless it could challenge the majority support for the union.

While the Cemex ruling will help, only we workers can organize unions. No series of temporary labor board rulings will do that for us.

Although this will likely shorten the time it takes to begin bargaining, it won’t help new unions actually bargain a first contract. As we have seen at Amazon, Trader Joe’s and Starbucks, organizing a union, winning an election and obtaining voluntary or mandatory recognition isn’t enough. An employer must “bargain in good faith” but there is no requirement they actually come to an agreement.

As I wrote about on these pages, about one-third of unions are forced to negotiate for more than three years to achieve their first contract, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Although we are seeing an upsurge in elections, they still amount to nearly one-third the number of 25 years ago.

Because it is not a law, the Cemex rule will only be temporary. It will also not reverse the use of labor law as a weapon of class warfare against workers. When the other party takes the White House, they stack the NLRB with party loyalists who do the bidding for the bosses and reverse previous favorable rulings or simply do not enforce them.

Although it’s not a panacea, it is preferable to pass an enforceable law. For half a century there has been a bi-partisan consensus that has made it harder for workers to organize and easier for employers to engage in union avoidance with little to no costs.

Since 1976, not one of the four Democratic administrations in office for six terms has managed to pass any labor law reform even when they controlled both houses of Congress. Even the most watered-down card-check legislation pushed during Obama’s presidency died in Congress.

The workers organizing new unions, taking over leadership of their moribund unions and striking didn’t wait for a temporary favorable NLRB ruling. Everything we are doing right now is happening despite labor law being stacked against us even in supposedly union-friendly states like my own California.

Liberals like the American Prospect want to celebrate Democrats as “friends of labor” even after they broke the railroad strike and arm-twisted the UPS Teamsters leadership into not striking. Temporary labor board rulings and walking the UAW picket line are simply empty campaign season gestures.

What we need are fewer regulatory fixes and more labor leaders who speak the truth to the bosses power and put union resources into organizing workers to engage in a strategy of escalating disruptive tactics.

The United Auto Workers’ president, Shawn Fain, seems to be doing just that. When the UAW strike began last month, Fain warned, “It’s a battle of the working class against the rich, the haves versus the have-nots, the billionaire class against everybody else.”

Fain isn’t running away from calling our struggles what they are — a struggle between classes. He said, “people accuse us and say this is class warfare. There’s been class warfare going on in this country for the last 40 years. The billionaire class has been taking everything and leaving everybody else to fight for the scraps.”

We need to hear much more of that, rather than thanking politicians for empty election stunts.

Fain isn’t alone. At the launch of the actors strike in July, the largest in Hollywood in six decades, SAG-AFTRA's president, Fran Drescher, said much the same as Fain when the union walked out in solidarity with the Hollywood Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike since May.

Drescher warned that “what’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor, by means of when employers make Wall Street and greed their priority, and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run.”

Her point, of course, was that the same workers who make things run can also make it stop.

Many workers want to fight. Ordering the boss to be nice to us isn’t going to change that. After 40 years of a one-sided class war, it’s far too late to tell both sides to shake hands.

Robert Ovetz is editor of “Workers' Inquiry and Global Class Struggle” and the author of “When Workers Shot Back” and, most recently, “We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few. Follow him at @OvetzRobert