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Updated: 5/25/2005; 4:42:39 PM.

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Thursday, March 10, 2005

Railway Carmen and Industrial Unionism
Those of us who have been stumbling around the nation's rail yards for a few years probably remember when the carmen had their own union, The Brotherhood of Railway Carmen of America. We might also recall that they merged with the Transportation - Communications International Union (TCU) in 1986, becoming its Carmen Division. Like many working rails, the carmen have suffered at the hands of big business unionism that seems more concerned about collecting dues than representing and serving its rank and file members. Kim Moody describes the characteristics of business unionism -

"Call it what you like, its basic characteristics are: top-down organization, closed-door negotiations, dependence on the Democratic Party, a fetish about the union's material property and accumulated wealth, a softness on employer "competitiveness," and a general distrust of the rank and file."

Fed up but motivated, a group of reform minded carmen have created a website - The Steel Wheel - where they are discussing union reform, splitting off from the TCU, and the pros and cons of craft unionism versus industrial unionism.

With the development of the Rail Conference of the IBT and the creation on January 3, 2005 of a Rail Labor Bargaining Coalition composed of

Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division (BMWED);
Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET);
National Conference of Firemen and Oilers (SEIU);
Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen (BRS);
Sheet Metal Workers International Association (SMWIA);
International Brotherhood of Boilermakers (IBB); and
American Train Dispatchers of America (ATDA)

and representing 85,000 railroad employees, there is renewed talk of uniting rail labor across craft lines in order to counter the unity and cooperation enjoyed by the carriers.

"It would be unfortunate for any rail union leader to not be a part of this coalition," said Freddie N. Simpson, President of the BMWED. "This coalition will prevent the carriers from whipsawing unions, large and small alike, and will strengthen all of rail labor at negotiations."

Is this just wishful thinking or could such cooperative action reverse the real pattern in collective bargaining that we have all experienced - declining real wages and givebacks?

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BLET/LIRR Dispute Likely Headed for Arbitration
Judge sides with LIRR in union dispute

BY JOIE TYRRELL
STAFF WRITER

March 9, 2005

A federal magistrate sided with the Long Island Rail Road yesterday in its dispute with engineers who had threatened to strike over the railroad's use of nonunion labor to move trains in a maintenance yard.

Magistrate Robert M. Levy recommended that U.S. District Judge Allyne Ross grant an injunction that would prevent a job action, and that she deny a request by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen that the railroad be stopped from using nonunion labor.

More

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What's Maiming and Killing our Nation's Railroaders?
Some disturbing statistics from the Federal Railroad Administration’s Office of Safety are being reported by BLE&T:

"Since the widespread implementation of remote control in 2002, the number of yard accidents on our nation's railroads have increased markedly, according to statistics obtained from the Federal Railroad Administration’s Office of Safety. In 2002, there were 984 yard accidents. In 2003, there were 1,089, which is an increase of nine percent. In 2004, there were 1,121, which is an increase of 9.7 percent from the previous year."

As Brother Webb has pointed out in his letter to UTU IP Thompson, the apparent rash of accidents and fatalities, even if not directly caused by the implementation of RCO technology, must give us all pause to question the wisdom of allowing an expansion of RCL use and the introduction of other new technologies at this time.

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American Rights at Work and Obstacles to Organizing Under the RLA
The American Rights at Work website contains the following Fact Sheet of interest to rails and all others laboring under the RLA:

Fact Sheet | Published 09-25-2004

Obstacles to Organizing Under the Railway Labor Act

In Workers' Rights Watch: Eye on the NLRB, various workers' stories, and fact sheets , we've shared the challenges the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) presents to workers who wish to organize and collectively bargain. Yet workers in the airline and railroad industry are subject to an entirely different set of rules and regulations for organizing. Find out why the Railway Labor Act (RLA) makes the path for forming a union even more difficult than for workers covered by the NLRA.

Obstacle 1: A Higher Threshold for Voting
The RLA requires that in order to form a union, there must be support from a majority among all eligible company employees - not just those who turnout to vote. This requirement is a higher threshold than the NLRA - and even general U.S. election law - both of which require majority support from only those who actually vote in an election. Imagine if in order to win the presidency, John Kerry or George W. Bush needed the votes of a majority of all eligible voters!

Obstacle 2: Organizing Companywide, Nationwide
In addition to the voting threshold, the RLA requires that a majority of a company's employees at ALL company locations must vote for the union - not just those at any one location. This requires workers to reach out across huge geographical areas, as many of them are covered by national companies. So airline workers in Baltimore cannot decide to organize by themselves, they must also enlist the support of their coworkers in airports across the country.

Obstacle 3: RLA: Benefiting Employers, Not Employees
One example of how this law hinders organizing is that anti-union employers strive to be covered by it. When Federal Express (FedEx) workers tried to organize in 1996, management officials aggressively and successfully lobbied Congress to retain its status as an airline so its employees would not get the chance to organize under the less-restrictive NLRA.¹ It may come as no surprise that workers are organized at UPS because these workers - employed by a company that is no more an airline than FedEx is - are covered by the NLRA. If FedEx employees now want to organize, they must mount a Herculean effort to reach out to 80,000 workers in cities from coast to coast.²  Thus the company gets the help of labor law to hinder its employees' attempts to organize.

Citations:

1. Krause, Kristin S. "FedEx vs. Teamsters; Teamsters Continue to Organize FedEx Despite Obstacles." The Journal of Commerce: Traffic World. June 23, 1997. Pg. 26.
2. Ibid.

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Republican's Use Audits to Punish Unions
Union Locals Face Audits From U.S.

U.S. labor union locals are being audited by federal government inspectors in what officials say is part of a labor law enforcement campaign and union leaders charge is payback for opposing President Bush's reelection.

"We kind of looked at it as something of a shot across the bow of labor," said Bob Frase, executive assistant to the secretary-treasurer of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union (PACE).

The union, based in Nashville, has advised its local units to expect audits this year. PACE represents 275,000 workers in the paper, chemical and energy industries.

The inspectors are being sent by the Department of Labor to audit the locals' annual reports of income and expenditures required by U.S. law.

"This administration is strongly dedicated to enforcing the law," said Labor Department spokeswoman Pamela Groover. "Employers and unions who abuse workers are going to feel the impact."

The department has increased enforcement of safety and pension laws in addition to tightening rules on labor unions, Groover said. The AFL-CIO said the audits were meant to burden all labor unions.

"It means diverting time from critical work to a massive amount of paperwork," said AFL-CIO spokeswoman Suzanne Ffolkes. "It's not surprising given their record on working people. They've been anti-labor since Bush's first term."

At a PACE local representing workers at two Houston-area refineries, the Labor Department auditors arrived in early January and stayed for two weeks, said David Taylor, secretary-treasurer of PACE local No. 4-227.

"They came in every day and stayed all day," Taylor said. "They said it was our first audit since 1983. My secretary's been here 25 years and she said she had never seen this before."

The auditors asked the local to reclassify some expenditures and refile the reports but found nothing improper, Taylor said.

"I've got a very good bookkeeper," he said.

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An aggressive audit of labor unions is only one front in Republicans' multi-pronged attack

We're still puzzled by why the Justice Department would expend resources to put two outstanding union officials like UTU's Charlie Little and Byron Boyd in "jail" and then fail to follow through and clean house by rounding up the rest of the RICOists. The paranoid in us imagines the jailed and the free being squeezed to keep moving the organization in the right direction and to open up new fronts in the attack on classes of service and FELA. Not that they needed much squeezing since embracing the business union model and the magic of interest based bargaining.

But in this era of BushCo unions are fair game and the Cheap-Labor Conservatives are pulling out all the stops to realize Grover Norquist's dream of breaking the labor movement. IN THESE TIMES' David Moberg writes about this multi-pronged attack on unionism in:

Under the Microscope

An aggressive audit of labor unions is only one front in Republicans' multi-pronged attack.

The Letter from Rep. Sam Johnson to Labor Department's Gordon Heddell referenced below in the discussion of the UTU RICO DLC scandal specifically requests information relating to the following question:

"Are unions with DLC programs adequately reporting payments or other items of value provided by DLC program participants (or their consultants, agents or affiliates) to unions and union officials as required under the LMRDA and the regulations thereunder?"

Is this just part of an "aggressive audit" of the union, the purpose of which is, according to AFL-CIO General Counsel Deborah Greenfield, to "saddle unions with expensive and time-consuming requirements to harass them and to provide the kind of ammunition that a Right to Work Committee researcher or Republican staffer would find very useful, but union members would find not useful at all."

Moberg writes:

"But while protection of children and of worker health is being neglected, the Office of Labor-Management Standards, which investigates and audits labor unions, is thriving. This year 48 new positions and a 15 percent budget increase were granted to the office, and since Bush has been in office they have benefited from 94 new positions and a 60 percent overall increase in the budget. Last year the Labor Department began imposing extraordinarily detailed financial reporting requirements for unions and related institutions, like credit unions. Although the AFL-CIO is still pursuing a legal challenge to the rules, the new requirements - which far exceed those placed on corporations - have already eaten up dues that could have been spent on providing members with services. In addition, the reports expose details about union strategies that could be helpful to employers and political opponents."

The Cleveland Mafia were and are victims of the times but they continue, as their own and our worst enemies, to contribute to the financial unraveling of the UTU through their misguided policies. Are the US Attorneys and their prosecution of select UTU officers not really so much about serving justice but more a politicized part of BushCo's war against labor?

How clever it is to take something like LMRDA (or the RICO law) that we assume is there to protect working stiffs and turn it against us. This is a tactic used over and over again by wealth in its war against humanity. It's a tactic that labor must learn to employ against those that oppose us.

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