The Labor Agenda
TNYT Editorial, December 29, 2008
There is no doubt that President-elect Barack Obama has chosen a labor secretary who could be a transformative force in a long-neglected arena. The question is whether he will let her.
Hilda Solis, a United States representative from Southern California, is the daughter of immigrant parents with union jobs. She has been an unfailing advocate of workers’ rights during eight years in Congress and before that, in California politics.
Ms. Solis has been a leader on traditional workplace issues, like a higher minimum wage and an enhanced right to form unions. She also has helped to expand the labor agenda by sponsoring legislation to create jobs in green technology, and in her support for community health workers and immigration reform.
Her record in Congress dovetails with the mission of the Labor Department, to protect and further the rights and opportunities of working people. It also dovetails with many of the promises Mr. Obama made during the campaign, both in its specifics and in its focus on the needs of America’s working families.
The main issue is whether the Obama administration will assert a forceful labor agenda in the face of certain protests from business that now — during a recession — is not the time to move forward.
The first and biggest test of Mr. Obama’s commitment to labor, and to Ms. Solis, will be his decision on whether or not to push the Employee Free Choice Act in 2009. Corporate America is determined to derail the bill, which would make it easier than it has been for workers to form unions by requiring that employers recognize a union if a majority of employees at a workplace sign cards indicating they wish to organize.
Ms. Solis voted for the bill when it passed the House in 2007. Senate Republicans prevented the bill from coming to a vote that same year. Mr. Obama voted in favor of bringing the bill to the Senate floor and supported it during the campaign.
The measure is vital legislation and should not be postponed. Even modest increases in the share of the unionized labor force push wages upward, because nonunion workplaces must keep up with unionized ones that collectively bargain for increases. By giving employees a bigger say in compensation issues, unions also help to establish corporate norms, the absence of which has contributed to unjustifiable disparities between executive pay and rank-and-file pay.
The argument against unions — that they unduly burden employers with unreasonable demands — is one that corporate America makes in good times and bad, so the recession by itself is not an excuse to avoid pushing the bill next year. The real issue is whether enhanced unionizing would worsen the recession, and there is no evidence that it would.
There is a strong argument that the slack labor market of a recession actually makes unions all the more important. Without a united front, workers will have even less bargaining power in the recession than they had during the growth years of this decade, when they largely failed to get raises even as productivity and profits soared. If pay continues to lag, it will only prolong the downturn by inhibiting spending.
Another question clouding the labor agenda is whether Mr. Obama will give equal weight to worker concerns — from reforming health care to raising the minimum wage — while the financial crisis is still playing out. Most members of his economic team are veterans of the Clinton administration who tilt toward Wall Street. In the Clinton era, financial issues routinely trumped labor concerns. If Mr. Obama’s campaign promises are to be kept, that mindset cannot prevail again. Mr. Obama’s creation of a task force on middle-class issues, to be led by Vice President-elect Joseph Biden and including Ms. Solis and other high-ranking officials, is an encouraging sign that labor issues will not be given short shrift.
There are many nonlegislative issues on the agenda for Ms. Solis. Safety standards must be updated: in the last eight years, the Labor Department has issued only one new safety rule of its own accord; it issued a few others only after being compelled by Congress or the courts. Overtime rules that were weakened in 2004 need to be restored. To enforce labor standards, the Labor Department will need more staff and more money, both of which have been cut deeply by President Bush.
Only the president can give the new labor secretary the clout she will need to do well at a job that has been done so badly for so long, at such great cost to the quality of Americans’ lives.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Key Questions for Hilda Solis, Nominee for Secretary of Labor, by James Sherk
ReplyDeleteHeritage, January 8, 2009
WebMemo #2196
Complete article w/references @http://www.heritage.org/Research/Labor/wm2196.cfm
The United States Senate will soon render its advice and consent to the nomination of Representative Hilda Solis (D-CA) as the new secretary of the United States Department of Labor (DOL). Solis is the daughter of a union organizer, a past union demonstrator, and a member of the House Progressive Caucus, a group of the most liberal members of the House.
Unions spent an estimated $16.5 million of members' dues to elect Barack Obama and another $85 million for the Democratic Congress and have made it clear that they expect the new Administration to follow through on their priorities. Union leadership unanimously applauded Solis's nomination.
However, union leadership wants the next labor secretary to implement reforms that benefit unions at the expense of their members. The AFL-CIO has published a guide to the policies it wants the Obama Administration to implement.[1] Many of their recommendations are the very types of special-interest policies that President-elect Obama campaigned against.
The AFL-CIO wants the Department of Labor to reduce transparency and disclosure requirements and reduce investigation of union corruption while stripping workers of their right to a secret ballot and facilitating the misuse of their pension funds. Unions want the next secretary of labor to give them more power over their members while holding them less accountable for how they spend their members' dues.
These policies would hurt the very workers the Department of Labor exists to protect. Before confirming Solis as labor secretary, Senators should consider the following questions.
Question #1: Secret Ballots Protect Workers
Organized labor's highest legislative priority is the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act, which effectively replaces traditional secret ballot organizing elections with publicly signed cards. Workers would have to voice their choice in public, in front of union organizers, exposing workers who do not want a union to pressure, threats, and harassment from union organizers. This legislation is popular with union bosses but opposed by large majorities of workers.[2] You support this legislation. Could you explain how taking away private ballots would protect workers?
Answer: The right answer is that it would not. Replacing organizing elections with public card checks is a move in the wrong direction. Card checks expose workers to threats and intimidation from unions and employers. Even when organizers obey the law, taking away secret ballots still leaves workers vulnerable to peer pressure and harassment. Organizers know who has and has not signed, so they repeatedly return to pressure holdouts to change their minds. They give workers a high-pressure sales pitch that presents only the union side and press them to commit immediately without time for reflection. Cards signed under these circumstances do not accurately reflect an employee's true intentions—a fact that unions privately acknowledge.
In contrast, secret ballot elections balance the rights of both employers and unions and ensure that workers have the chance to hear both sides and reflect on their decision before voting. Contrary to union rhetoric, most companies obey the law during organizing elections, and the NLRB promptly remedies illegal discrimination against workers who want to organize.
Question 2: Misuse of Pension Funds
The AFL-CIO wants the Department of Labor to "rescind all 2008 guidance regarding the legal standards imposed on pension plan fiduciaries when considering investments in "economically targeted investments" and "the exercise of shareholder rights."[3] These guidelines provide important protections for workers, preventing union officials from misusing workers' pension funds for their benefit while imperiling workers' retirement. Will you continue to require unions to manage pension plans in the sole interest of workers and maintaining strict fiduciary responsibilities on union pension managers?
Answer: The right answer is that the Department of Labor should keep strict fiduciary requirements on union pension plans. Despite the declining popularity of defined benefit pension plans, unions still manage workers' pension plans worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The government requires unions to manage those pension plans for the sole benefit of workers. Under current regulations, unions may not direct workers' pension funds to favored firms but must maximize the retirement earnings of their members. In the past, unions have invested pension funds in projects operated by well-connected individuals in the union movement that subsequently lost millions of dollars, hurting workers' retirements. They have also spent pension resources to pressure companies to support their political goals—money that came out of workers' retirement funds. Pension funds belong to workers; they are not the unions' funds to distribute to well-connected insiders or use to pressure corporations.
Question 3: Union Financial Transparency
The Department of Labor revamped union financial disclosure forms so that they will now provide meaningful information to union members about how their dues are spent. Now union lobbyists want the Department of Labor to rescind those regulations. Do workers have a right to know how their dues are spent? How would reducing financial transparency benefit workers? Will you commit to keeping the existing financial disclosure requirements in place?
Answer: The right answer is that union members are well served by knowing how their dues are spent. Previous forms provided no meaningful insight into how unions spent their members' dues. The revised LM-2 form now requires unions to itemize all expenses over $5,000. The LM-30 forms require unions to report potential conflicts of interests. The newly promulgated T-1 requires financial disclosure from union trusts, such as worker training or strike benefit funds. These provide workers with valuable transparency into how their dues are spent, so they can hold their union representatives accountable.
They also expose corruption. The SEIU scandal in California was uncovered by journalists examining discrepancies in the new LM-2 forms. Financial transparency holds unions accountable.
Question 4: Union Accountability
Over the past eight years, the Department of Labor has increased the amount of money spent to audit union books to ensure they are accurately reporting their finances. As with businesses, audits hold unions accountable and discourage fraud and corruption. However the AFL-CIO wants the Department of Labor to conduct fewer audits and is lobbying to have the amount of money spent auditing union books cut. What do you believe would happen to compliance if the Department of Labor announced it intended to sharply cut the amount of money spent auditing books? Do you believe audits protect union members?
Answer: The right answer is that audits are necessary to protect union members and ensure compliance with the laws. Congress would laugh at any business that lobbied to have less money spent auditing its books. But that is what the AFL-CIO is requesting. Unions free of corruption have nothing to fear from audits, while they deter wrongdoing in the union movement. Cutting audits would hold unions less accountable and permit corruption.
Will Solis Stand Up to Unions?
Unions are supposed to represent their members, but much of what union leadership wants the next labor secretary to do would undermine workers' rights. Unions want the labor secretary to repeal financial disclosure requirements that increase transparency and enable workers to hold unions accountable. They want fewer audits of their books. They want the freedom to use pension funds on political goals instead of ensuring workers have a secure retirement. Moreover, they want to effectively eliminate workers' right to a secret ballot on joining a union. Organized labor is lobbying for measures that will benefit union bosses at the expense of union members. Senators should carefully consider this agenda when questioning Solis.
James Sherk is Bradley Fellow in Labor Policy in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation.
Our Workers Deserve Secret Ballots, by Elaine L Chao
ReplyDeleteWSJ, Jan 14, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123189678244679531.html
When President-elect Barack Obama initially announced his economic team, one important player was conspicuously absent: his pick for secretary of labor.
But America's work force is central to our economic recovery in the near term and to our sustained prosperity in the long term. Seventy percent of our economy is consumer driven. And most of that consumption depends on workers' paychecks.
The Labor Department has tremendous resources to protect American workers and help them be more competitive in the world-wide economy. The department also has the power to harm American worker competitiveness through misguided regulations and punitive policies that would cause jobs to go overseas or disappear entirely.
Over the past eight years, the Labor Department has worked hard to ensure that labor regulations protect workers, without needlessly making it harder to create and keep jobs in America.
And our record speaks for itself. Today we have record-low workplace injury, illness and fatality rates. The department set new records in the number of workers recovering back wages owed to them through effectively targeted enforcement and our compliance assistance program. To meet the needs of workers in our knowledge-based economy we launched new programs to bring employers, workers, unions and educators together for new training and new career opportunities. The department also secured record monetary recoveries for workers' pension plans.
On the regulation side, we updated old, outmoded rules. These rules were written for jobs such as "key punch operator" that aren't relevant any more. These rules stymied productivity and made compliance nearly impossible, while doing little to protect workers.
You might have also heard about our efforts to update union financial disclosure regulations for the first time in over 40 years. Our new disclosure rules have helped rank-and-file members better understand where their dues are being spent.
This is only a partial list. The bottom line is that we have worked to be pro-worker without strangling the workplaces that employ them. And we've done that because to ride out tough times and stay well positioned for future growth, it is vital that the Labor Department not push regulations that impede job growth.
Yet special-interest groups that purport to have workers' interests at heart are agitating for more workplace mandates. And there will be pressure on the department to retreat from efforts to make federal job-training programs actually prepare workers for real-world jobs in the new economy, instead of funding duplicative programs that train workers for the types of jobs that are disappearing.
One of these counterproductive, special-interest initiatives is "card check," which would deprive workers of the ability to vote privately in workplace unionization elections -- a vital worker protection that dates back to the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
There is a push in Congress to enact card check despite the fact that the vast majority of workers -- including rank-and-file union members -- want to keep the private ballot system in workplace unionization elections and do not want it replaced by a signature card process that will subject them to the pressures of solicitation and potential intimidation by union activists. Ironically, to decertify a union, labor leaders insist on holding private-ballot elections to protect workers from employer intimidation.
Another destructive and undemocratic aspect of the card-check bill is a provision for government-dictated labor contracts in newly unionized workplaces. Under the bill, if an initial labor contract is not agreed to within a congressionally dictated timetable, the government could designate an "arbitration board" to write a labor contract that employers and workers would be forced to live under for two years. This is not just a problem for employers. Workers would not have any right to ratify or reject the contract.
The Labor Department has a far-reaching impact on every worker and every workplace in America. For the sake of all of America's workers, special-interest agenda items must be balanced with economic reality and the need to keep all these workplaces in America.
Ms. Chao is the secretary of labor.