By Josh Eidelson

– A Supreme Court case to be heard this month could deal another body blow to the embattled U.S. labor movement. The case, Harris v. Quinn, offers the court’s conservative majority a chance to make so-called right to work the law of the land for millions of public sector workers.

And it targets one of the most effective ways unions have grown their ranks – getting governors to classify the growing ranks of taxpayer-funded home care workers as public employees with unionization rights – and a decades-old precedent that the 2012 Knox v. SEIU case suggests justices may be itching to overturn. If the court strikes that 1977 (Abood) precedent – that workers in union workplaces can be required to pay fees for “collective bargaining activities,” though not for “ideological activities unrelated to collective bargaining” – unions fear further defunding, diversion, division and discrimination will follow.

To consider the case, Salon called up Harvard Law School professor Benjamin Sachs, a former union attorney and founder of the On Labor blog. A condensed and edited version of our conversation follows.

What is at stake in this case? How broad a ruling do you think we could see?

I can imagine a range of things that could happen. The court could just affirm the Court of Appeals decision, in which case the law would essentially stay where it is today. I think that’s less likely than the other possible scenarios.

Assuming that the state of Illinois loses, the unions lose, you could imagine a number of things happening. I think the most limited ruling would say something like this: Abood is still good law — with respect to let’s call them “traditional public employees,” it is constitutional for a state to require the employees to pay dues to a union for the union’s non-political activities. But the court would go on to say these home-care workers are not traditional public employees, they don’t look like traditional public employees, they’re really employed by these private individuals in whose homes they work, and so even though we’re leaving the basic law of union dues as it is, we’re saying it doesn’t cover home-care workers of this kind. That would be a devastating ruling for unions in the home-care sector, devastating in the sense that it would upend their ability to collect dues. But it would leave untouched dues-collection practices for the vast majority of public sector employees.

The third possibility is the one I think that is on everyone’s mind, and in some ways probably the most likely outcome of the case. That ruling would say Abood is wrong, we overturn it: It is unconstitutional in the public sector to require a public employee to pay dues to the union, even when those dues are used only for collective bargaining purposes.

That ruling would convert all public sector employment into a kind of right-to-work regime in which no mandatory dues can be required even though the union is required to represent everybody in the bargaining unit. That would be an incredibly sweeping opinion, with dramatic consequences for public sector unions all over the country, including teachers.

This is not just a kind of labor law, labor union issue. Public sector unions are incredibly important to our politics. They are a primary supporter of the Democratic Party. If you make unconstitutional the dues arrangements in the public sector, you’re really going to — I don’t want to say “cripple,” but hinder dramatically the ability of unions to participate as vibrant political actors.

There’s another thing the court could do. This case all along has been about “mandatory dues.” But in the briefing to the Supreme Court, the Right to Work Committee has now expanded what they’re asking for. So they’re now asking not just that mandatory dues be unconstitutional, but that “exclusive representation” itself be unconstitutional. If that argument is considered by the court and wins, the only kind of unionism you could have in the public sector is “minority” or “members-only” unionism, so that the only people that would be covered by a collective bargaining agreement and represented by the union are those who affirmatively desire to become members.

What do you think that would do to unions’ clout?

The risk is that employers play the unions off each other, and in the long run undermine unionism, but there are also very good and important arguments in favor of minority unionism. So I think it’s hard to predict what it would do to unions’ clout. But most likely it wouldn’t be good.

The statement that Alito made in Knox — that “such free riders arguments … are generally insufficient to overcome First Amendment objections” — do you see that as a tell when it comes to what he and his conservatives colleagues would do on this case?

It’s really risky to try to predict what the Supreme Court will do and it’s even risky to predict what an individual justice will do in a given case. That being said, I think it’s pretty clear that at least one, if not five, members of the court in Knox were signaling an unease with what is fairly settled law in the public sector union context.

There are parallels between the public sector law in Abood and the private sector law that exists in the 1988 case Beck, in terms of drawing a distinction between collective bargaining activities workers can be required to pay for, and political activity that they can’t. If the court moved to the right on public sector dues or fee deduction, would that open a door to a shift in the private sector?

In the private sector, the question [for the Supreme Court] is “what does this federal statute say” — the National Labor Relations Act” — not “what does the Constitution say?” Because under our well-established constitutional law, the Constitution binds the government, not private actors …

What federal labor law now does with respect to the private sector is it just allows private employers and private sector unions to bargain contracts which require the payment of dues. Under constitutional doctrine — what’s known as the “state action” doctrine — that kind of arrangement, where the government says you can bargain a contract which says x, that’s not enough to implicate the Constitution.

No matter what the court says in Harris v. Quinn, that holding should not change the law with respect to the private sector. The only way that Harris v. Quinn changes the law with respect to the private sector is if the court also very fundamentally changes something about the state action doctrine, such that private sector collective bargaining agreements become state action that implicate the Constitution.

The National Right to Work Foundation, which helped bring this case, has described it as an issue about “forcing home-care providers into union ranks.” What do you make of that line of argument?

Number one: There’s never a union unless the majority of the employees themselves affirmatively desire a union. What any state can do, what any private sector employer can do, is give employees a vote about whether or not they want a union — and then the principle of majority rule applies.

Number two: Even under majority rule, nobody can be forced to become a member of a union anywhere in the United States. What people can be required to do is to pay for representational services that they’re provided. The union has to represent everybody who’s in the bargaining unit, even the people who voted no. Along with that obligation on the union comes a requirement that everybody pay dues for the representational activity that the union is statutorily obliged to undertake.

To characterize that as people “being forced into union ranks” seems to miss some important nuance.

In recent years we’ve seen unions, including the Service Employees International Union, which you used to work for, successfully arguing that categories of domestic workers who are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act — and also often from the way workers are thought about in U.S. culture — in fact are at least in part public employees. And thus that they have access to public employee labor law, which in many cases is more pro-union than private sector labor law. How much more room is there for that strategy to advance at the state level, if Harris v. Quinn does not change the existing law?

There are a number of contexts in which state money is paying for people’s labor, and where the work relationships are atomized so it’s not the public schools, it’s not the Department of Motor Vehicles, but it’s where individual workers are providing services dispersed across workplaces and geographies. Home-care work is a good example of that, childcare work is another. This accounts for a significant part of the labor force. These are very important services. It seems to me that there is no reason to exclude these workers from collective bargaining regimes …

States have set up bar associations for lawyers and required lawyers to pay bar dues, and those arrangements have been challenged on just the same grounds [as] Harris v. Quinn … And what the Supreme Court has said is: Look, the state has a real interest in making sure there’s an operative bar in the state; we need that to ensure that the practice of law is ethical and effective and so forth. And if we don’t require everybody to pay dues, nobody will pay dues.

Whether or not you call childcare workers employees of the state, it’s just beyond argument that a state like Illinois has a real interest in running these home-care programs. The interest they have is in making sure people can get care in their homes rather than in institutions. And as part of that state interest, Illinois can make a legitimate decision that they want to interact with the workers as a collective rather than as individuals. And once you make that decision, you have to charge people for it — or you run into this free-rider problem.

You wrote about Mulhall v. UNITE HERE, which also could have had sweeping consequences for union organizing. The decision that ultimately the majority made, that that case was “improvidently granted” – the decision in some sense to punt [rather than ruling] – what, if anything, do you conclude from that about the current court?

If you were to say, what are sort of the two most viable, important sort of mechanisms or strategies for organizing workers into unions today, you would say private organizing agreements of the sort that were challenged in Mulhall, and public sector organizing in home care and childcare of the sort that are challenged in Harris. So the two most important legal strategies for organizing workers into unions in the United States today are both being challenged in the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court agreed to hear challenges of both those strategies. Mulhall was an existential threat to the private sector union movement. Harris an existential threat to the public sector union movement. That’s notable.

It seems, from what we can see publicly, that there was some disagreement about whether the best course or the right course of action was dismissing Mulhall or reaching the merits and ruling essentially for the union in that case — it did not seem that there was majority support for ruling for the respondents in that case.

Does that tell us anything about the current case, or about the merits of that case as a vehicle?

I guess what you might say is that the original grant of certiorari in Mulhall, given all of the very deep procedural problems with the case, might indicate some hostility among some justices to the kind of private organizing agreements that were at stake in the case. At the same time, there weren’t enough votes on the court to reach a holding in that direction on the merits.

Source: http://www.salon.com/2014/01/06/scalias_golden_chance_to_kill_unions/

By Mike Elk

– On Friday, yet another nail was put in the coffin of the defined-benefit pension in America. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the percentage of U.S. private-sector retirement plans with defined benefits fell by half between 1989 and 2010, from 42 to only 22 percent. Yet this type of plan is much preferred by unions and worker advocates over defined-contribution plans such 401(k)s, because if a company makes bad investment decisions, workers’ retirement benefits don’t suffer.

Boeing is one of the few remaining major corporations in the United States that still offers defined-benefit pensions. But on Friday, 30,000 union Boeing workers in Washington state voted to give up the pensions for new hires and to let the company freeze the plans for all workers in 2016.

“I don’t see a way forward on pensions. I don’t see what it is that we can do,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of EPI, which advocates for low- and middle-income workers. “Retirement security right now is wishful thinking.”

The vote by members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) Lodge 751 came after Boeing threatened to move production of the 777X jet line, along with potentially thousands of jobs, out of Washington state unless workers agreed to the contract. The workers voted down a similar contract in November, but Boeing refused to budge—even though the company is doing well, with over $400 billion dollars in back orders and a program to buy back more than $10 billion in its own stock.

In December, the international stepped in and forced the local, which opposed the deal, to hold another vote. In a bid to keep their jobs, the workers voted 51-to-49 percent on Friday to ratify the slightly revised contract, which ends defined-benefit pensions and bans workers from striking for eight years.

“Boeing is one more point in a long trend of employers shedding their pension liability,” says Eisenbrey. “Looking ahead, they don’t want to be in a situation where we go through another stock market plunge and they wind up having to put a lot of money in the pensions’ problem. From an employer’s point of view, a defined-contribution plan is the easiest thing, you just put in 3 percent from an employee’s paycheck and they invest. If the employee invests badly, then it’s their tough luck. Its just simpler.”

The loss of pensions at Boeing marks a major setback for unions, as employers typically follow the example of other employers at the bargaining table in terms of what constitutes a reasonable demand. Since the financial crash, unions have given up pensions for new hires at large, profitable, industry trendsetters such as General Electric, Verizon, Honeywell and now, Boeing.

Though this marks a sea change toward retirement insecurity for tens of thousands of U.S. workers during Obama’s tenure, thus far the president has said nothing about the trend.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says the president could use his bully pulpit on the issue. “Certainly he could say something about preserving DB pensions,” says Baker. “That wouldn’t cost him anything, but apparently it is not even on his radar screen.”

Indeed, U.S. presidents have occasionally weighed in on or intervened in labor struggles, as when President Richard Nixon stepped into mediate the 1971 Bituminous Coal Strike. In 2008, then President-elect Obama spoke in support of the laid-off workers who occupied the Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago. Obama also publicly praised the United Auto Workers for making concessions as part of the auto bailout.

So why hasn’t the Obama administration said anything about an issue that affects so many Americans?

“They don’t give a damn and don’t want to piss anyone off over it,” says Baker. “It’s pretty obvious that Obama doesn’t feel the same obligation towards supporting unions as he does towards pushing the agenda of major corporations.”

While President Obama did not speak out on behalf of Boeing workers, the President is quite open about being a major public advocate for Boeing.

Speaking to the Export Council last September, President Obama said, “I think Jim [McNerney, Chairman and CEO of Boeing], at least, will confirm that I’m happy to go out and make sales. I’m expecting a gold watch—(laughter)—from Boeing at the end of my presidency, because I know that I’m on the list of top salesmen at Boeing. And that applies to all of you.”

EPI’s Eisenbrey says that the Obama administration has been much more focused on cutting Social Security than shoring up American’s retirement security. Last spring, the Obama Administration announced its support for a proposal to amend Social Security known as “chained CPI,” which the AFL-CIO opposes because it entails lower benefits for retirees. “We should be increasing benefits and their proposal was to have a technical adjustment which was a benefit cut,” says Eisenbrey.

Working In These Times reached out to the White House for a reaction to the Boeing vote, but did not receive a response. As with many labor issues, the President has once again remained silent while union workers have taken a hit.

Meanwhile, Boeing workers are adjusting to less secure retirement futures. John Kleiboeker, a Boeing worker of 16 years and the president of the Machinists Local Lodge 63, told The Oregonian, “I’ve got 15 years to retirement. … I’m looking at a loss of $250,000.”

Source: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/16068/obama_administration_stays_quiet_as_boeing_strikes_major_blow_to_pensions/

By Bryce Covert

Wisconsin state Sen. Glenn Grothman (R) is pushing to undo the state’s law that employers have to provide their employees with at least one day off a week, the Huffington Post reports.

The Huffington Post obtained an email Grothman sent to other state lawmakers on Friday in which he proposes legislation that “would allow an employee to voluntarily choose to work without one day of rest in seven.” State Rep. Mark Born (R) is sponsoring the legislation in the state Assembly.

Wisconsin is somewhat unique in having the law on its books. “Right now in Wisconsin, you’re not supposed to work seven days in a row, which is a little ridiculous because all sorts of people want to work seven days a week,” Grothman told The Huffington Post. But workers don’t have to get a day off every seven days, as they could work for up to 12 in a row “if the days of rest fall on the first and last days of the 2 week period,” according to the law. Grothman called the law “goofy” and called undoing it a matter of “freedom.”

While he argues that the law would ease workers’ ability to work overtime, it’s possible that employers would force their employees to work the extra time, making it less than voluntary. “It’s a very hard thing to know whether something is truly voluntary or not,” Vice President of the Economic Policy Institute Ross Eisenbrey told the Huffington Post. “If the employer puts pressure on people and lets them know they will be unhappy if workers exercise their right to have a day off, that might be enough so that no worker ever does anything but volunteer to work seven days a week.”

In fact, the power usually lies with employers and instances of them abusing labor laws are already on the rise. In 2009, two-thirds of low-income workers said they had experienced a wage law violation in the previous week alone. Wage theft, where an employer illegally withholds overtime pay or makes its employees work off the clock, robs low-wage workers of more money than is stolen from banks, gas stations and convenience stores combined. Actions filed in federal court alleging wage and hour violations increased by 400 percent between 2000 and 2011.

And the law doesn’t always come to workers’ rescue. In California, workers recovered less than half of what was taken from them from 2008 to 2011, and, worse, 83 percent of those who actually proved a case of wage theft still never got what they were owed.

American workers already put in more hours and are guaranteed less time off than most other developed peers. We work more than in any other industrialized countries. Unlike in the United States, it’s illegal in six of the 10 most competitive countries in the world to make workers put in more than 48 hours a week. The United States also lacks laws guaranteeing that workers can take time off if they or their family members are sick, will get vacation or holiday time off, or can take paid time off for the arrival of a new child. Many other developed and competitive countries, on the other hand, do guarantee these things.

Grothman would also go further and take away the national holiday for government workers on Martin Luther King, Jr., day. He was a sponsor of the country’s first preemption bill that blocked cities and local communities from enacting paid sick days legislation in Wisconsin.

Source: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/01/05/3120741/grothman-weekends/

From The PA. AFL-CIO

– We Look Forward To Working Together In 2014 To Achieve More Prosperity For Pennsylvania’s Working Families

Rick, Frank, and the entire (PA. AFL-CIO) staff express their thanks and appreciation to all of you who joined us in helping meet the many challenges we faced in 2013. Your activism and support helped defend and promote good jobs, decent wages and benefits for all of Pennsylvania.

As we begin a new year we wish you peace and prosperity. We are optimistic about the future and our continued success as we work together to defend and improve the living standards and quality of life for workers, and as we bring more good jobs back to Pennsylvania.

Once again we will face many of the same challenges we faced in 2013 – attempts to privatize valuable public assets and services including the wine and spirits stores; additional attacks on good pensions and on good wages.

This new year also gives us the opportunity to secure gains by increasing the minimum wage, by expanding quality affordable health care for all, and by promoting union made products and services that are made and provided in Pennsylvania and the U.S.A.

We look forward to working together in meeting the challenges and in achieving more progress for the working families of Pennsylvania.

Thank You Again From All Of Us.

Source: http://www.paaflcio.org/?p=3343

By Chris Arnold

When members of Congress return to work next week, at the top of the “to-do” list is whether to renew emergency unemployment benefits. An extension of the benefits , which means 1.3 million out-of-work Americans are no longer getting unemployment checks.

But whether or not benefits are extended, conservative and liberal economists alike want to see the government improve the underlying program: They’re proposing changes that might help more people find jobs more quickly.

Helping the unemployed get training while they’re collecting benefits is one suggestion.

“Community colleges have been a good investment that have enabled people to get skills to get somewhat better paying jobs,” says Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research. But he says many states don’t do enough to support unemployed people getting that sort of training.

He’d also like to see more of what’s called work sharing, where instead of laying off people, a company reduces hours for most workers. And for time they’re not working, the government uses unemployment money to pay them. It’s something that’s reduced unemployment in Germany.

Some conservatives like this idea, too.

“I would like for Congress to make it mandatory,” says Michael Strain, an economist with the American Enterprise Institute. He says Congress authorized this German-style work-sharing option for employers in 2012, but it’s only up and running in some states. He says all states should give companies a work-sharing option and, like Baker, thinks the program hasn’t been well-publicized.

Strain has other ideas, too. Some involve helping workers get to areas where there are more jobs.

“In some of the states, the labor market is booming and healthy, and unemployment is really low, so I’ve suggested that we offer relocation vouchers to the long-term unemployed — only to the people who want them, so no one is being forced to move or anything — but we say, ‘Hey look, you’ve been looking for work for seven months and you haven’t found one yet. Do you want us to cut you a check and you can move to North Dakota, or move somewhere where the labor market is much healthier, and where you may have a much better shot at getting a job?” Strain says.

He says he’d also like the government to pay for busing to help unemployed lower-wage workers who live way outside urban centers (in distant suburbs sometimes known as exurbs). He says free busing would help such job seekers afford to take jobs with farther commutes and closer to the hustle and bustle of major metro areas where they’d be more likely to find work.

But should lawmakers extend benefits when they come back next week? Strain says yes.

For one, he says, long-term unemployed workers are more likely to drop out of the workforce and give up if they get cut off — and there are still three times as many people looking for work as there are job openings. So that means hundreds of thousands of Americans just won’t be able to find a job anytime soon.

“Society is failing for them, really through no fault of their own,” Strain says.

Still, other conservatives oppose extending benefits again. They’re worried about the cost, and say that workers would be looking more aggressively without the extended benefits.

TO LISTEN TO AN AUDIO OF THE STORY, GO TO: http://www.npr.org/2014/01/02/259222365/for-the-unemployed-ideas-to-help-bridge-the-gap-to-work

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Twenty-five states, (including Pennsylvania) and Washington, D.C., have work-sharing options:

Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Washington

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT HOW THE PROGRAMS WORK, GO TO: http://www.clasp.org/resources-and-publications/publication-1/Work-Sharing-An-Alternative-to-Layoffs.pdf