George Will: Democracy Is Uncivilized (Daily Kos)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/27/91754/7509

George Will: Democracy Is Uncivilized
by PaulVA
Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 07:15:39 AM PST

Hurray for George Will. In between smearing Senator Webb and his daily whines about the high cost of the minimum wage (it's hard to find good cheap help these days) - Will finds the time to take a shot at Americans who dare find a way to advance themselves with a voice at work.

There's a measure of irony to George Will's high minded opposition to workers having the freedom to choose whether or not they want to join a union. Will is a syndicated columnist and as one, he enjoys a contract that mandates what he is compensated by the outlets that run his columns. Then again, that is neither here nor there since in George Will's "civilized" world you do as he says and not as he does.

* PaulVA's diary :: ::
*

In today's Washington Post column, Will finds that the decline in union membership to 12 percent of the workforce is due not to the fact that an average of 23,000 workersare fired each year for trying to form a union (31,000 in 2005) but to Will's notion that unions are not "persuasive enough." It's easy to figure out why it's so hard to get this fact once you look at where he's coming from. In George Will's world, persuasiveness is measured through well-placed glances and obscure references to long dead words belonging to the English vocabuary. Disagreement sparks raised eyebrows and perhaps a few curt remarks of the scandalous variety.

In the real, brutish world that Will writes so much yet knows so little about, real workers lose their real jobs where they lose their real income and eventually their real houses.

In fact, Will dismisses the thousands of workplace rights violations that happen each year with a short glance at the wording behind labor law. According to Will:

There are, however, ample protections against employer pressures that really are abusive.

Washington Post

I wonder what protections he must mean.

Maybe the ones that were supposed to protected Verna Taylor?

Three years later, in 1995, the NLRB ruled that Taylor had discriminatorily terminated the workers based on their union support, and ordered that the company offer to reinstate the six women, along with another pro-union worker fired, and to compensate them with backpay and interest.** However, the company appealed the ruling, and justice for the workers was delayed through multiple court filings, hearings and decisions for almost another 8 years. Finally, in March of 2003, the NLRB issued an order for the company to "make whole" the former employees with backpay and interest owed. But as of April 2004, over a year after the order was issued, the company still refuses to pay the almost $380,000 owed to the workers to redress the wrongful terminations.

American Rights at Work


Sure, the National Labor Relations Act says that workers cannot be coerced into one way or the other in a representational election. In fact, it says it below:

Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any or all such activities . . . .

Section 7, National Labor Relations Act


FULL story at link.

[AX10]

1. Conservativism: The illigitimate idealology.