Card check' may give workers rights again

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/article/20090125/OPINION01/901250327

By Joe Atkins • January 25, 2009

Mississippi may have been a staging ground for one of today's most dramatic new labor organizing methods: the so-called "card check" process allowing unions to organize through a simple card-signing that avoids the traditional months-long election process favored by and often tilted toward company management.

"Card check" is also at the heart of one of the most contentious pieces of legislation facing the new Democrat-controlled Congress this session: the proposed Employee Free Choice Act. A major standoff is already shaping up with President Obama, Democrats and unions on one side, and Southern conservatives, Republicans in general, and business groups on the other.

Just as Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi and surrounding states in 2005, labor contracts were being negotiated at casinos on the Gulf Coast and in Tunica as a result of prior "neutrality" agreements by the casinos' Las Vegas-based owners that allowed a successful card-check election here.

"It was proven that the vast majority of workers wanted a union," said Bill Chandler, now director of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA) but then political director with Unite Here in Mississippi. "We were able to bring a number of organizers into Mississippi. We were given access where we could meet with workers in break areas and in their homes. We did a lot of home visits."

Nearly 90 percent of the casino employees not only signed up to join a union but also to allow payroll reductions for their union fees. Today, approximately 5,000 workers at the Grand and Sheraton casinos in Tunica and at the Grand in Biloxi are members of either Unite Here, the Teamsters, or the International Union of Operating Engineers.

Ironically, organizing at the casinos, with their many immigrant workers, also laid the foundation for Chandler's MIRA, a nationally known champion of immigrant rights.

FULL story at link.