Ending America’s labor pains: the Solis Confirmation

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by Ian Williams

President Barack Obama is exceeding the modest expectations that some of us had for him. His appointment of Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor marks the end of three decades of unbridled union-bashing, which saw the degree of unionization in the American labor force plummet. She is an explicit supporter of unions – a far cry from Ronald Reagan’s having the PATCO organisers led away in shackles.

While being “pro-business” has never been a bar to political advancement in Washington, being accused of being pro-labor has all too often been the political equivalent of paedophilia. Though Republicans have been natural, one might add phobic, union-bashers, even Bill Clinton took union money and votes and then denounced them as “special-interest groups” (unlike, say, the bankers, whose money he took and whose interests he cultivated). Emulating Clinton, Tony Blair did the same in Britain – refusing to roll back much of Margaret Thatcher’s anti-union legislation and demanding exemptions from EU regulations that gave workers more protections (despite Blair’s alleged Europhilia).

The National Labor Relations Board, set up by Franklin Roosevelt to help workers unionise, claims that it is enforcing the statute that “guarantees the right of employees to organize and to bargain collectively with their employers, and to engage in other protected concerted activity with or without a union, or to refrain from all such activity”. But for years that last phrase has covered most of their practice. Certainly employers have spent untold millions in the gums of NLRB enforcement actions.

The right in the US are the ideologues, while most union members are pragmatic, lacking the long-term political objectives that used to be common to unions elsewhere in the world. Yet American conservatives and employers display a pathological fear of the unions, Big Labor, that Europeans find difficult to understand.

Unions may not be on par with “terrorists” or “communists”, but they are close. “Staying union free is a full-time commitment”, asserts the Wal-Mart training manual – and the company has been prepared to close plants rather than recognise or negotiate with a union. In common with other employers Wal-Mart deploys a phalanx of expensive, union-busting lawyers and consultants, prepared to litigate exhaustively against any adverse NLRB decision and to pre-empt any attempt to unionise.
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