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November 2004

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UNITE’s Current Campaign

By Site Administrator
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November 2004
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When attempting to form or join unions, workers, especially workers of color, face almost insurmountable challenges. If they complain or speak-up, they are harassed, fired, bullied into quitting and, in many cases, blacklisted. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is the federal body designated to protect workers’ rights and ensure impartiality between employer and employee, but it rarely lives up to its mandate. Many feel that the NLRB has actually functioned to defer, delay, and sometimes even block workers’ rights, in spite of its stated goals. 

Under such bleak conditions, and after four years of the Bush administration’s attacks on working families, can we project an alternative vision of building labor and community power that challenges the NLRB to live up to its mandate of protecting workers’ rights? Can AFL-CIO unions and their rank and file members embrace issues immediately apparent to union members and live up to their potential as a force for social change? Can organizations and coalitions draw attention to the NLRB’s failure, agitate complicit NLRB bureaucrats and recalcitrant employers, and create victories for working people based on labor and community solidarity and power? Can changes be made to the existing NLRB, enabling it to better live up to its mandate of protecting workers rights? 

The current national campaign by UNITE-HERE (North America’s laundry, apparel, and hospitality workers’ union) to organize Angelica Corporation, the largest health care laundry services company in the United States, provides a perfect example of how these questions can be answered. 

The NLRB: A Failure 

Founded in 1935 as part of the National Labor Relations Act, the NLRB’s purpose “is to encourage the process of collective bargaining.” But, according to Fred Feinstein, General Council to the NLRB and its chief prosecutor during the Clinton administration, the NLRB “is simply broken in fundamental ways.” 

In fact, the NLRB is so flawed “unions avoid utilizing its processes when possible and are looking for new and different processes that are far more fair,” said Feinstein. According to Feinstein, the current system of secret ballot elections supervised by the NLRB is “framed as a contest between the union and the employer...placed in the context of a political election,” where both sides have equal access. But the current process “distorts the fact that they are not equal entities.” Secret ballot elections don’t work because “employers have complete control of the process and the workplace, where the company exerts economic control over the work force. 

“The employer can campaign everywhere, wherever, whenever it wants. The employer can compel the employee to listen” to anti-union propaganda. And it is “perfectly legal for the employer to ‘predict’ all forms of dire economic consequences if a union is voted in,” said Feinstein. 

On the other hand, “Employees are restricted. The union can’t get on the work site. The union can compel nothing. No one can consider this a fair process.” 

The WRB: An Alternative 

On May 27, 1993, in an attempt to draw national attention to the NLRB’s failure, JWJ organized a National Day of Action against the NLRB which included sit-ins and protests that shut down NLRB offices in 26 cities across the country. More than 10,000 people participated and 1,000 were arrested. 

After the protests, JWJ and unions involved in the NLRB actions decided to establish an alternative structure to advocate for workers’ rights, especially the right to organize. They agreed that a formal body, to not only hear workers complaints, but also to act on those complaints, was needed as an alternative to the NLRB. As a result, they formed the Workers Rights Boards (WRB). 

WRBs can’t take cases directly to the NLRB or its local appendages, but it can directly influence employee grievances, wrongful terminations, and union organizing campaigns. By utilizing moral and political persuasion and threatening widespread public exposure against recalcitrant employers, which the NLRB isn’t designed to do, WRBs create labor and community powered employer accountability, instead of bureaucratic dependence on antiquated laws. In other words, WRB members are able to use personal authority and community status to mobilize support for and intervene on behalf of workers. 

WRB members include alder- persons, state representatives, ministers, priests, rabbis, other religious leaders, organizers, activists, academics, intellectuals, and celebrities. WRB members emphasize that workers’ rights are civil rights, not just a matter of concern for labor unions, but for the community as a whole. According to JWJ, workers, after all, aren’t just workers. They are neighbors, members of the community, people of faith, students, taxpayers, caregivers, and family members. Attacks on workers’ rights are also attacks on the stability and well-being of neighborhoods, religious communities, schools, universities, and families.

Angelica, OSHA, & NLRB 

Miguel Flores, a Mexican American from Houston, Texas, sits across the table at the local UNITE-HERE office. He was flown into St. Louis, Missouri to speak at a rally outside of Angelica’s corporate headquarters. Flores was fired from Angelica Corporation last spring for joining UNITE- HERE and actively participating in the organizing campaign. “The campaign started on a Friday. The following Monday, Angelica suspended me. And by that Friday I was fired,” Flores said. According to UNITE-HERE, Angelica has 3,000 laundry service employees nationally, about 2,000 of which are in the union. 

“When the campaign started, the company was in a frenzy,” Flores continued. “They began holding captive audience meetings and speaking out against the union. Then they began promising better benefits. They said, ‘We can resolve our problems together.’ ‘We don’t need a union’.” Flores spoke up at a captive audience meeting. Later that day, management asked him to sign a letter stating that he had “thrown a laundry basket down a ramp.” Flores refused and was then suspended for three days. When he returned to work he was fired. 

“They focus on money and production. But they should be focused on the workers. Our insurance is too expensive. We work ten to twelve hours one day and then two to three hours the next, so they don’t have to pay us overtime. Single mothers can’t get time off to take care of their children. Angelica is extremely abusive to its workers,” Flores added. 

While wages and benefits are a major concern, safe working conditions are probably the most important. “We handle extremely dirty linens,” Flores said. “We handle diaper cloths, linen with blood clots, and needles.” Flores said he had to quickly sort through numerous 200 pound bags “straight from the hospitals. Many bags still had blood, guts, body fluids, and different blood borne diseases. We could get hepatitis or HIV.” This process is called “soil sort.” “It used to take ten to twelve people to handle all the bags of linen. Now Angelica expects five to six people to do the job of twelve.” 

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has found Angelica guilty of numerous health and safety violations. On August 31, OSHA issued citations to Angelica’s Batavia, New York plant for dozens of job safety and health standard violations and proposed penalties exceeding $140,000 against the company. Earlier in the year, OSHA proposed nearly $64,000 in fines at two Angelica plants in California. To date federal and state OSHA agencies have proposed fines of over $300,000 for Angelica’s health and safety violations. 

OSHA has also charged Angelica with “willful violation,” its most stringent citation. In some cases, work surfaces were visibly contaminated with blood and other potentially infectious materials. According to OSHA, “soiled laundry was thrown and/or placed on the walking surface on the soil sort conveyer line. Employees routinely stepped in feces or other human waste as a result...” OSHA also charges Angelica with not having a written cleaning schedule, leaving surfaces to be cleaned sporadically, if at all. 

Nationally, UNITE-HERE has filed over 70 unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB, charging Angelica with threatening plant closures, withholding information, spying on workers, and suspending or terminating pro-union workers. While unfair labor practice charges have had some impact, the NLRB doesn’t actively campaign for workers’ rights and since the Bush administration’s appointment of three members to the NLRB’s five member board, this situation has become much worse. 

A WRB Hearing 

On September 22, in St. Louis, Jobs With Justice held its second national WRB hearing. The hearing was in support of the Angelica workers. UNITE-HERE members from six different Angelica work sites gave testimony on health and safety concerns, labor law violations, union busting, and the failure of the NLRB. 

Yvonne Wolcott, from Batavia, New York, said, “We have lots of health and safety issues within our plant.... In our soil department one of the biggest problems is ‘power dumping’ when they unload dirty linen at such a speed that the soil workers can’t keep up and the bins overflow and dirty linen, soaked with blood and other body fluids, starts to pile up on the floor....” 

Nery Jimenez, from Durham, North Carolina, said, “When we started organizing a union, management responded with forced meetings, intimidation, and more pressure. We have filed 15 charges with the NLRB. We demand that Angelica respect our right to organize under a fair and neutral process.” 

Lourdez Perez, from Phoenix, Arizona, said, “I hear Angelica is prepared to spend $1 million to break our union drive.... Why don’t they use that money to give us a raise? Why don’t they use it to assure a safer work place?” 

Vicki Calabrese, from Lorain, Ohio, said, “Several years ago we had an NLRB election. Before the election, Angelica tried to win votes by telling the workers that if they vote against the union they would get a wage increase.... But the majority of us still voted for the union and we won the election.” 

“When it was time to negotiate our union contract,” Calbrese continued, “Angelica used unfair tactics by delaying the negotiations process.... In an NLRB election the company has the upper hand. The company can delay the negotiations process even after workers win the election, and during the campaign the company has time to discourage and intimidate workers...” 

While the national JWJ-WRB hearing did not have an immediate impact on the UNITE-HERE campaign, in many other ways it was a success. The WRB hearing empowered workers and built labor and community solidarity with UNITE- HERE members, put pressure on Angelica to do the right thing, gained media attention for the ongoing campaign, and raised awareness of the NLRB’s failure to protect workers rights. 

According to Margarida Jorge, a JWJ activist, the WRB hearing also accomplished another very important victory. “It clearly illustrated that we are not going to accept the failure of the system as our failure. We’re not giving up.” 

In recent years the AFL-CIO has placed renewed energy, emphasis, and money on organizing the unorganized, recruiting new union members, building rank and file participation in the labor movement and solidifying labor and community based coalitions. In fact, many unions and community groups who have traditionally seen their roles as mutually independent and sometimes antagonistic, are beginning to work together, opening up and cooperating on local and national levels like never before. However, the AFL-CIO’s vision seems limited to issues immediately apparent to union members, rather than as a catalyst for building long-term social change. 

While JWJ-WRBs provide the vision and forward-thinking needed to project an alternative vision of labor and community power that challenges the NLRB’s complicity, more is needed. 

Card check neutrality and the Employee Free Choice Act should be a key part of any effort to fundamentally change NLRB processes. By challenging the NLRB to live up to its mandate and by projecting an alternative vision of labor and community solidarity and power, through WRBs, we can build strength based on democracy and workers’ rights, rather than dependence based on NLRB bureaucrats. Vision, potential, and knack for agitation focused on immediate worker demands and long-term social change enables WRBs to act as an alternative to the NLRB. 

In many ways, WRBs are changing the rules of the game by changing the consequences for employers who violate the law. 

Tony Pecinovsky lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri. He has organized with the Teamsters union and SEIU and is a member of the Newspaper Guild.
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