NLRB to rule on legality of UAW method of organizing unions

By JOHN GALLAGHER , Knight Ridder Newspapers

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=11909777&BRD=1699&PAG=461&dept_id=46377&rfi=6>

The Morning Journal (Cleveland)

DETROIT — The National Labor Relations Board sent a
strong signal this week what a second term for President
George W. Bush in the White House might look like.

In what could be a blow to the United Auto Workers and
other unions, the Republican-majority NLRB said it would
decide whether to curtail a union’s ability to organize
workers though a simplified process known as neutrality
and card-check agreements.

The case probably won’t be decided until sometime in
2005, and the outcome of this November’s presidential
election will have a major impact. The party that
occupies the White House gets to control three of the
five seats on the board, which regulates union-
management relations in the United States.

The current 3-to-2 GOP majority would swing back to more
union-friendly Democratic control if Sen. John Kerry of
Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic nominee, wins
the presidency.

"This is starting a discussion on the most important
issue in American labor law of the current period,
certainly in the last 10 years," said John Raudabaugh, a
partner at the Detroit law firm of Butzel Long and a
former Republican member of the NLRB from 1990 through
1993.

Under neutrality and card-check agreements, companies
agree to recognize a union that has collected signature
cards from a majority of workers indicating they want to
join, without forcing the union to go through a
traditional secret-ballot election.

The UAW has used this simplified process in recent years
to organize workers in the mostly nonunion auto parts
industry, winning victories at Johnson Controls Inc.,
Magna International, Dana Corp., Metaldyne Corp. and
other companies. Unions more and more are turning to
this process because victory through the standard
secret-ballot election can take years to achieve because
of corporate legal challenges.

But in a case brought by an anti-union group known as
the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the
NLRB voted late Monday along party lines to examine how
soon employees can challenge a company’s recognition of
a union as bargaining representative when a secret-
ballot vote has not been taken.

The case involves the UAW’s efforts to organize a Dana
plant in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, and a Metaldyne plant in
St. Marys, Pa. Both companies agreed to recognize the
union after card-check campaigns in 2003. Within weeks,
anti-union employees, supported by the Springfield, Va.-
based Right to Work foundation, filed petitions with the
NLRB to kick out, or decertify, the union. Rulings at
the NLRB’s regional level dismissed the petitions,
saying a union and a company needed reasonable time to
negotiate a contract.

By taking an appeal of the case this week, the
Republican majority on the NLRB board in Washington,
D.C., said it was not making any judgments on the
merits. But its ruling raised the stakes for unions and
employers.

The majority Republicans consists of NLRB Chairman
Robert Battista — a Detroit management labor lawyer
from Butzel Long who once represented the Detroit
Newspapers during the newspaper strike of the mid-1990s
— and members Peter Schaumber and Ronald Meisburg.

Dissenting Democratic members Wilma Liebman and Dennis
Walsh said the right to voluntary agreements between
unions and managements without a secret-ballot vote of
the members was settled 40 years ago. It called the
majority’s willingness to take the case "unsupported —
and, indeed, highly questionable."

UAW President Ron Gettelfinger echoed that Tuesday.

"Card-check elections are a fair and efficient
procedure, recognized for decades by the National Labor
Relations Board and the courts of the United States.
Their use should be expanded, not curtailed," he said in
a statement.

Raudabaugh said a decision is likely to turn on the
question of how soon a decertification vote can be held
once a union has won an agreement with management. In
normal cases anti-union workers have to wait a year or
more to try to throw out a union. The NLRB majority
could rule that a decertification vote could be held
immediately after a union signs a neutrality agreement
with a company.

Both sides claim to represent the spirit of workplace
democracy. Anti-union activists contend that neutrality
agreements and card-check campaigns can be manipulated
by union and management so that rank-and-file workers
never get to express an opinion.

Clarice K. Atherholt, an assembler at the Dana plant in
Ohio, gathered signatures for the decertification
effort. The failure to hold a secret ballot on union
membership, she said, was "the most unfair,
undemocratic, un-American way that I have ever heard
of."

But Stewart Acuff, head of organizing for the AFL-CIO,
the nation’s leading union coalition, said the NLRB’s
traditional secret-ballot process has been hijacked by
anti-union forces. He said companies routinely stall
elections, fire union organizers and threaten to close
plants in advance of a vote.

"It’s a shame and a disgrace," he said. "Workers should
not have to exercise an extraordinary level of courage
to express support for a union, but that’s the way it is
in the United States now."