Thank you, Christine [Kelly], for those kind words. Thank you to New Political Science for inviting me to be here at APSA. And thank you all for your warm reception. I’m delighted to be with you on this Labor Day weekend.
The subject for this evening’s lecture is, “Can we be a democracy if democracy ends at the workplace door?” I’d like to start by stealing a technique no doubt familiar to many in this room. Let’s start with the “John Sweeney Test.”
The first question is this: How much higher are the median weekly earnings of union workers compared with those of non-union workers—six percent, 12 percent or 20 percent?
Let’s have a show of hands. How many say six percent? How many say 12 percent? How many say 20 percent? You’re all wrong—the answer is 26 percent.
Next question: How many workers became new members of AFL-CIO unions last year—125,000, 200,000 or 300,000? Raise your hands if you say 125,000. How many say 200,000? And how about 300,000?
Wrong. The answer is 500,000 workers organized with AFL-CIO unions last year.
Now for the last question: how many non-union U.S. workers say they would join a union if they had the chance? Who would guess two million? Who would say five million? Who would go as high as 12 million?
You’re all wrong again. According to independent national surveys, an estimated 42 million men and women in non-managerial jobs in this great land of ours say they would join a union in a New York minute if they could.
So everybody in this room failed the “Sweeney Test.”
Now you probably have a couple of questions. One may be: is it fair to give a multiple-choice quiz and not include the correct answer as one of the choices?
And the other is likely to be: if 42 million people want to join unions, and workers’ living standards are higher with a union, why are only 500,000 a year doing so? In fact, why doesn’t the labor movement have 50 million members instead of 16 million?
Good questions, and the answer to the first one is that I use the “Sweeney Test” to illustrate the fact that when the rules are changed arbitrarily or ignored in a test or in a contest—say a union election—it’s impossible for someone to pass the test.
The answer to the second question—why aren’t more people able to join unions and what are the ramifications for our country—is going to take the rest of this evening. To help us get started on that task, I’ve brought along a friend.
Actually, I was going to bring two friends to share their stories with you tonight. One is a worker at a Cintas laundry plant in this area. But a funny thing happened. She was mysteriously called in to work this evening, although she was not scheduled to work.
Of course, that happens all the time. Nonunion workers often have little say over their schedules—and no mechanism to redress unfair scheduling. But she feels she was called in because the company got wind that she was going to come speak to you tonight. She told us she would lose her job if she didn’t go in.
And this struck me—on Labor Day weekend, in this great democracy, a worker can’t get a night off to talk about fundamental workplace issues with America’s political scientists. Ironically, she’d lose her job for talking to you about what happens to workers when they try to win a voice at work.
Our other friend is here tonight. David Faris is a graduate teaching assistant in political science at the University of Pennsylvania here in Philadelphia. He focuses on international politics and the middle east. He’s a member of Get-UP, an organization which has been struggling for three years to win union representation for the 1000 graduate teaching and research assistants at Penn.
I want to ask David to share his story with us now.
[David Faris speaks] My name is David Faris and I am a political science graduate student at Penn. I’m also a member of GET-UP, the graduate employee organizing campaign affiliated with the AFT. We are in the 3rd year of our fight to gain recognition from the Penn administration.
As most of you know, graduate employees are low-paid, front-line teachers and researchers with little job security. Penn is one of America’s wealthiest universities, yet its graduate employees are underpaid. If we’re lucky, some of us will earn $15,000 this year, which is 20% below a living wage in this city. And the more graduate students universities like Penn hire to work for a pittance, the more tenure-track jobs disappear forever.
We lack adequate health care. It cost me more than a month’s rent just to have an MRI on my back last year. I didn’t even bother with physical therapy, because I knew I couldn’t afford it.
Penn has a tax-exempt, $8 billion physical plant, but many of us have no office space or access to the equipment we need to do our jobs professionally.
We played by the rules. We garnered majority support in just under three months of organizing in fall 2001. Penn refused to recognize us. We then filed for an election with the National Labor Relations Board. Penn used the law to stall our vote for over a year. We finally got to vote in February 2003. Exit polls and surveys indicate that we won by a solid majority. On election night, federal agents impounded our ballots because Penn appealed our right to even have an election. Here we are six months later and the votes have not yet been counted and bargaining has not begun.
We are united, determined, and angry. We followed the law and the law has been used against us. I call on all of you to sign our petition and help us to convince Penn to count the votes and come to the bargaining table.
Thank you, David. You’ve not only helped dramatize some of the problems workers face when they try to join or form unions, you’ve made us keenly aware that when it comes to what goes on in the workplace, democracy isn’t an abstract notion. Thank you for sharing your story.
I wish I could tell you that the University of Pennsylvania and Cintas are a couple of small, insignificant employers or that their actions are rare exceptions to the standards of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and the right to dissent that are the soul of our system of government.
I can’t do that.
Penn is one of the largest and richest of the Ivy League schools, an institution that is responsible for upholding the highest—not the lowest—standards of free speech and free association, standards that are essential if we are to have a vibrant democratic society.
And Cintas is the biggest industrial laundry and uniform supplier in our nation—17,000 employees, 34 straight years of record profits, $2.7 billion in sales and $2.5 million in profits this year alone.
And they are not alone when it comes to interfering with the freedom of workers to make their own decisions about whether to form and join unions—what’s going on at Penn is going on right now at Yale University, at Columbia, at Brown and many prestigious colleges and universities around the country.
Yale graduate employees have written a new report documenting the anti-union campaign by the Yale administration. They have filed numerous unfair labor practice charges, only to be stalled by the anti-worker NLRB. As a result, Fred Feinstein, the former General Counsel of the NLRB under President Clinton, is spearheading an investigation with a team of distinguished figures to hear the allegations by graduate employees against Yale.
And what Cintas is doing is taking place every day.
When confronted with a union organizing drive, employers do everything they can to delay union elections, to delay certification once the election is held, and then stall for months and years on bargaining a first contract.
According to research by Kate Bronfenbrenner at Cornell University and by Human Rights Watch:
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In a quarter of union election campaigns, employers illegally fire workers who lead the organizing—and they get the message across because in the average case, they fire four people.
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What is especially chilling are the legal ways employers exercise coercion: In 92 percent of election campaigns, employers force employees to attend mandatory anti-union meetings—with the union, of course, excluded and union supporters not allowed to speak up.
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And 78 percent force workers to submit to one-on-one pressure sessions at least once a week with their supervisors—the person who sets their hours and decides whether they get promoted.
Does democracy end at the workplace door in our country?
Let me begin to answer that with another set of questions.
What would it be like if you were a candidate for elective office—school board, city council, Congress, even president—and the election were run like a union representation election?
How would you recruit supporters to knock on doors for you if they knew they could lose their jobs in retribution, or be denied promotions or overloaded with work, or be harassed or spied upon at work?
What would happen if you couldn’t have a voter list until six weeks before the election after your opponent had been working one for months?
How would you get your message across if voters were required to watch television ads vilifying you for several hours a day, while you were forced to campaign secretly, door-to-door, after dark?
How could you win if the media reported that precincts voting for you would be devastated economically, with everyone losing their jobs?
What if your opponent could just delay the election for weeks and months because you had the early momentum?
What if the election were held in your opponent’s headquarters and voters had to file by the glaring stares of officials who control their jobs?
And what if you won, only to find the ballots could be impounded and the outcome delayed by years and years of litigation?
Those are the de facto ground rules for union elections in America, and I venture to say that if former President Jimmy Carter were asked to monitor such an election in a third-world country, he’d be on a plane and out of there in a heartbeat.
But this isn’t a third-world country. This is supposed to be a first-rate democracy, yet we treat workers like second-class citizens. And that’s an international disgrace!
At the root of this discussion is one basic issue: Fundamentally, what is an election, and do union “elections” meet the test?
In a paper last year, David Cingranelli from the Department of Political Science at State University of New York at Binghamton found that union elections under the National Labor Relations Act in fact fail widely accepted standards for fair political elections, including:
Freedom from violence, intimidation or coercion.
Freedom of speech and expression and freedom of assembly to hold political rallies and campaign.
Freedom of access to voters.
Freedom of access to polls by voters, party agents and accredited observers.
And freedom to question, challenge and register complaints or objections without negative repercussions.
On all those standards, union elections fail.
Nor do the way union elections are conducted in our country begin to measure up to the labor management practices in other industrial democracies.
And how do union election conditions stack up against the standards set by the International Labor Organization—the ILO—to measure the rights and conditions of human beings at work? The ILO’s Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work is the universally accepted global benchmark and it has four simple parts—freedom from child labor, freedom from forced labor, freedom from discrimination and the freedom of workers to join and form unions.
In a study for Human Rights Watch, Lance Compa compared our union election practices to the ILO standards and concluded, and I quote: “Workers’ freedom of association is under sustained attack in the United States, and the government is often failing its responsibilities under international human rights standards to deter such attacks and protect workers’ rights.”
Again, our nation doesn’t pass the test.
So democracy clearly stops at the workplace door. That’s bad enough. What’s worse is how disastrous that fact is for the health of our democracy at large.
The fact that unions are good for workers is pretty well accepted. As I mentioned at the start, union workers bring home more money than non-union workers, and union workers are much more likely to have health care benefits and defined benefit pensions.
A new paper released last week by the Economic Policy Institute confirms that the impact of unions on total nonunion wages is almost as large as the impact on total union wages: For example, a high school graduate whose workplace is not unionized but whose industry is 25 percent unionized is paid five percent more than similar workers in less unionized industries.
What’s not widely-known or appreciated is an equally important role that unions play in our greater society.
Vanderbilt political scientist Ben Radcliff has found that every percentage point drop in union density lowers voter participation by .4 percentage points. The long-term decline in unionization is therefore an important factor underlying the long-term decline in voter participation in the U.S. To plug in the numbers, the drop from 35 percent to 13 percent union density from the 1950s to today may account for a 9 percentage point drop in voter participation—a significant portion of the overall decline.
In the 2000 presidential election, 55 percent of eligible voters actually voted in the 10 states where unions are the largest percentage of the workforce, as compared to 49 percent in the 10 states where union membership is weakest.
So unions are good for workers, good for our communities and economy and good for democracy.
Without the freedom to join unions, workers are denied the most proven way to lift themselves and their families up, to have time to spend with their children, to participate in civic affairs and contribute to their communities, even to run for political office, as more than 2,000 did in the last election cycle.
Without unions, workers have no voice, not in the day-to-day decisions that affect them in their workplaces nor in the public debates over who gets what in our society.
And without unions, I maintain, we would not have a democracy, we would have an unvarnished plutocracy—bought and paid for by Wall Street, Big Phrma, Big Oil and the rest of Corporate America.
In recent years, much has been made of the fact that union membership has declined in our country and unfortunately, that’s true.
As I said earlier, about 16 million workers in the United States belong to unions, 13 million of whom are in unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO—about the same number of members we had 40 years ago. But the American workforce has tripled in size during that time and so we’ve declined from a peak of 35 percent of the workforce to about 13 percent.
Part of that decline is due to our own complacency: over the last decades, many of our unions stopped devoting adequate resources to organizing in order to concentrate on bargaining and servicing current members.
But the biggest problem is that the government system for employees to exercise a free choice to form or join a union is broken.
The system to facilitate worker organizing is so broken that of the 500,000 workers who organized with AFL-CIO unions last year, less than one fifth actually went through NLRB elections. Fifty years ago, more than 90 percent of all workers who organized did so through the NLRB.
Yet the desire for union membership as well as public approval for our movement has never been higher.
Last year, our polling showed that two-thirds of the American people think unions are essential to our economy, and our approval ratings are in the same range.
And we found that more than 75 percent of the public supports the right of workers to form and join unions without employer interference, and that a similar percentage says it’s important to have strong laws that give workers the right to form and join unions in their workplace.
But unfortunately, most of the public has no idea that employers are indeed interfering with worker rights on a wholesale basis.
Eventually, we will win stronger laws through the political process—and that’s essential because our current laws are full of loopholes, and the punishment for most violators who are caught is the simple posting of a notice of guilt.
But we can’t wait for that—workers are already seeking out alternative means of organizing that don’t depend on legal protection.
This Labor Day, we’re launching an unprecedented effort—what we call our Voice@work campaign—to educate and mobilize our members, lawmakers and the public to reclaim the basic human right to form unions in America.
This summer we set up forums between workers like David and all the Democratic presidential candidates and they’ve been very productive—the candidates were as much in the dark as the public. At our Presidential Candidate Forum last month in Chicago, all nine candidates pledged without hesitation or reservation to champion the freedom of all workers to form and join unions.
In late September and early October, we’re sponsoring, with our affiliate unions, a national Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride to dramatize the need for immigration reform and greater protections for immigrant workers who want to join unions.
And on December 10th on International Human Rights Day, we will mount a massive public demonstration against the suppression of workers’ rights here in the United States.
As political scientists, all of you in this room tonight can help us in the struggle—and we appeal to you to do so in support of human rights and in support of democracy.
You can help in big ways—you are the leaders and the thinkers and the teachers in the public policy arenas. We need much more research on how workers can freely form democratic organizations at work and on the role unions and collective bargaining play in civil society and in maintaining a healthy democracy.
You can also help in small ways, by standing up and being counted when workers need support in your community.
You can do that tonight, by signing the petition being circulated by members of Get-UP in support of the graduate teaching and research assistants at the University of Pennsylvania demanding that their votes be counted.
Many of you here have graduate students organizing for a union. As faculty, you have enormous power over your students. I urge you to be clear to them that it is their decision, and their decision alone, to choose to organize and no matter what decision they make, their actions will not affect their academic relationships.
Your help is needed by 40 million workers out there who want the freedom to join unions, including those 17,000 at Cintas, and the Graduate teaching assistants at Penn and at Yale, who are trying to win election contests in which the rules are ignored or changed every day.
You are needed to help rewrite and legislate new labor laws that guarantee the promises of our founding fathers are fulfilled—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to join a union.
You are needed to help us make sure that the vibrant civil society so crucial to democracy is not squelched, and that democracy does not end at the workplace door.
Thank you and God bless you for all the great work you are doing.
