Investigate Bush’s Labor Board

by Mike Hall, Dec 5, 2006

	Andrew E. Kersten is an associate professor of American History and chair of the Department of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

When some 600 union organizers come together this weekend at the AFL-CIO Organizing Summit, they will brainstorm about strategies to restore and reinforce the rights of workers to join together in unions.

Winning passage of the Employee Free Choice Act will take center stage, and organizers will explore new tactics to deal with one of the most oppressive and anti-worker National Labor Relations Boards ever.

The Bush administration’s NLRB has made it far more difficult for nurses and university graduate employees to form unions and issued decision after decision that reins in workers’ rights, while making it easier for employers to fight workers and their unions.

History Professor Andrew E. Kersten offers a suggestion in the latest Point of View (POV) guest column at www.aflcio.org: Turn congressional investigators loose on Bush’s NLRB.

Kersten, an associate professor of American History and chair of the Department of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, says the recent NLRB decision denying the right of potentially millions of workers from joining unions is another “bushwhacking” and the end result of years of political maneuverings by extreme conservatives. Kersten writes:

Since the turn of the 20th century, every generation of workers has fought in a class war from above. Employers have methodically worked to make the United States an “open shop nation”—a nice-sounding concept that in reality undermines workers’ ability to get a voice at work through union membership—and their efforts are far from complete. Still, the NLRB’s recent action is cause for great concern, leaving us to question whether the NLRB can be trusted and what we can do to regain momentum in our decades-old struggle for an equitable society. But given the recent congressional elections, the union movement is now in a much better position than it has been for a long time. It’s time to recapture the passions of the past and retake the NLRB.

Kersten’s column takes us through the late 19th century conflict between Samuel Gompers’ newly formed American Federation of Labor (AFL) and employers and through the New Deal-era creation of the NLRB that established:

…the tradition of fair, open and democratic union elections and an equitable collective bargaining processes. Since the 1930s, conservatives have rallied to attack the New Deal and the NLRB by using the federal courts, by passing restrictive laws such as the Taft-Hartley Act and, finally, by taking over the labor relations bureaucracy itself.

But fair, open and equitable aren’t in this NLRB’s worker rights vocabulary. Says Kersten:

The NLRB’s decision—and the media reaction to it—has sent shock waves through the nation, not just the labor movement and political progressives. It remains up to us to decide what to do with this new political landscape. During the next year, the Congress we elected will take up issues such as the minimum wage, ethics and corruption in government and the war in Iraq. As the Democrats set the hearings for Congress, we must urge them to broaden their scope and investigate the operation of Bush’s NLRB.To stop the NLRB from making any more bad decisions, we will have to take back the bureaucracy—and not just the Congress—from the conservatives.

Click here to read Kersten’s entire column. 

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