about the American people.

The EFCA should be resubmitted with a 60% threshold for card check - the same threshold as the GOP Senate had to meet to block it. The 60% threshold is far less subject to GOP demagoguery and offers a direct and brutal contrast to the obstructionists in the Senate. Unions have agreed to the 60% threshold in individual cases in the past.

Passing legislation with the 60% threshold today is better than fighting for 5 years to maybe get a chance at the 50% threshold. If the 50% threshold is achievable in the future then it's easy enough to rewrite the rule from 60% to 50%.

We're not getting to 60 pro-EFCA Senators anytime soon, so I think this is more than a little bit of wishful thinking. This is an issue that Republicans will be absolutely tribal on when push comes to shove.

A 60% threshold would be interesting, but I'm not sure how much that would affect people's votes.

Replace it with the idea Ezra proposed. If 50+1 workers sign majority cards then have an instant election. This is a compromise for both sides. We still get the workers input with majority cards and republicans preserve secret elections which they all of a sudden "care" about.

Resubmit the legislation with these changes and I bet we could get the extra votes we need in the senate. It places a major burden on Republicans to vote for the bill since they claimed that they rejected the bill because it got rid of secret elections. They'd have no excuses to reject the bill and the president would have no excuse to veto the bill, which he said he would have done had the first bill passed the senate).

At the very least it forces republicans to either vote for or against unions one more time.

Those are a lot of great ideas.  I was especially intrigued by the idea of organizing online workers.  This is a really important opportunity for labor.  We passed on organizing the tech sector at the dawn of the microchip revolution and there are while swaths of the most dynamic sectors of US industry that remain unorganized - Microsoft, eg.

I also think that having a greater labor presence on myspace and facebook would help recruit organizers and other activists into labor's fight.  

However, I'm not sure online organizing of workers will work in quite the same way you are describing here.  I spent about 5 years organizing before I decided to go to school and become a teacher.  I think you are underestimating the power of the anti-union campaigns that most businesses run all the time regardless of whether there is an active union drive.  Most workers won't join a union if they don't see other workers in the same shop doing the same thing with them.  There's too much at stake unless you can build relationships strong enough with your fellow workers who are all going to have to do brave and risky things together in order to win recognition and a contract.  Building these relationships in the face of a multi-billion dollar industry to ensure that these sorts of organizing relationships do not get built takes a lot of work and sometimes a fight or two.  In my experience, this all has to be done face-to-face, since organizers ask workers (and each other) to do uncomfortable and risky things all the time.  And, to do that right, you have to have their back and they have to have yours.  That requires a relationship with more depth than those that commonly occur online.  

A few workers will likely join online, but I can't see enough in any one workplace or any one firm or industry joining in large enough numbers to begin to run a campaign.  I worked with Unite Here (formerly on the HERE side).  The strongest part of our union were and are recent immigrants in housekeeping with little or no online experience and certainly little exposure to blogs and online organizing.  I'm not sure these folks could be reached through online organizing.

That said, I would like to be proven wrong. I'd like to know how many people join unions by clicking the "Join Us" button, and if those folks actually wind up in a recognized with a contract.  

For the union,
Jay

Great piece.

Shai,

Great post and thanks for the links, especially to Prof. Dannin's book. I think I may have purchased the last one available on Powell.com.

Another really good concept that is included in the NLRA, but not longer applied to organizing by the contemporary labor movement, is the idea of "Open Source Unionism", or "minority unions", or "members only unions". Freeman and Rogers wrote about this concept in the Nation in 2002 and stated...."another union formation was also widespread: "minority" or "members only" unions, which offered representation to workers without a demonstrated pro-union majority at their worksite. Such nonmajority unions were critical to organizing new sectors of American industry, providing a union presence in the workplace well before an employer recognized a collective-bargaining unit. Most of the early organizing of the industrial trades, for example, and of early industrial unions like the mineworkers and steelworkers, was achieved through such minority unions."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020624/ro gers

The idea is that NLRA language allows for representation by unions those employees who express the desire for union representation without the need for majority status.

In his book, "The Blue Eagle At Work, Reclaiming Democratic Rights in the American Workplace",

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0 801443172/1n9867a-20

Charles J. Morris elaborates on the development of the Wagner Act in 1935 and the evolution of the NLRA. He insists, also, that not only does the NLRA language guarantee the rights of minority or members only unions, but that..."Eighty-five percent of the oiginal Steelworkers agreements were for "members only", as were 64 percent of the UAW contracts in the Auto industry. Indeed, in the late 1930's members-only contracts, which were popular with both the CIO and AFL unions, were just as common as majority-exclusivity contracts."

Rogers and Freeman, as well as Morris, go on to suggest that the idea of Open Source or Minority unionism has special application in the Retail sector....hey WalMart!!!

I had hoped that after the split in the AFL-CIO, and the formation of the Change to Win Coalition, that new forms of organizing would be implemented to attract workers toward organized labor. But so far it seems like we are still relying on politicians to do our organizing for us.

John Foster
GCC/IBT Local 4C

I'm really into the NLRA stuff, especially because it's probably the kind of thing that is fairly easy to pass relative to EFCA.

That said, I don't really understand how online union organizing would provide any value-added over traditional organizing. When is a MySpace relationship going to be more effective at overcoming workplace intimidation than a face-to-face one? I'd say never.

As for the "Join Us" sections being bad, that's because you need 50% in an NLRB election to join a union most times (excluding in a right-to-work state where your shop has a union). It's just not really an online thing.

The labor movement has a lot of work to do on rebranding itself. On The Waterfront and Jimmy Hoffa Sr. didn't do any favors there and that's what most people outside the union world think of first. The internet has a lot of potential for this, though really any branding work would be a step forward. For organizing, though... I'm very skeptical.

I'm currently an organizer, and in my experience, maybe 1% of the low-income health care workers I work with are online.  While yeah, we should have decent online resources, focusing there cuts out a huge number of workers.

I'm a big fan of leverage campaigns, wherein pressure is exerted on the employer to force them to agree to card-check and neutrality.  This can be done as Justice for Janitors does, or by leveraging negative media attention at the boss.  It's less worker-directed, which I have issues with, but can be very effective - the SEIU Local 775 took the homecare market in Washington state from ~6% to ~67% in about a year and a half using leverage, alliance work, and some striking good luck.

I work for a union and have worked on several NLRB and one non-NLRB corporate pressure organizing campaign.  I don't understand why the labor movement doesn't just propose reforms that would maintain the secret ballot system, but make employer abuse of the system much more difficult.  I think this would make it less difficult to pass because it would blunt the rhetorical spin the right is using against the EFCA.

Some suggested reforms include:

  1)Easier access to worksites
   2)Increased penalties for employer violations
     of the act.
   3)Make it easier for the unions to get  
     injuntions against employer violations of  
     the act.  Similar to what employers can get
     for violations of secondary boycott
     provisions in the act.
   4)Binding arbitration if the two sides reach
     an impasse on contracts (or at least
     first contracts)

Right now the labor movement is losing in both the arena of public opinion and legislatively on this issue.  Explaining why the secret ballot is not ideal for union elections I think is a rhetorical loser for the labor movement.  I appreciate any thoughts on this matter.