WHILE President Bush points to low unemployment and a resurgent stock market as signs of a strong economy, most Americans don't feel so bullish. Median incomes are flat, healthcare costs are soaring, pensions are being de-funded and corporate employers are threatening to shred the social contract with their employees that has prevailed for 60 years.
The balance of economic power has become increasingly one-sided, and one reason is that a key institution -- the National Labor Relations Board, the country's chief arbiter of labor disputes -- remains solidly in anti-worker hands. Although a quasi-judicial entity appointed by the president and empowered to adjudicate labor disputes, the NLRB actually sets the rules that govern those disputes and thereby exerts an enormous influence over who prevails. In case after case, the Republican-dominated board has taken positions that have hurt American workers.
In one recent case, the Oakwood Healthcare decision, the board found (by its usual 3-2 Republican majority) that a group of Michigan nurses are excluded from the protection of the nation's most important labor laws on the spurious grounds that they are "supervisors," not employees. In one stroke, these workers -- and potentially tens of thousands of others -- lost the right to be in a union and to advocate collectively for workplace improvements.
The same day as the Oakwood decision in late September, the board also cut back on the right of employees to wear union buttons at work. That case arose out of a dispute in San Diego at the W Hotel, which, according to its owner, the Starwood Hotels & Resorts chain, seeks to give its guests a "wonderland" hotel experience where they get "whatever they want, whenever they want it." For its employees, however -- mostly low-paid Latino laborers -- the hotel is no wonderland. Some wore buttons bearing four words -- "Justice Now! \o7Justicia Ahora!"\f7 -- and the name of their union. The W demanded workers take them off.
The NLRB sided with the W because the buttons were "controversial." W guests now need not worry about having their wonderland experience marred by seeing employees exercise their 1st Amendment rights. That rule is now precedent and can be applied to workers in labor disputes across the country.
