Latest anti-union ads target
Oregon’s Jeff Merkley
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
A pair of business-backed front
groups run by a Washington, D.C.,
lobbyist is waging a wide-ranging me-
dia campaign against organized labor.
Stopping the union-backed Employee
Free Choice Act (EFCA) appears to be
the goal of the campaign by the Center
for Union Facts and the Employee
Freedom Action Committee.
EFCA is a bill in Congress that
would make it easier for workers to
unionize and get a collective bar-
gaining agreement.
Seen as a way to
turn around
decades of decline
in union member-
ship, EFCA is far-
and-away the top po-
litical priority of the
American labor
movement.
Last year, the bill
passed the House, and
had the support of the
majority in the Senate.
But backers were nine
votes short of the three-
fifths majority needed to
end a filibuster (cut off de-
bate) and bring a bill to a
vote in the Senate. Oregon’s
Republican U.S. Senator
Gordon Smith opposes it,
and voted against cutting off
debate.
Oregon House Speaker Jeff
Merkley, Smith’s Democratic
challenger, supports EFCA, and
last year helped pass similar legislation
in Oregon covering public employees.
On May 22, full-page ads appeared
in the Oregonian and the Eugene Reg-
ister-Guard criticizing Merkley. “[Jeff
Merkley] supports eliminating the
right to a private vote when unions are
enlisting new members,” the ads said.
The ads, which cost $14,623 to run,
were placed by the Employee Free-
dom Action Committee, set up by
Richard Berman, a long-time lobbyist
for the tobacco, alcohol and restaurant
industries. The Oregon phone number
in the ads rings though to Berman’s
D.C. office.
Berman’s trademark is creating
front groups that attack the credibility
of industry critics. Past Berman cam-
paigns worked to create doubt about
the harm of second-hand smoke or the
link between fast food and obesity, de-
fended tanning operations against can-
cer concerns, or argued that increases
in the minimum wage hurt low-wage
workers.
“Pretty much any dirty work that
needs to be done by corporate Amer-
ica, Rick Berman’s the first guy that
gets the phone call,” said national
AFL-CIO spokesperson Steve Smith.
Now Berman is working to try to
JUNE 6, 2008
undermine public sympathy with the
labor movement. Berman has not dis-
closed to the press who’s paying for
the campaign, and the spokesperson
for his groups did not return calls from
the NW Labor Press.
Since 2006, his group the Center
for Union Facts has spent millions of
dollars running anti-union ads on tele-
vision and in newspapers across the
country. The ads present crude stereo-
types of union leaders as bullies and
s
e fact
Get th
at:
thugs with working class New York
accents, and they make frequent refer-
ence to “labor union bosses” and “fat-
cats.”
One ad ran a mug shot of UNITE
HERE President Bruce Raynor next to
pictures of Iranian President Mah-
moud Ahmadinejad and former Ugan-
dan dictator Idi Amin. Another, pictur-
ing a menacing-looking “DMV
worker” with a snarl on her face, said
public servants make more than tax-
payers because union chiefs have
“greased the system.”
The group’s “teachers unions ex-
posed” ad series claims America is
falling behind other countries educa-
tionally because of teachers unions.
And the ads invite the public to nomi-
nate and vote for the worst unionized
school teachers.
The group’s Web site also has a
strong Internet presence. The group
pays to have its site as the first “spon-
sored listing” to appear when Google
users search for “Employee Free
Choice Act.”
But the “facts” on their Web site
aren’t factual, according to a report by
the non-profit American Rights at
Work. For instance, the site inflates
union leader compensation by includ-
ing reimbursements for work-related
travel, even though the source of the
data, the U.S. Department of Labor,
clearly distinguishes between salary
and reimbursements in its annual
union financial disclosure forms,
which are publicly available.
Stylistically, Berman is a bomb-
thrower, coming up with attention-get-
ting campaigns that provoke and of-
fend. Union leaders have mostly
chosen not to respond.
“It’s a mud-slinging campaign.”
said Smith, the AFL-CIO spokesper-
son. “We don’t sling mud with them.”
Merkley campaign spokesperson
Matt Canter called the May 22 ads a
“gross distortion,” and said the ads tar-
geting Merkley were “designed to
confuse Oregonians.”
The anti-Merkley ads follow the
standard script in the campaign against
EFCA. As one Center for Union Facts
ad put it, “labor union bosses have a
new scheme to do away with secret
ballot elections.” The “scheme” re-
ferred to is of course EFCA, under
which workers could unionize simply
by having a majority in a workplace
sign union authorization cards — thus
eliminating the need for a “secret bal-
lot” workplace election. The process is
known as “card check.”
Employers who want to keep
unions out prefer the current system,
in which unions are certified after a
workplace election. That’s because the
rules give every advantage to the em-
ployer.
Under the National Labor Relations
Act, neither union organizers nor pro-
union workers have any right to talk to
workers at the workplace about how
they might benefit from union mem-
bership. But the employer has almost
unlimited authority to meet with work-
ers on the clock individually and in
groups to argue against the union, typi-
cally aided by professional anti-union
consultants. Employer-side attorneys
can use legal challenges to delay the
union election for months or even
years. And consequences are minimal
for even the worst offenses employers
commit — spying on workers, lying to
workers about the union, and harass-
ing, disciplining and firing pro-union
workers.
For such violations of the law, the
most common “remedy” is a require-
ment that employers post a notice in
the break room saying they won’t do it
again. Fired pro-union employees, af-
ter years of litigation, sometimes win
backpay (minus any wages they
earned in the meantime) and an offer
of reinstatement to their workplace,
where in most cases the union drive
was long ago defeated.
EFCA addresses the weaknesses of
the National Labor Relations Act by:
instituting card check as a legally
binding method of unionizing; increas-
ing penalties for employer misconduct
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
Toxic Avengers
scold Oregon U.S.
Sen. Gordon Smith
Al Dorgan (pictured above) of
Albany Steelworkers Local 7150
takes part in the May 20 premier
of “The Toxic Trader” outside the
downtown Portland district office
of U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith. The
Steelworkers’ street theater
production features three “Toxic
Avengers” fending off a gigantic
“Toxic Trader” puppet (right).
The play illustrates the
devastating down-sides of free
trade agreements supported by
Sen. Smith, including the
importation of millions of toxic
toys containing poisonous levels
of lead and the exportation of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs —
including 22,600 from Oregon over the past seven years, organizers
said. The production will now travel the country, performing at the
offices of other lawmakers who have backed free trade agreements
instead of working for fair trade, which, according to the Steelworkers,
should require protection for the environment and ensure that workers
are protected at the very least by their own country’s labor laws and
standards.
(triple back pay and civil fines of up to
$20,000 per violation); requiring the
government to seek a federal court in-
junction against an employer when-
ever there is reasonable cause to be-
lieve employer conduct has
significantly interfered with employee
rights during an organizing drive; and
mandating mediation and binding ar-
bitration if union and management
can’t reach agreement on a first con-
tract within 120 days.
EFCA opponents like the funders
of the Center for Union Facts can’t re-
ally come out and say they don’t want
stricter penalties for employers who
trample workers’ rights, or admit they
don’t like the bill because it would
make unionizing easier. So they say
they oppose EFCA because it would
trample workers’ rights — to a secret
ballot union election.
“That’s the only argument we see
from these groups,” Smith said. “They
want to keep this as superficial as pos-
sible and focus on just one issue, the
secret ballot election. When we talk
about the Employee Free Choice Act,
we put it in context of the much larger
issue, which is that the system for
workers to unionize is broken.”
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