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Tag Archives: unions

2/11-13 Weekend News Roundup & Open Thread

The Progressive Wing Posted on February 11, 2022 by BennyFebruary 11, 2022

Horrific allegations of racism prompt California lawsuit against Tesla

The N-word and other racist slurs were hurled daily at Black workers at Tesla’s California plant, delivered not just by fellow employees but also by managers and supervisors.

So says California’s civil rights agency in a lawsuit filed against the electric-vehicle maker in Alameda County Superior Court on Thursday on behalf of thousands of Black workers after a decade of complaints and a 32-month investigation.

Tesla segregated Black workers into separate areas that its employees referred to as “porch monkey stations,” “the dark side,” “the slave ship” and “the plantation,” the lawsuit alleges.

Only Black workers had to scrub floors on their hands and knees, and they were relegated to the Fremont, Calif., factory’s most difficult physical jobs, the suit states.

Graffiti — including “KKK,” “Go back to Africa,” the hangman’s noose, the Confederate Flag and “F– [N-word]” — were carved into restroom walls, workplace benches and lunch tables and were slow to be erased, the lawsuit says.

Tesla responded to the lawsuit, filed by the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, with a blog post saying that the agency had investigated almost 50 discrimination complaints in the past without finding misconduct — an assertion the agency denied.

“A narrative spun by the DFEH and a handful of plaintiff firms to generate publicity is not factual proof,” the blog post said, adding that the company provides “the best paying jobs in the automotive industry … at a time when manufacturing jobs are leaving California.”

The lawsuit comes in the wake of Tesla’s billionaire chief executive, Elon Musk, moving the company’s headquarters from Palo Alto to Austin, Texas, where he is building a major new assembly plant.

The state’s lawsuit suggests the relocation to a state known for looser enforcement is no coincidence, declaring it to be “another move to avoid accountability.”

Not only were Tesla’s Black workers subjected to “willful, malicious” harassment, but they were also denied promotions and paid less than other workers for the same jobs, the suit asserted. They were disciplined for infractions for which other workers were not penalized.

In an interview, DFEH Director Kevin Kish said the lawsuit is the largest ever brought by the state for racial discrimination in terms of the size of the affected workforce since the agency gained prosecutorial powers in 2013.

Before that, complaints were handled by an agency administrative law judge rather than in court. But as more employers have forced workers to sign arbitration agreements preventing them from taking complaints to court, “government has the only effective enforcement mechanism to remedy broad pervasive violations in a workplace,” he said.

“We hear a lot about ‘structural racism.’ This case is very focused on segregation — the structural barriers to equality for Black employees,” Kish said.

Most of the agency’s complaints involve individual workers or small groups. And racial complaints are on the rise. In 2016, the agency investigated 744 cases. By 2020, that had grown to 1,548, Kish said.

More news and perspectives in the comments section. See you there! This also serves an open thread. I’ll open Benny’s Bar later today for HH.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Elon Musk, open thread news, Racism, Tesla, unions

4/24-25 Weekend Open Thread

The Progressive Wing Posted on April 24, 2021 by BennyApril 24, 2021

It’s all too easy for employers to interfere in union elections

When workers at the Kumho Tire plant in Macon, Ga., petitioned for a union election on Sept. 18, 2017, they thought they were in good shape. Nearly 80 percent of them, 250 total, had signed cards showing support for unionizing. In the lead-up to the vote, management made clear where it stood. “My supervisor would stop me every day and say, ‘How you gonna vote, man? You gotta vote no!’ ” one worker, who remained anonymous out of fear of retaliation, told labor scholar Gordon Lafer. “No question I was going to vote yes, but I couldn’t let them know that, ’cause I was in fear for my job security.” One month later, when the ballots were counted, workers voted 164 to 136 against unionization.

Earlier this month, we saw a more prominent example of this phenomenon, when workers at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., voted by more than 2 to 1 against joining a union. (Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) It followed several other high-profile organizing defeats in recent years, including autoworkers at Volkswagen in Tennessee and Nissan in Mississippi, as well as Boeing employees in South Carolina.

Employers publicly interpret these results to suggest that workers simply don’t want unions. “Labor bosses should understand that when workers vote against forming a union, it signifies that the arguments made by organizers were not compelling or persuasive,” Kristen Swearingen, chair of the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, an anti-union lobby group, said after the Amazon defeat.

The evidence suggests otherwise. Current polling data shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans approve of unions, and nearly half of nonunion workers would vote to join one if given the opportunity. But if unions are so popular, why don’t workers vote for them?

The problem is that union elections today are nothing like the elections we learned about in civics class. We would rightly question the outcome of an election anywhere else if monitors reported that one side was surveilling and interrogating voters, forcing them to attend propaganda meetings denouncing its opponents, restricting the opposition’s ability to campaign, and threatening voters’ livelihood. But all of this is the normal, largely legal course of events for union elections in the United States, where competing parties do not get equal time to make their cases and voters do not have freedom of expression without retaliation. Even when employers cross the line — as they do in more than 40 percent of elections — the penalties are so trivial that it pays to break the law. Given the obstacles, it’s remarkable that unions win as many elections as they do.

Spending millions on anti-union consultants, companies like Amazon, Google and Boeing unleash “union avoidance” campaigns that all follow the same playbook. Even before the election gets underway, employers try to game the outcome in their favor, starting with legal maneuvers to block or delay the vote. They gerrymander the voting district (known as the “bargaining unit”), trying to pack in workers they believe lean anti-union and to carve out those they think are more pro-union. In Amazon’s case, the company insisted that the Bessemer bargaining unit include temporary and seasonal workers, nearly quadrupling its size from 1,500 to 5,800 members.

Meanwhile, management ramps up its anti-union campaign. Supervisors track and surveil workers to suss out union support, often taking them aside for one-on-one interrogations. Employees are subjected to barrages of anti-union texts and phone calls, while management plasters the workplace with “vote no” propaganda — even the bathroom stalls.

Workers are frequently pulled off the job to attend mandatory “captive audience” meetings — a feature of nearly 90 percent of all union elections. As Amazon worker Jennifer Bates testified before the Senate Budget Committee in March about the Bessemer campaign: “We were forced into what they called ‘union education’ meetings. We had no choice but to attend them. They would last for as much as an hour and we’d have to go sometimes several times a week. The company would just hammer on different reasons why the union was bad. And we had to listen. If someone spoke up and disagreed with what the company was saying they would shut the meeting down and told people to go back to work. Then follow up with one-on-one meetings on the floor.”

After one meeting where Bates asked managers some pointed questions, an Amazon official asked to photograph her employee badge. “I think it’s to show you’ll get in trouble for bringing up these types of questions,” she said.

Meanwhile, union supporters have to figure out creative ways to reach workers off the clock to avoid management interference. Union representatives are usually not allowed equal time in captive audience meetings, nor are they typically allowed anywhere on company property. Workers cannot communicate using company email or chat systems. Alternatives include visiting workers at home, although this is more difficult in a pandemic. During the recent Amazon union drive, union supporters tried catching employees driving out of the parking lot at the end of their shifts. In response, Amazon pressured Jefferson County officials to change the timing on the traffic lights, which reduced the time workers had to talk, according to reporting from More Perfect Union.

Faced with management’s intimidation campaigns, many pro-union workers become wary of expressing their support publicly — and not without reason. Research from the pro-labor think tank Economic Policy Institute shows that workers are fired in 1 out of 5 union election campaigns.

Clearly the election process needs to be fixed. But doing so leaves unanswered a more fundamental question: Why are employers allowed to intervene in union elections at all?

Employers argue that they must play a role in the election process to ensure that workers make a fully informed decision when it comes to the consequential act of joining a union. They certainly have reasons to oppose unions, which create checks and balances against management’s untrammeled authority in the workplace. But that doesn’t mean they should have a say in whether or how their workers decide to join one — let alone engage in campaigns of threats, intimidation and retribution.

Joining a union is a federal right, one that employers have no business infringing upon. As with any relationship between parties with competing interests, the way to handle those differences is to negotiate over them. So if employers have a problem with unions, the place to deal with it is at the bargaining table.

More perspectives, news, tweets, videos, etc in the comments. This is a weekend open thread.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Bernie News Roundup, Open Thread, unions

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