How Unions Take Workers’ Voice and Never Give It Back

By David Osborne

Monday, September 04, 2023

 

Starbucks workers in Pittsburgh made news in July when they filed paperwork with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to get rid of the union that had only recently won the right to represent them. These Starbucks employees were organized by an arm of one of the nation’s most powerful unions, SEIU. In addition to baristas and service personnel, SEIU also represents tens of thousands of government employees.

 

One of the Starbucks employees, Elizabeth Gulliford, initially supported the union but changed her mind after the union created a “very chaotic atmosphere.” Additionally, she remarked, “we thought we would have a voice, but we really don’t because no one’s in communication with us.”

 

But, if Starbucks workers haven’t already learned, getting rid of a union once it has been elected is incredibly difficult.

 

Public-sector workers — teachers, state- and local-government employees, law enforcement, and firefighters — who make up the vast majority of the unionized workforce, face the same problem. As a labor lawyer and special counsel to Americans for Fair Treatment, I’ve had the privilege of helping public employees when their unions have lost interest in doing their job. These public-sector workers have a special reason to hold their union officials accountable: Officials are using workers’ voices not only to organize but to engage in politics.

 

And they, too, face enormous obstacles getting rid of their unions.

 

Take Joan (a pseudonym), a former client and a deputy sheriff who worked near Philadelphia. Joan and other deputy sheriffs were represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), one of the largest public-sector unions in the country. In fact, AFSCME became the workplace union in the mid ’70s, long before Joan started working there.

 

But AFSCME was a terrible union for Joan because there was (and is) a real movement within AFSCME to get rid of law-enforcement officers. AFSCME’s president, Lee Saunders, has reflexively criticized police officers whenever there have been news of police shootings, despite his union’s obligation to represent Joan and the law-enforcement community.

 

Joan was also convinced that AFSCME’s local union officials were failing their members when negotiating a new contract because the early returns didn’t look good. So, Joan and many of her co-workers filed a “decertification” petition with the state labor board, asking for an election to oust AFSCME and deal directly with the county government, as many other law-enforcement officials do.

 

The knives came out. AFSCME strategically leaked news that the contract they’d been negotiating was almost done, but that nothing could be implemented with Joan’s decertification petition pending. The raises would be small — just as Joan and her co-workers thought — but they’d be retroactive, meaning that everyone would get a nice check for a few hundred dollars as soon as the contract was signed. Effectively, workers were being offered money to oppose the decertification efforts.

 

This placed enormous pressure on Joan to withdraw her decertification petition. During every shift, she’d hear from colleagues — even those who had privately admitted that the union had negotiated a terrible deal in the long run — that they wanted their money, and they urged her to withdraw her petition.

 

In the end, the election didn’t happen, and AFSCME is still there despite its record of disservice to employees.

 

This is not an unusual outcome. Whenever someone files a decertification petition, the union uses every trick in the book to kill the employee’s chances. Once union officials — even those who once spoke for employees — get a taste of power, they aren’t interested in giving it up.

 

Unfortunately, many states’ labor laws are tilted in union officials’ favor. Some unions, when faced with a decertification petition, scramble to agree to a contract — even one that favors management — to take advantage of something called a “contract bar,” which prevents a decertification election while a contract is in place. It has happened to my clients.

 

In most states, unions never have to stand for reelection. Joan’s union, which won its certification in 1975, hasn’t had to prove that it enjoys majority support in nearly 50 years. The only way to remove it is to decertify it, and as Elizabeth and Joan would tell you, that means counter-organizing on your own time against full-time union organizers who have lots of money and lawyers on call. Few states have enacted “recertification” requirements that would impose democracy on supposedly representative unions, requiring them to periodically run for reelection.

 

Not every decertification campaign fails; I’ve been a part of some successful ones. But it shouldn’t be this hard to kick a union out of the workplace when it isn’t serving workers.

 

My guess is that union officials are learning little from workers’ attempts to hold them accountable. Without dramatic changes to labor law, it seems Labor Day is more for union officials than it is for rank-and-file employees.