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This discussion explores the current challenges in the U.S. labor movement and the potential for cooperative strategies to enhance efficiency and empower employees. It delves into the role of corporations in supporting social responsibility beyond profit-making, and proposes reforms to strengthen the National Labor Relations Act. The need for substantive reforms to ensure equal access and fair bargaining practices is highlighted, alongside the debate on loosening labor laws to promote worker participation and competitiveness. The transformation of labor relations towards a more inclusive and democratic system is also explored, emphasizing the importance of balancing power dynamics between employees and employers for a healthy economy and equitable outcomes.
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WHAT SHOULD UNIONS DO? • Discussions of future of unionism cannot ignore current weak state of U.S. labor movement. • Can weak unions successfully pursue cooperative strategies such as efficiency enhancing or employee empowerment unionism? • Cooperative behavior from position of weakness will likely promote efficiency, but is unlikely to revive labor movement and to make positive contributions to equity and voice. • Whether unions are secure or threatened depends not only on choices that labor movement must make, but also on corporate behavior and public policies.
WHAT SHOULD COMPANIES DO? • Corporate alternatives boil down to question of what is the social responsibility of corporations? • Just to make a profit, or something broader? • For present, primacy of shareholders, Wall Street, and focus on short-term profitability dominate. • Discussions of future of U.S. labor relations should not overlook questions of corporate governance, responsibility, and business norms.
STRENGTHENING THE NLRA: POSSIBLE REMEDIAL REFORMS • Create strict timetables for processing unfair labor practices to prevent “justice delayed is justice denied.” • Penalize violators with fines, such as triple backpay for illegal firings. • Provide immediate reinstatement of illegally fired workers. • Allow bargaining orders when employer’s illegal actions prevent union from obtaining majority support.
STRENGTHENING THE NLRA: POSSIBLE SUBSTANTIVE REFORMS • Provide equal access for unions during organizing drives. • Require instant elections so that elections occur soon after petition is filed to remove opportunities for negative campaigning and selective discharges. Or allow card-check elections for similar reasons. • Require arbitration of first contracts if bargaining fails. • Broaden scope of mandatory bargaining items to include plant closures, subcontracting, introduction of new technology, and other issues. • Ban permanent strike replacements. Prohibit replacements from voting in decertification elections. • Allow secondary boycotts.
LOOSENING LABOR LAW • Reform focuses on weakening NLRA’s section 8(a)(2) restriction on company-dominated labor organizations. • Undoing Electromation-type rulings re: potentially legitimate employee participation mechanisms that give workers a voice and that promote cooperation and competitiveness. • Pair this reform with strengthening ability of workers to organize union to promote loosening rather than weakening of NLRA.
TRANSFORMING THE NLRA • New legal system is needed to support new forms of unionism. • Non-majority unions—bargaining or consultation rights for unions that have support of minority rather than majority of employees in workplace. • Mandated works councils • Employee free speech, unjust dismissal protections, and right to workplace information.
STRIKING A BALANCE • Laws, processes, and behaviors should seek to handle employment relationship conflict and power imbalances between employees and employers in ways that promote effective organizations, healthy economy, equitable outcomes, respect for human dignity, and fulfillment of principles of democracy. • Labor relations and labor law must navigate number of critical dualities: tension between property rights and labor rights, between work rules and flexibility, between bilateral negotiation and unilateral control, and between efficiency, equity, and voice.
