Union authorizes strike against Caterpillar locomotive maker in Canada

From the Financial Times:

Members of the Canadian Auto Workers union overwhelmingly voted in favour of staging a strike against Caterpillar Inc. at an Ontario locomotive factory should the company implement unilateral changes to existing employment terms.

The CAW and Caterpillar have been negotiating terms of a new agreement to replace a contract that is scheduled to expire at midnight on December 31. CAW President Ken Lewenza has said that Caterpillar’s offer is not acceptable and that contract talks broke off earlier in the week.

In a statement sent out Friday afternoon, the CAW said nearly 98% of members working for Caterpillar at an Electro-Motive plant in London, Ontario, voted to give the union the power to call a strike if needed in coming days.

Longshoremen’s union rapped for lack of diversity

From the New York Times:

The figure of the longshoreman has cut an enduring image of hard-working New York for decades. But troubled by a work force that remains predominantly white, the commission, a bistate agency that oversees the dockworkers, pressed the New York Shipping Association in May to produce a diverse pool of candidates for temporary jobs. The shippers deferred to the International Longshoremen’s Association, the union that has maintained an iron grip on the ports for decades, and the union came up with 37 candidates.

All but four were white men. None were Hispanic. Only one was black, and, according to the commissioners, he did not really want a job. The other three were white women.

“Imagine our dismay that in a diversity program, the I.L.A. would come up with an all-white slate of candidates,” Walter M. Arsenault, the executive director of the commission, said. “That’s an oxymoron.”

This is the same problems the building trade unions face in Peoria. Membership in these unions seems to be inherited, and there’s little chance for members of minority groups to get hired.

NLRB passes pro-union rules, Congress threatens to fight changes

From the Associated Press:

The National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday moved ahead with plans to speed the pace of union elections, even as Republicans in Congress threatened to derail the process.

The board’s Democratic majority voted 2-1 in favor of a revised proposal that could give organized labor a boost in organizing new members at companies that have long opposed unions.

Business groups have strongly opposed the new rules, saying they amount to ambush elections that don’t give company managers enough time to talk to employees. Unions claim the rules help them level the playing field with companies that abuse the legal process to stave off union elections.

The vote came after the board’s lone Republican member, Brian Hayes, didn’t make good on threats to resign, a move that would have rendered the agency powerless to act.

Teamsters helped deprive workers of seniority rights, court says

From Reuters:

Republic Airlines and the Teamsters union unlawfully deprived hundreds of Midwest Airlines flight attendants of their job seniority when the two airlines merged, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Wednesday.

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Republic failed to honor the Midwest flight attendants’ seniority rights when it purchased the airline’s parent company, Midwest Air Group, in 2009.

Federal law, specifically the McCaskill-Bond Amendment to the Federal Aviation Act, requires airlines to integrate employee seniority lists when two carriers merge.

UAW complains says Ford executives didn’t suffer like union members

Via Bloomberg:

A hearing will continue into next month on the United Auto Workers’s complaint that Ford Motor Co. salaried employees didn’t sacrifice equally with hourly employees to help the company survive, the union said today.

An independent arbitrator will take testimony from additional witnesses in December after hearing three days of testimony this month, the UAW Ford Department said in a posting on its Facebook page. More than 35,000 Ford workers, who gave up pay increases and bonuses, signed the grievance last year after the company reinstated raises, tuition assistance and 401(k) matches for white-collar employees.

“The depth and gravity of questioning and testimony, particularly from our witnesses has taken longer than anticipated,” the union said in its post. “We are confident that we have presented a strong case to the arbitrator regarding the lack of equality concerning Ford Motor Company (F)’s reinstatement of bonuses to the executives and salary employees only.”

Alabama Navistar plant worries UAW members

Via Dayton Daily News:

Jason Barlow, president of United Auto Workers Local 402, said the new plant is of great concern to the local membership.

“We’ve been told we’re still going to be viable and we’ll be building numerous truck lines,” Barlow said. “But it’s aggravating because we have one line empty so the company has more than enough to build in Springfield but they went to another state.”

Barlow said the Springfield plant not only has the space and facilities, the wages are attractive enough to bring production here. Temporary workers and new hires make $14.53 an hour, which Barlow says is in line with other plants in other states.

Workers picket at United Auto Workers headquarters

From Labor Notes:

Clerical workers at United Auto Workers headquarters in Detroit are protesting layoffs that will take effect Friday. They picketed this month carrying signs that read “What about shared sacrifice?” and “Justice for ALL workers.”

The 35 layoffs will hit all clerical or maintenance workers with less than 14 years’ seniority.

In a statement, UAW President Bob King counters that “we have a fiduciary responsibility to our dues-paying members and cannot carry more clerical staff than justified by the size of our membership.”

Wage-only unions: A thing of the future?

Here’s an Mother Jones opinion piece about the benefits of proposed wage-only unions:

The idea here, I guess, is that there would be two distinct kinds of labor unions authorized and protected by law. The first kind would be the ones we have now, which are extremely difficult to create. The second kind would be restricted to bargaining over wages and benefits, but would be much easier to create. With this kind of “Union Lite” available as an option, perhaps Wal-Mart could finally be successfully organized?

I’m surprisingly sympathetic to this notion, though it’s obviously pie in the sky. As Haus mentions elsewhere, existing labor unions would oppose it and therefore Democrats would oppose it too. Likewise, although perhaps corporations and rich people should be in favor of organizations that promote higher wages for the working and middle classes, they aren’t. Therefore Republicans would also oppose this idea.

Beyond this, there are obvious problems with wage-only unions. I’ve long supported organized labor because it’s the only large-scale countervailing power that promotes the economic interests of the middle class against the interests of the corporate community. At the same time, I’ve long recognized that telephone-book size contracts stuffed with endless picayune work rules are genuinely corrosive. But where do you draw the line? I agree that unions would be far more acceptable to management, and far more useful to their members, if they spent less time fighting for rigid job classifications and money-wasting featherbedding clauses. But what about safety regs? I’d love to think that we could just trust MSHA to enforce safe practices in coal mines, but that would be naive. It’s the UMW that’s been mostly responsible for progress on that front.

Newspaper slams union reforms

The Las Vegas Review-Journal makes its anti-labor stance clear in this editorial:

But while organized labor and their Democratic allies in Congress have so far failed to eliminate such secret ballot elections altogether in favor of a simple, more manipulable “card-check” system, they now seek the next best thing: quicker elections.

The purpose for all this “reform”? To rig the process in favor of Big Labor.

If the unions have so far failed to get rid of the ballot, they now hope to encourage so-called “ambush elections” making it harder for companies to present their side of the issue prior to a vote.