By John Brummett
That “card check” issue, or at least a loose variation for overhauling our federal law on labor organizing, is not dead.
And the center of gravity today will be the historic capital city of a state long considered anti-union. That would be Little Rock.
For some reason, several of the nation’s labor leaders will congregate with expected hundreds of state union members at Central High School this morning, then march to our state Capitol area for a catfish fry and rally.
Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, will be here and speak. Ed Hill, the national president of the Electrical Workers, will join him. Rich Trumka, current secretary-treasurer of the national AFL-CIO and likely the next president, will attend as well.
Never has so much labor muscle ventured at once into our little state.
Actually, I know the reason. Or reasons. There are two.
First: Since the death of “card check” itself, by which workplaces could organize through a pre-emptive signing of union affiliation cards by a majority of workers, labor has been working intently with U.S. senators, not business people, on an incremental version.
If such an incremental proposal comes to pass, 60 votes will be needed to break a Republican filibuster. Labor will need all Democratic hands on board. We happen to have two Democratic senators in Arkansas and it happens that neither of them can be counted on to be on board.
One, Mark Pryor, a sometimes-mushy centrist willing to oblige labor in some business-acquiescent way, has been intimately involved in these new talks. He eschews references to a “card check compromise,” saying instead that what he envisions is an entirely new bill having nothing to do with cards or affronts to secret ballots.
Because he wants to prove the center isn’t always mushy, but sometimes cement-strong, Pryor would like to help facilitate a passable bill. It also would shore up his labor flank perhaps in perpetuity.
So he’s been key in private negotiations that have included Democratic Sens. Tom Harkin of Iowa, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Chuck Schumer of New York, along with, from time to time, Vice President Joe Biden.
They’re working on ideas like elections within a week or two of card filings and assigning Federal Labor Relations Board agents to elections as workers’ contacts for grievances about management pressure. And they’re mulling new processes for settling contract negotiations more quickly that would fall somewhere between the federally assigned binding arbitration that labor wants and the status quo that management law firms have become adept at drawing out.
Our other senator, Blanche Lincoln, is up for re-election next year. While her first political consideration is keeping the business establishment satisfied, she’d just as soon not have a tepid or balking labor component in the usual Democratic base.
Second: Organized labor is trying to define and market this issue as not merely one of union worker rights, but of civil rights and social justice. So today they’ll start at the internationally famous Central High to pay homage to the nine brave young black students who changed racial and educational history 52 years ago.
This has two purposes. One is to advance labor’s effort to tie itself to the cause of black people in the South. The other, quite simply, is to lean hard on Lincoln.
She might withstand erosion of the usual Democratic base in regard to union workers. But she’d be less able to withstand erosion in the 16 percent of the Arkansas electorate that is African-American. Labor people think she still has to worry about a Democratic primary challenge, and, from time to time, they invoke Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s name.
Meantime, here’s the word from Randy Zook, head of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce: “Let me assure you we are not taking a victory lap,” but remain alert to what labor is up to.
Actually, Zook tells me, perhaps significantly, that the chamber wouldn’t necessarily oppose “tweaking” in how the process works. But unionizing by pre-emptive cards and binding arbitration — those are no tweaks, but pure disasters for job creation, he says.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
