CWA 1180 - News

Bush's labor board guts workers' rights
December 2005

First, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that graduate teaching assistants don’t have the right to unionize. Then the board issued a decision making it all but impossible for temp workers—there are some 2.5 million in America—to form unions. And the anti-labor decisions keep coming.

Over the past year and a half, ever since Bush appointees began to outnumber Clinton appointees on the NLRB, the board has gone from upholding labor law to dismantling it. Bushs pick for chairman, Robert Battista, spent decades representing the management side in labor conflicts in Detroit. This past summer and fall, Battista and the Bush appointed majority gave the green light to a company that fired workers for holding a peaceful work stoppage in the company parking lot. They ruled that newspaper carriers are “independent contractors” and can’t unionize. They suggested that private airport screeners could be barred from unionizing for reasons of “national security.” The Bush majority even went after disabled janitors: claiming that their jobs are “primarily rehabilitative,” the board denied them the right to form a union.

NYU nixes the contract

These NLRB decisions have immediate consequences. After graduate students at NYU had affiliated with UAW Local 2110, they won a contract in 2002 that gave teaching assistants an average 40 percent raise, bringing pay up to $18,000 a year. But empowered by Bush’s NLRB decision denying graduate students labor rights, NYU management announced that once the contract expired on August 31, 2005, they would no longer recognize the union as a bargaining partner.

Civil disobedience

The fight was on. That day, a thousand defiant NYU graduate students and supporters held a protest at NYU’s Bobst Library to insist that management do the right thing and sit down with the union to negotiate a new contract. AFLCIO president John Sweeney joined 75 graduate students from NYU and Yale and their supporters in a sit-in blocking the doorway to Bobst; they were all arrested on charges of disorderly conduct.

“There were labor unions long before there was an NLRB,” says UAW secretary-treasurer Elizabeth Bunn, who took part in the protest. As the NLRB continues to gut labor law, many workers will have to fight for union recognition without NLRB protection in the future.

Click here to find out how you can support the NYU strikers.

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