Reason Magazine - Topics > Employment

New at Reason

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

From the June 2008 issue, Associate Editor David Weigel reveals the big political payoff that organized labor expects from the Democrats this fall.

Read all about it here.

Union Rules

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

If you ever want a window into the needs and desires of the labor movement, you should listen to Stewart Acuff. And if you get within 50 yards of Acuff, you’ll be listening: The snow-bearded activist, now the AFL-CIO’s director of organizing, projects his voice like an opera singer. He grips the podium, white-knuckled. He clasps his hands, then pulls them apart with a snap. When I saw him at the Take Back America conference in Washington in March, his reedy voice grew rougher and louder as his speech went on.

“My brothers and sisters,” he said, “if we go into 2008 with an even larger mobilization of workers behind this legislation, with even more commitment to win the election in 2008, and put this on the agenda in 2009, I’m here to tell you today that we will pass this legislation, in the House, overwhelmingly! We will pass it in the Senate! We will defeat a Republican filibuster! And we will have a president who signs the Employee Free Choice Act! And we can get back to the business of restoring the American dream for millions and millions of workers!”

What’s the Employee Free Choice Act? If you aren’t a lobbyist in Washington, a union worker, or an employer nervously trying to prevent your staff from organizing, you might not have followed the twisty history of the latest attempt to increase private-sector unionization. “Card check,” as it is usually known, would allow employees at a company to bypass secret-ballot elections and declare their intent to unionize by simply signing cards. If adopted, it could portend the most revolutionary change to labor law since the 1940s.

The battle over card check is part of a much larger story of Campaign ’08: the coming-out party of Democratic interest groups. For the first time since 1992, Democrats are eyeing complete control of the executive and legislative branches, with all of the spoils of appointment and legislative scheduling that would entail. Unions want to grow their numbers. Green industries want tax incentives. Trial lawyers want a ceasefire in the war on torts.

If these groups could actually form a line in January, the unions would be at the front. Card check was the brainchild of organizers who had watched their numbers tumble as manufacturing jobs moved out of the rust belt and successive conservative administrations made it tougher to organize. President Bill Clinton, signer of NAFTA, did little to stop the skid from labor’s point of view. The organizers have learned their lessons, pushing members of the House and Senate—including the junior senators from New York and Illinois—to commit in writing to card check.

“When we started working on this legislation five years ago,” Acuff said at Take Back America, “people in Washington said it would never be taken seriously, never pass the laugh test.” Bills were introduced in 2003, 2005, and 2007. The first two times, they never reached the floor, with Republicans arguing that labor organizers usually win unionization elections anyway and that 90 percent of those results are approved by the federal government’s National Labor Relations Board within two months. In 2007, with the Democrats in charge of the legislature, the same bill passed the House easily and won 51 votes in the Senate, but that wasn’t enough to proceed to an up-or-down vote. All along, the effort has faced a veto threat from President Bush.

Things are different now. Democrats believe that as many as nine Republican-held Senate seats are vulnerable in 2008. The AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and allied unions plan to spend $360 million on the 2008 election. That’s around $200 million more than the unions spent in the Kerry-Bush race. As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slug it out for the nomination, the AFL-CIO is running a $53 million campaign attacking John McCain—portraying him as a right-wing ideologue who co-sponsored the Secret Ballot Protection Act, the GOP’s attempt at making kryptonite against card check.

All that union money comes with a promise: What’s good for unions will be good for the Democrats. Greg Tarpinian, a Change to Win organizer who spoke at the Take Back America panel, pointed out that union membership was one of the strongest determinants for a voter choosing a Democratic ballot. “If union membership was 10 percent in Ohio in 2004,” he argued, “John Kerry would be president.”

If card check passes, Tarpinian has only one worry: the ability of the National Labor Relations Board to “keep up with the demand” for brand new unions. Those new brothers and sisters of the labor movement will start paying dues; said dues will find their way to new Democratic campaigns like salmon finding their way upstream.

Republicans and business lobbyists are watching all of this with a sense of resigned horror. They know Democrats will have the votes, and they believe that the end of secret ballot elections will be not just bad for business, but bad for democracy. They also see card check as the tip of a spear. One Republican staffer worried to me about collective bargaining rights for public employees. “Do we really want fire-fighters to start striking?” he asked.

The unions stand to be the biggest beneficiaries of an all-Democratic Washington. Affordable housing advocates, meanwhile, want the 2007 Federal Housing Finance Reform Act, which created a $3 billion fund bankrolled with tax revenue and the profits of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, to be spent on more housing units instead of held up by concerns over budget deficits. Trial lawyers have paid their dues: The American Association for Justice spent $6.3 million to elect Democrats in 2006 through its political action committee, the most of any single PAC. For the first half of this decade, the plaintiffs industry fought a rearguard action against the tort reform movement, which Republicans have been using to limit the size of settlements. Trial lawyers lost a big battle when the Senate passed class action lawsuit reform in 2005, but they haven’t given much ground since then. When the Democrats come back, plaintiffs expect to go back on offense.

The Consumer Product Safety Reform Act, passed this year, is a model of what to expect in a Democratic future. The law doubled funding for the eponymous safety commission to $155 million by 2015, set no caps on damages, and empowered state attorneys general to make federal cases if they have “reason to believe that the interests of the residents of that State have been, or are being, threatened or adversely affected by a violation” of consumer safety. It passed the Democratic-controlled Senate by 79-13, aided by the scare over tainted toys from China.

But unions outmatch every other member of the Democratic coalition in demands and expectations. Now is their time. One organizer told me that a Democratic comeback would mean that the party had “no more excuses” for not giving them what they wanted. At Take Back America, Acuff said the party should gift-wrap anything wavering Republicans want if it will get the bill to a floor vote. “If we have to build a bridge somewhere to get it passed, then build the damn bridge!” he said. “If we have to rename a highway after somebody, rename the highway!”

Another activist, relaxing after a day of sessions and meetings, regaled me with stories of how businesses bust unions, how the National Labor Relations Board punctures budding movements, and how essential it was to change the system. He repeated my question back to me. “If we get a Democratic president, are we going to pass card check?” He leaned back and grabbed a Miller Lite from one of his brothers coming back from the bar. “If the sun comes up in the morning, we’re passing card check.”

David Weigel is an associate editor of Reason.

Worker Safety: Is Government Helpful?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 12:46:00 EST

Not too much, Bryan Caplan concludes, studying the numbers from Kip Viscusi's article on "job safety" in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:

Annual OSHA penalties for safety violations (2002): $149,000,000
Annual Workers Compensation Premiums (2001): $26,000,000,000
Estimated Annual Wage Premiums for Risky Activities (2004 dollars): $245,000,000,000
His point: Market incentives for worker safety dwarf legal incentives, which in turn dwarf regulatory incentives. The level of safety we see in the workplace today is about the same as the level we'd see if government just looked the other way.

For a look at the "cost" side of any cost-benefit analysis of OSHA-style workplace regulations, from our Aug/Sept 2001 issue, James De Long on "how New Deal-era regulations stifle flexible work arrangements."

'I'm Only Going to Hire Smokers From Now On'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 13:56:00 EST

I've long defended the right of business owners to allow smoking on their property. But I've also argued that business owners should be free not only to ban smoking on their property but to refrain from hiring smokers, or even to fire smokers (in the absence of a contract forbidding it), based on concerns about health insurance costs, or for whatever reason makes sense to them. "If an employer decides that hiring smokers (or fat people) is too expensive, that's his business," I wrote in a post a couple of years ago. "By the same token, companies should be free to hire only smokers, or only fat people." Here is a story for those who though the latter scenario was purely hypothetical:

The owner of a small German computer company has fired three non-smoking workers because they were threatening to disturb the peace after they requested a smoke-free environment.
The manager of the 10-person IT company in Buesum, named Thomas J., told the Hamburger Morgenpost newspaper he had fired the trio because their non-smoking was causing disruptions.
Germany introduced non-smoking rules in pubs and restaurants on January 1, but Germans working in small offices are still allowed to smoke.
"I can't be bothered with trouble-makers," Thomas was quoted saying. "We're on the phone all the time and it's just easier to work while smoking. Everyone picks on smokers these days. It's time for revenge. I'm only going to hire smokers from now on."

Update: Reuters is now reporting that the owner of the company, Thomas Joschko, concocted the story about firing the nonsmokers. "He said it was a joke and worth the trouble," says Stephanie Lamprecht, the Hamburger Morgenpost reporter who wrote the original story and a follow-up revealing the hoax. "He said he's a chain-smoker himself and said he was tired of smokers being hassled so much."

[Thanks to TrickyVic for the tip.]

Fired for Taking His Medicine

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:06:00 EST

Today the California Supreme Court heard arguments in a case brought by a computer programmer who was fired after testing positive for marijuana even though his use of the drug, which he takes to relieve chronic back pain, is authorized by state law. Gary Ross, who has a doctor's recommendation to use marijuana, argues that his employer, Ragingwire, violated the state's fair employment law by firing him for taking his medicine. He says medical marijuana users should get the same exemption from drug-free workplace policies that is required for employees with prescriptions for narcotic painkillers. Ragingwire says marijuana is different, since it remains illegal for all uses under the federal Controlled Substances Act.

I have the same mixed feelings about this case that I do about employer drug testing generally. On the one hand, freedom of contract means companies should be allowed to hire and fire based on criteria that make sense to them, even if they seem unfair and unreasonable to me. On the other hand, it is quite clear that employers would not worry about marijuana use that does not impair job performance (or actually improves it, as is likely the case for Ross) the way they do now were it not for the irrational pharmacological distinctions drawn by the government. Since drug tests detect marijuana use within the last few days (or weeks in the case of frequent smokers), they do not indicate impairment, so in terms of safety firing someone who tests positive for pot is like firing someone because he drank a few beers over the weekend. Insisting that a computer programmer (as opposed to, say, an airline pilot or truck driver) never smoke pot, even on his own time, seems especially inane. And in this case, the role of the war on drugs is obvious, since Ragingwire's rationale for firing Ross is based on the federal government's refusal to recognize marijuana's medical utility.

Crucified on a Cross of Goldmining

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 11:19:00 EDT

There are two new films out on a contested gold mine in Romania, one airing on PBS tonight. Rosia Montana, a rural Transylvanian town (pictured right, in all of its glory), sits on top of $10 billion in gold.

PBS viewers will get one side of the story about the village:

PBS describes the film as a "David-and-Goliath story" [of poor villagers versus big mining corporations, but] viewers who see pristine shots of the Rosia valley won't realize the hills hide a huge, abandoned communist-era mine, leaking toxic heavy metals into local streams--or that while the modern mining project will level four hills to create an open pit, it will also clean up the old mess at no cost to the Romanian treasury.

Another documentary about the same mine, Mine Your Own Business, presents another angle. They say the biggest threat to the people of Rosia Montana "comes from upper-class Western environmentalism that seeks to keep them poor and unable to clean up the horrific pollution caused by Ceausescu's mining":

Local unemployed miner Gheorghe Lucian says it best: "People have no food to eat. . . . I know what I need--a job." Mr. Soros's Romanian Open Society Foundation is touting "alternative economic activities such as organic agriculture and eco-tourism," unrealistic at best.

The Boss's Fat Tax

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 15:08:00 EDT

The Washington Times reports that Clarian Health, an Indiana hospital chain, has started charging obese employees and smokers more for their health insurance coverage—$30 and $5 more, respectively, per paycheck. As in the case of companies that refuse to hire smokers (or fire them when they test positive for nicotine), I think decisions like these should be left to individual employers, who cannot force people to work for them and, by the same token, should not be forced to hire people on terms unilaterally imposed by one party. Still, I understand the complaints about increasingly nosy bosses who seek to pressure or punish workers into changing their off-the-clock behavior even when it has nothing to do with job performance. This phenomenon is another reason to rethink the tax policies that perpetuate the artificial link between employment and health insurance, just as the government's efforts to discourage risky habits that might cost taxpayers money are another reason to be leery of a state-run health care system. Given that the government can use force to get its way, while businesses have to compete with each other for employees, which sort of intrusiveness is more alarming?