Al Franken speaks with union members after signing an EFCA petition, July 2008. Photo: AFL-CIO

Throughout the 2008 campaign, the “card-check” provision of the Employee Free Choice act was a political lightning rod. Business groups hammered candidates across the country, including Al Franken in Minnesota, with ads pillorying the proposal as an attack on workers’ rights. Organized labor lobbied ferociously for the provision, which would allow workers to unionize when more than half have signed cards indicating support for collective bargaining. They argued that it was essential to rejuvenating the labor movement after decades of decline, and spent millions working to get Democrats elected in the belief that they would pass the card-check provision.

So when The New York Times reported last month that Democratic leaders had quietly decided to drop the controversial measure from the Employee Free Choice Act without so much as a vote, it came as something of a slap in the face to organized labor. While union officials insist that card check is not yet dead, it seems unlikely that the labor law revision will ultimately be enacted.

“It’d be really really nice if the Democrats would grow a little bit of a backbone,” said Martin Goff, organizing director for UNITE HERE Local 17. “We have the House, the Senate and the presidency. Yet these guys start going to their second, third and fourth positions before the Republicans even ask for it. I’m disgusted actually.”

Bernie Hesse, an organizer with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789, is similarly put off by the backpedaling from Democrats.

“Why did we do all this work?” Hesse asked. “That’s kind of a weird way to bargain, to start taking stuff away before they even start marking up the bill.”

Hesse has traveled to Washington, D.C., in order to lobby for the Employee Free Choice Act. He described organized labor’s dalliance with Democrats as an abusive relationship. “We keep going back to them even though they beat us,” he said.

The need for an overhaul of the country’s labor laws is obvious from organized labor’s perspective. The number of workers belonging to unions has been in free-fall in recent decades. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly 12 percent of workers were union members in 2008, down from just over 20 percent in 1983, the first year for which federal statistics were kept.

Union organizers blame this decline in part on increasingly aggressive campaigns by employers to fight organizing efforts and weak labor laws that only offer a slap on the wrist to companies that break the law. Indeed, according to a study released in May by Cornell University professor Kate Bronfenbrenner, companies have become more brazen in their anti-union tactics. The study found that more than half of the companies examined threatened employees with wage cuts or shuttered work sites, and roughly one third fired workers for pro-union activities. Even when workers did vote to organize, the study found that more than half were without an initial labor contract after a year.

“What’s happened under the existing labor laws is that employers and their attorneys have figured out where the holes are,” said Peter Rachleff, a labor historian at Macalester College. “They’re able to intimidate workers, they’re able to create a climate of fear, they’re able to discourage workers from availing themselves of their right to organize.”

The Employee Free Choice Act is designed to make such anti-union tactics more difficult for companies to utilize. In addition to the card-check provision, it would also force binding arbitration on companies if they fail to reach agreement on a labor contract after a year — a provision that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business interests are equally alarmed by. The legislation would also provide tougher punishments — including fines — for companies that flout the laws.

But Rachleff also argues that unions must share the blame for their decline. He believes that even if organized labor ultimately gets everything it wants in the Employee Free Choice Act it won’t be sufficient to rejuvenate their ranks.

“I have low expectations of what the Employee Free Choice Act would mean if it were passed,” he said. “I don’t think that the existing labor movement is prepared to get out and organize even if the ground rules were to change.”

Rachleff is not at all surprised that Democrats appear to be backing away from the most controversial element of the legislation and believes that labor leaders are complicit in the decision to drop card check.

“Various union leaders signaled to the Democrats that it was OK,” he said. “It’s just a sorry-ass situation. The leaders of the existing labor organizations, they have to find things to make it look like they’re doing something. Pushing the Employee Free Choice Act became something very convenient for them to look like they were spending their members’ dues on good things.”

But local labor leaders insist that the card-check provision is not dead. Shar Knutson, president of the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation, was on a conference call with national union leaders on Tuesday to get an update on the situation.

“It’s still in play,” she said. “No one’s conceding anything.”

Eric Lehto, director of organizing for AFSCME Council 5, said the union will be mobilizing its 43,000 members to lobby Minnesota’s legislators during the legislative break for Labor Day. U.S. Sen. Al Franken immediately signed-on as a co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act upon finally being seated in Washington. But Lehto and other labor leaders believe Minnesota’s senior senator, Amy Klobuchar, could more forcefully promote passage of the legislation, including the card-check provision.

“We would like to see Amy take more of a pro-active effort in pushing the legislation and publicly advocating for it,” he says.

Lehto believes it’s not too late to save the card-check provision that labor unions spent so much time and money advocating for during the last election cycle.

“I wouldn’t say it’s dead,” he said. “There’s still work to be done during recess. What the final bill’s going to look like I don’t know.”

(WDCpix)

This week Minnesota’s members of Congress went back to work after the July 4 break, except for Sen. Al Franken who was showing up — finally — for the first time. Rep. Keith Ellison put forward a credit reform bill, Rep. Betty McCollum announced her plan to expand the Peace Corps, and Republicans criticized the Democrats’ energy and stimulus policies. Here’s how the week shook down:

Rep. Keith Ellison introduced legislation to reform credit rating agencies on Wednesday. “When these agencies put their mark of approval on complex products they confer a legitimacy that may not actually exist,” he said. “We’ve learned of instances where credit rating agencies have given top ratings to products backed by dubious mortgages and other loans. Under current law there was really no one looking over the agencies’ shoulders to make sure that they were making reasonable assumptions or had even a basic understanding of the risks they were assessing.”

Rating agencies are currently subject only to limited oversight by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but are critical elements of the financial system.

Rep. Michele Bachmann sent a video to people attending the Tea Parties over the weekend; she was appointed to the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute’s Advisory Board; and she says that President Obama is destroying the American dream — or, rather, the American dreams of Chrysler auto dealers.

Rep. Betty McCollum is gearing up for a Congressional softball game. Proceeds from the game be donated to the Young Survival Coalition (YSC), a group that works to educate and support young women living with breast cancer.

McCollum also spoke passionately on the House floor on Thursday about expanding the Peace Corps.

[T]oday the Peace Corps, one of the most successful foreign policy initiatives, is at a crossroads. Peace Corps is not capable of meeting the demand of Americans of all ages who want to serve… We have an opportunity here today in this moment to reinvigorate Peace Corps for the next new century, but it’s going to take leadership from Congress. The President’s request simply was not enough, even though the President does propose to double, increase and fully fund Peace Corps out into the years.

Rep. James Oberstar is still pushing a $450 billion funding bill and $50 billion for high-speed rail. Also, Oberstar was in New York on Friday with Obama’s transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, to mark the 50th anniversary of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which is crucial to Duluth’s status as a seaport.

Rep. Erik Paulsen talked to the Eden Prairie News about the cap-and-trade energy bill working its way through Congress. “If we’re going to be serious about securing our energy future, we need to focus on having nuclear energy be a part of that,” he said.

Rep. John Kline penned an editorial for the website “America’s Right” slamming Obama’s stimulus policies. “Republicans are committed to pro-growth policies that will get our economy back on track without saddling future generations with unmanageable debt,” he wrote. “We offered a stimulus plan that would have created twice the jobs for half the price.”

But Media Matters says his statement doesn’t hold water: “[T]he GOP got its ‘twice the jobs’ claim by misusing a formula in an academic paper that they later admitted they weren’t able to understand in the first place.”

Sens. Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar split their votes on immigration policy, specifically on the border fence between the United States and Mexico. Franken voted against it. Klobuchar voted for it.

One of Franken’s first tasks as senator was to sign on to the Employee Free Choice Act, a pledge he’s made throughout his campaign. “I just became a cosponsor of my first bill in the Senate, the Employee Free Choice Act,” he said on Tuesday.

Local 789 is part of a nationwide effort by the UFCW to organize workers at the country’s largest employer. The campaign, targeting more than 100 stores in 17 states, was prompted in part by the presence of a more labor-friendly administration in Washington, D.C., and to generate momentum for passing the Employee Free Choice Act.

Wal-Mart is arguably the country’s most notoriously anti-union company. In the past it has taken dramatic steps to keep collective bargaining agreements out of its shops. After workers in Canada voted to authorize a union in 2004, for instance, the company responded by closing the store.

According to Doug Mork, organizing director for Local 789, Wal-Mart has been engaging in standard, anti-union behavior since the campaign’s inception earlier this year. But in the second week of June a team of corporate representatives was dispatched to the Twin Cities from the company’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to help smother any organizing momentum.

“They really turned up the heat inside the stores and really started to hammer folks,” Mork said.

He believes the dialed-up efforts are a reflection of Local 789′s recent successes in convincing workers that union representation is the correct choice. Employees at eight Wal-Mart stores in the Twin Cities have so far signed off on cards indicating that they want to organize, according to the union.

“We’ve seen considerable and steady forward progress,” Mork said, “not only in our core, active stores from the beginning, but now just in the last few weeks we’ve had a couple of new stores break lose and start to get more active.”

According to Martin Ostheus, regional director for the National Labor Relations Board, an investigator has been assigned to scrutinize the allegations against Wal-Mart. Ostheus expects a ruling on whether the charges have merit to be made by mid-August. There are no other complaints against Wal-Mart currently pending with the NLRB’s Minneapolis office.

Daphne Moore, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, says that the company is looking into the allegations. “We’re just learning about the filing,” she says. “We’ll review it and respond after that review. Generally we provide our managers with training on how to comply with labor laws and we also make sure that our associates know their rights.”

Moore also questions the union’s claim of growing worker support for unionization. “We have noticed that the UFCW has been working harder in its attempts to get Wal-Mart associates to sign union cards, but we don’t think our associates have any reason to be more interested than before.”

Mork believes Local 789′s efforts will eventually result in elections in Wal-Mart stores to decide whether workers want to have union representation, but he declines to predict when that might transpire. Up until then, he expects the retailing behemoth to continue to fight such efforts vigorously.

“In the past obviously Wal-Mart’s been tremendously effective in scaring the hell out of people and getting them to back down,” he said.

Yet for the last five years, the United Food and Commercial Workers — the largest union in the country representing retail workers — has largely eschewed organizing drives aimed at Wal-Mart workers.

After years of unsuccessfully seeking a toehold within the retail chain, the union simply decided that under current labor laws trying to organize workers in the face of fierce corporate resistance was futile.

“Workers at Wal-Mart have wanted to organize for a long, long time and have made efforts in various places,” says Doug Mork, organizing director for UFCW Local 789. “But there just hasn’t been a real possibility. If their employers have been committed enough and capitalized enough to fight them to the mat on it, workers simply haven’t had the opportunity to organize under existing labor law.”

But the UFCW now vows that its capitulation to Wal-Mart is over. The union has started organizing campaigns in 17 states, including Minnesota, targeting more than 100 stores. The impetus for the organizing drive: the new administration in the White House and the possibility of passing the Employee Free Choice Act. Under the proposed legislation, workers would join a union after more than half of the workers sign a card indicating support. Under present law, an election must be held to determine whether a majority of workers are in favor of joining the union.

President Obama has consistently voiced support for the Employee Free Choice Act. UFCW organizers are utilizing cards with a picture of the popular president to entice workers to sign off on unionization. The cards include a 2007 quote from Obama specifically calling out Wal-Mart. “I don’t mind standing up for workers and letting Wal-Mart know they need to pay a decent wage and let folks organize,” he said at the time.

But the proposed legislation has floundered as the economy has tanked. President Obama has not made it a top legislative priority, and some former supporters, including Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark) and Arlen Specter (D-Penn.), have turned against it.

UFCW’s Wal-Mart campaign is part of an effort by organized labor to build support for the Employee Free Choice Act and apply pressure to Congress.

“Every union has been lifting up clear examples of where current law has not worked well,” says Mork. “Wal-Mart is clearly one of the examples for the UFCW. There’s adequate evidence that all sorts of people can look and say, ‘Yes, workers at Wal-mart wanted to organize.’ There’s been clear energy and interest in the past, and they’ve been able to completely shut it down.”

In the Twin Cities, UFCW has had discussions with workers at nine stores, according to Mork. But it’s difficult to say whether the union is gaining significant traction. Mork is reluctant to specify exactly how many workers have so far signed cards indicating support for joining the union.

“I don’t want to give Wal-Mart any information that they don’t have in terms of what’s happening here,” he says. “We’re certainly not a majority anywhere yet. But we’ve got stores where significant numbers of folks have signed.”

Wal-Mart seems unfazed by the campaign. “We have noticed that the UFCW has been working harder in its attempt to get Wal-Mart associates to sign union cards,” says Daphne Moore, a spokesperson for the company. “We don’t think our associates have any reason to be more interested than before.”

However, the retailer is notorious for the lengths it will go to keep organized labor out of its stores. When meat cutters at a Texas store voted to unionize a decade ago, the company responded by eliminating meat cutters from 180 stores in six states. After workers at a Wal-Mart in Canada voted to join a union in 2004, the company shuttered the store.

But less dramatic tactics are the backbone of Wal-Mart’s crusade to keep unions out of its stores, as documented in a 2007 report by Human Rights Watch. Managers are given extensive training in union prevention techniques. New workers are required to watch anti-union videos. There is a union hotline that managers are directed to call at the first hint of organizing so that advice can be dispensed directly from the corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Nelson Lichtenstein, author of the forthcoming book The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business, says such tactics have now become standard for national retail chains. “It’s no longer extraordinary,” says Lichtenstein, who teaches labor history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Now everyone does it. Target does exactly the same thing.”

While these tactics have undoubtedly played a major role in keeping organized labor out of Wal-Mart stores, some observers also argue that unions haven’t made a persuasive case to workers.

“Why is it that workers that everybody acknowledges are not really that well paid are also not willing to vote to put a union in place at Wal-Mart?” asks Charles Fishman, author of the The Wal-Mart Effect. “That’s the $12-an-hour question. … What it says is people don’t think the union has more to offer them than Wal-Mart.”

Fishman points out that if every Wal-Mart worker received a $2 an hour raise, it would eat up all of the company’s $12 billion in profits.

“If Wal-Mart were to be unionized, the stores might look the same,” he says. “The prices wouldn’t be the same, and the way the place operated wouldn’t be the same. Because there’s no room in there to be quote-unquote more generous to people on benefits or pay or staffing without changing the operation.”

After years of unsuccessful battles with Wal-Mart, the UFCW has been content in recent years to concentrate on bloodying the company’s image. The main vehicle for this effort has been the “Wake-Up Wal-Mart” marketing campaign. Through a Web site, protests and other communications tools, the UFCW has tarred Wal-Mart as a corporate behemoth that treats its workers like dirt and routinely violates labor laws.

There is some evidence that the campaign has been successful in affecting consumer behavior and instigating changes in Wal-Mart’s personnel policies. For example, the company has twice in recent years altered its health-insurance policies to make them somewhat more affordable for workers. And in December it settled 63 lawsuits alleging that Wal-Mart failed to pay employees their rightful wages for $352 million.

“They’ve had a positive impact, particularly on health insurance and particularly on the notion that somebody’s watching Wal-Mart,” says Fishman, about the “Wake Up” campaign. “We all know how we do the dishes, clean the kitchen, fold the laundry, rake the leaves if someone’s standing there with their arms crossed watching us.”

Now the UFCW hopes to capitalize on that groundwork by organizing workers.

Peter Rachleff, a labor historian at Macalester College, believes the time is ripe for the UFCW to take another run at Wal-Mart.

“Their anticipation of EFCA getting passed and their estimation of a changed political and economic climate all make this a time — not necessarilly a good time or an easy time — but a necessary time to shift their strategy and try to organize Wal-Mart,” he says.

But that doesn’t mean he believes they’ll be successful. “There‘s a lot at stake,” he says. “I’m not optimistic.”

Lichtenstein is even more blunt in assessing the UFCW‘s chances. “They know it will fail,” he says. “It’s designed to fail.”

But even failure can have an upside. “Demonstrating that failure shows we need something new,” Liechtenstein says. “We need a new law.”

Marcus (left) said retailers who don't donate to Coleman "should be shot."

Did bailout money end up boosting Norm Coleman’s senatorial campaign? Hard to say, but damning new evidence unearthed by Huffington Post suggests that the former U.S. senator was heavily promoted by corporate opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act, including bailout recipient Bank of America Corp. On Oct. 17, three days after the financial institution received $25 billion in bailout funds, Bank of America hosted a conference call with conservative activists who charged that the proposed legislation would turn America “into France” and spell “the demise of a civilization,” according to leaked audio of the call. Former Sen. Coleman campaigned against the measure (erroneously at times) and was supported by a series of TV commercials made by the anti-labor Coalition for a Democratic Workplace — and his name came up on the call.

Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus said: “If a retailer has not gotten involved in this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to Norm Coleman and all these other guys, they should be shot. They should be thrown out their goddamn jobs.”

During the call, a man, presumed to be an employee of Marcus’ foundation, suggested that listeners could influence the election without violating campaign finance laws by giving to the foundation. “Some organizations have written checks for $250,000, $500,000, some $2 million for this.”

Today the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza rates the Third Congressional District seat the 18th most likely to switch parties in the November election. Republicans have held the post for 50 years, but with Rep. Jim Ramstad retiring and the district trending Democratic the race is thought to be a toss-up. Here’s Cillizza’s brief blurb:

18. Minnesota’s 3rd district (R): This race to replace Rep. Jim Ramstad (R) is the rare contest where both candidates — state Sen. Erik Paulsen (R) and Iraq War vet Ashwin Madia (D) — are running solid and well financed campaigns. This should be one of the best races in the country. (Previous ranking: 17)