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.”

Minnesota Independent photo by Chris Steller

A day’s wait brought relative quiet for antiwar activists who locked themselves to a pair of military recruiting office doors in Minneapolis Friday. Without much reaction from police or recruiters (at least as of early afternoon), the protesters took advantage of heavily trafficked Washington Ave. SE to spread their message.

Minnesota Independent photo by Chris Steller

On Thursday similar “lock downs” at several metro area recruiting stations, including Washington Avenue’s, sparked lively standoffs and in at least one case ended with police cutting protesters free and issuing citations.

But on Friday, members of Students for a Democratic Society and the Peace and Justice Committee at Macalester College experienced hours of relative quiet outside the U.S. Army and Navy recruiting stations near the University of Minnesota campus.

Minnesota Independent photo by Chris Steller

Sporadic conversations with passersby and occasional police drive-bys punctuated a somewhat sleepy atmosphere on the shady side of a campus-area street that carries more vehicular and pedestrian traffic than the average Minneapolis thoroughfare.

Minnesota Independent photo by Chris Steller

The contrast was especially marked with a similar action last year, when the same groups’ lockdown at the same location coincided with a street protest on the anniversary of the Iraq War, said spokeswoman Leigh York, who was herself arrested yesterday at another recruitment office in Brooklyn Center.

Minnesota Independent photo by Chris Steller

York said the two women and three men arrived before the side-by-side recruiting stations’ 8 a.m. opening today and locked themselves to both doors. U-shaped bike locks bound door handles to protesters’ necks at each office. Connected by chained arms between them were three more protesters.

York said those locked down and as many as a dozen supporters (including a medic) in attendance were prepared to stay the day at least if left undisturbed. Voluntarily unlocking would be a group decision, she said.

Supporters offered water and hand-fed bites of banana to protesters as the day wore on.

Passersby stopped to argue or encourage. “Get a fuckin’ life,” said one.

The protest, which York described as “public civil disobedience and direct action” was meant to disrupt recruiting for a military involved in what she called “imperialist and profit-driven wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Photo: MHS

Contracts guaranteeing bonuses to executives at collapsing businesses — like American International Group (AIG) — are held inviolable, while labor union contracts regularly get voided or reneged-on when corporations declare (or even threaten) bankruptcy. Labor experts say it’s the law of the land.

Today President Obama told Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to find a way to stop AIG — which took in $170 billion in public bailout funds — from paying $165 million in executive bonuses. But even if Geithner succeeds, management’s preeminence in law will remain deeply seated in the American legal system.

The most local and recent example of workers whose contracts became casualties to corporate collapse are the Star Tribune’s pressmen. Only by caving to concession demands on Friday did they avoid having a bankruptcy judge void their contract. (The week began with news arising from the negotiations that the Star Tribune burned through as much as $11 million in a court battle with the rival Pioneer Press defending Par Ridder, the publisher who in 2007 oversaw half a year of the newspaper’s hurtle toward insolvency.)

As University of Minnesota Prof. John Budd tells the Minnesota Independent, it comes down to who calls the bankruptcy shots.

“I imagine that AIG could void its executive bonus contracts if it filed for bankruptcy,” he said. “But you have executives making the decision whether or not to file for bankruptcy so the right incentives are not there.”

Other experts say contrasting contract situations are only part of the picture. The real matter is one of “the different ways that workers are treated in this economic crunch from the ways [executives] are treated, law or no law,” says Peter Rachleff, professor of labor history at Macalester College.

“I have commented on this issue for years in my classes,” adds Prof. James Scoville, Budd’s Carlson School of Business colleague, who teaches ethics and labor relations.

Scoville cites a maxim by Jim Gross, professor of labor policy and labor arbitration at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations: “Property rights have trumped labor rights at every turn.”

Gross tells MnIndy he coined the phrase a decade ago in his book “Broken Promises: The Subversion of American Labor Relations Policy, 1947-1994.”

It has wide application as a general proposition, he says, “despite rhetoric to the contrary about workers’ rights and human rights.”

Contractual rules developed over centuries of common law overwhelmingly favor property owners and the management that serves them, in Gross’ view.

“The last time we had major labor law reform in favor of workers’ rights was in the Great Depression,” he says, and even as much as that era’s Wagner Act supported labor, its “underlying core principle was freedom of contract.”

The resulting balance of power between employers and unions “far favors employers in this country because we have employment at will,” says Gross.

The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would bring United States’ labor policy into alignment with that of nearly every other developed country, he adds, but recent efforts for its passage are not encouraging.

Four years ago, the same candidate-training program did the trick for three other council hopefuls who went on to win election later that year. The best-known graduates of Camp Wellstone’s January 2005 session are U.S. Rep. Tim Walz, now in his second term representing Minnesota’s First District, and Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, who has gained a national profile during the recent U.S. Senate election recount.

But it’s the local victories by three members the Camp Wellstone Class of 2005 — Minneapolis City Council members Ralph Remington, Diane Hofstede and Elizabeth Glidden — that offer the most direct inspiration to council aspirants from this year’s camp: Charley Underwood, Doron Clark and Kenya McKnight.

All three find themselves in crowded fields: Underwood in Ward 12, the last to send a Republican to the council; Clark in Ward 1, where the retirement of DFL incumbent Paul Ostrow is creating one of three open council seats this year; and McKnight in Ward 5, where a number of others are also said to be mulling efforts to oust DFL incumbent Don Samuels.

Two others attended the recent candidate camp with the Minneapolis City Council in mind. Charles Carlson just announced that he has dropped out of contention for the DFL endorsement in Ward 2 for the seat now held by the council’s lone Green Party member, Cam Gordon. And Peter Eichten said last month he was still considering whether to enter the Ward 9 race as the second Green Party challenger (after Dave Bicking) to Gary Schiff, the DFL incumbent.

Carlson had been looking to get farther than Bill Svrluga, a 2005 Camp Wellstone grad who vied for but didn’t win the DFL endorsement in Ward 2 that year. Svrluga’s fellow camper Kevin McDonald took his race all the way to the November 2005 general election, when he drew nearly 40 percent of the votes in the city’s 12th ward, losing to DFL incumbent Sandy Colvin Roy.

This year Colvin Roy faces another newly minted Camp Wellstone grad in Underwood, who tells the Minnesota Independent he’s now been through all three tracks the camp has to offer. He completed the campaign-staffer track while working on Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer‘s 2006 bid for Congress, and later the track for citizen activists.

That’s the role Underwood says comes most naturally. This is his first time running as a candidate himself since he lost the race for Macalester College student body president in 1968 to Tim O’Brien, now a well-known author.

But three days of role-playing over the last weekend in January primed Underwood for tasks like phoning for campaign donations. That chore got easier for Underwood with this Camp Wellstone advice: “Ask for a certain amount of money, then pick up your coffee cup. Let the silence be there. Don’t bargain them down.”

McKnight concurs: “I enjoyed the hands-on learning, which helped me become much more comfortable with my approach talking with people, my 90-second speech. … It was a great start for me.”

For weeks leading up to the March 3 precinct caucuses, candidates spend evening after evening dialing not only for dollars but also for the support of prospective delegates. Once elected on Caucus Night, DFL Party delegates will choose candidates at ward conventions held later this month, with contenders for citywide offices (including mayor and at-large park commissioners) selected at the city convention in the spring.

The Green and Republican parties conduct parallel processes, though they’re conducted in a much more compact manner than those of the DFL.

Camp Wellstone is part of the St. Paul-based organization Wellstone Action (named for the late Sen. Paul Wellstone and his wife, Sheila), which offers eight training programs in all. Communications Director Elana Wolowitz says the camps are held throughout the year and across the country, often at the request of local groups. Since 2006, more than 300 Camp Wellstone alums have won elective office.

Wolowitz says most participants are progressive-minded, and the organization describes itself as progressive — but also nonpartisan and non-ideological, with at least one Independence Party candidate on its graduation rolls.

Might wound-licking Republicans now flock to Camp Wellstone for tips? Wolowitz is dubious, since conservatives have their own institutes — on which Camp Wellstone is modeled in part.

Graduates are more likely to run into each other in places like Minneapolis where the two-party system means DFLers and Greens. Underwood, a DFLer who counts many Greens among his circle of friends and fellow activists, says it’s only by chance that no city council race this year pits two Camp Wellstone grads against each other.

Michelle Obama made a stop in Rochester Monday to campaign for her husband, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, before making her way north to address a crowd of 4,500 at Macalester College in St. Paul. MnIndy copyeditor Nancy Olsen was there and captured these scenes (follow the link for hi-res images and captions).