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.”

Creative Commons photo by James Moore via Flickr

United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789 has withdrawn charges of labor law violations by Wal-Mart against employees at its store in St. Paul’s Midway neighborhood. The union, which is currently engaged in an organizing campaign at Wal-Mart outlets throughout the Twin Cities, accused the world’s largest retailer last month of illegally threatening to terminate workers who supported unionizing.

According to Doug Mork, organizing director for Local 789, four of the six workers slated to testify before the National Labor Relations Board backed out. At that point, UFCW wasn’t sure it had a strong enough case to proceed and withdrew the charges before the federal agency. Mork believes intimidation tactics by Wal-Mart were a factor in why the workers ultimately decided against testifying.

“It’s been a little bit hard to figure out,” he said. “It’s not quite so simple as to say they were scared off. I think that’s a piece of it.”

Despite the decision to drop the charges, Mork believes it will not be the last time they seek redress from the NLRB for Wal-Mart’s hardball anti-union tactics. “I suspect there will be more charges to follow,” he said.

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.

The occasion: a bill designed to overhaul policies for handling criminal intelligence information by making it easier for law enforcement agencies to keep and share information about citizens.

Under the proposed legislation, intelligence data collected on individuals by law enforcement officers could be kept secret for a year. The information would then be made available to the target of the probe unless it meets a series of criteria related to the prosecution of potential crimes.

The legislation would also authorize law enforcement agencies to share intelligence data with other government officials — not limited to police officers — when necessary to protect the public.

The bill was drafted by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and is sponsored by St. Paul DFLer Rep. John Lesch (pictured). (A companion bill has been introduced by Sen. Don Betzold, DFL-Fridley.)

In introducing the measure, Lesch acknowledged concerns about civil liberties but argued that some form of legislation is necessary to regulate the sharing of such data.

“A version of this will happen in future years, if not this year,” he said. “I think it’s important that this discussion be had.”

But the proposed legislation has raised alarm bells among peace activists and civil liberties advocates. They fear that the bill is overly broad and would lead to widespread spying on law-abiding citizens.

Teresa Nelson, an attorney with the Minnesota chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that the legislation would allow law enforcement agencies to keep “political dossiers” on citizens, while only creating an “illusion of security.”

Bernie Hesse, an organizer with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789, expressed a concern that labor unions would be targeted for engaging in nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, like walking picket lines.

“We’re afraid that we might be labeled as a criminal organization,” he said. “We’re very conscious of and appreciate the work that law enforcement agencies do, but we also don’t want to be restricted in some of the things that we have to do to bring about economic justice for workers.”

Retired FBI agent and veteran peace activist Coleen Rowley said that since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the government has been obsessed with collecting intelligence data.

“One of the false notions since 9/11 that leads to this massive intelligence collection has been the idea that we did not have enough dots,” she said. “The failure to connect the dots was the problem, not that there was not enough dots.”

The concerns are exacerbated because of prosecutions stemming from Republican National Convention, which was held in September. Law enforcement relied extensively on undercover informants to infiltrate activist groups and build criminal cases. The most notorious example is the case of the RNC Eight, who are charged with criminally conspiring to disrupt the four-day gathering.

For now the legislation isn’t going anywhere. Lesch acknowledged the concerns about the bill, and moved that it be laid over for further consideration. That motion was adopted unanimously.