Bargaining Power
by Matt McDonald
Shirley Potter’s first grade classroom at Happy Valley Elementary School in Bellingham is silent at 7:30 a.m. as she prepares for her day. Potter, who is Bellingham’s Education Association president, said her demanding schedule begins with a ring of a bell that seems to come all too soon.
“I do the language arts piece for the first graders, from the spelling to the writing and the reading, and it takes all morning,” Potter said. “I touch base with all the children. … The morning just slides by, and all of a sudden it is noontime.”
As BEA president, Potter spends the second half of her workday fighting for improvement of teacher’s working conditions, such as a less demanding work schedule and better health care benefits. Potter works an extra hour every day and four hours every weekend — off the clock — on top of her half-day teaching schedule.
To meet the increasing demand, many teachers are working off the clock more than ever before, Potter said. She said teachers have less time to accomplish their tasks with more expectations from the federal government’s “No Child Left Behind Initiative.”
The initiative, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, requires teachers to educate children regardless of family income or special needs. The initiative has received criticism because teachers spend more time with problem students and less time with the class as a whole.
Some people believe public school teachers are overworked, and lack good benefits and pay because of the teacher unions, Potter said. But she doesn’t agree.
“(Unions) are the balance and check for school districts in that they would work us 12 hours a day if they could,” Potter said. “If there were no labor unions for teachers it would be even worse.”
Overwork is a problem for Americans, and labor unions are the only protection a worker has in the United States, said Karen Nussbaum, assistant to the AFL-CIO president.
According to “Key Indicators of the Labor Market 2001-2002,” a study conducted by the International Labour Organization, American workers spend nearly one week more on the job per year than they did a decade ago. Now Americans work the longest hours in the industrialized world.
Labor unions provide members with a voice to protect themselves from overwork, while ensuring they have higher wages, protection from being fired without proper cause, formal grievance procedures and paid vacation.
According to the AFL-CIO, 16.1 million Americans were labor union members in 2002. Union members in the United States receive protection from overworking, but many American workers are without the union protection guaranteed in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
“Without a union, there is no right to bargain collectively, so you are at the mercy of what the employer is or is not willing to do,” said Dave Warren, president of the Northwest Washington Central Labor Council.
Employees without labor unions, such as fast food workers, have no protection from overworking.
“When you are talking about fast food restaurants, it is very hard to organize them because turnover rates in fast food are high and frequent and you are dealing with a national chain that has an interest to keep the unions out,” Warren said.
Attempts for fast-food workers to form unions in the United States and Canada have failed in the past. According to Eric Schlosser, author of “Fast Food Nation: the Dark Side of the All-American Meal,” workers at a McDonald’s restaurant in Montreal signed union cards for their local Teamsters Union in 1997. They did so hoping to start the first unionized McDonald’s in North America.
The McDonald’s owners hired attorneys to slow down the process of union certification. Weeks before the union was to be certified the owners shut down the McDonald’s because they said it was losing money.
According to the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations, half of employers in the United States threaten to shut down operations if employees attempt to form a union.
Former Arby’s employee Jordan Wintermute worked in the fast food industry for eight months to pay his bills. He received minimal benefits, such as a free meal every once in a while and going home early for doing tasks like cleaning out the freezer.
“It would be better if they valued their employees and didn’t treat you like you are a fast-food worker,” Wintermute said.
While some employees try to form labor unions to prevent exploitation, overworking problems still exist within current American labor unions, said Tom Kingshott secretary treasurer of Local Union 44, which represents service workers in Bellingham.
“In a grocery store meat department, instead of having three or four meat cutters that would have been working five years ago, now there is one meat cutter doing the same amount of work the three or four meat cutters did back then,” Kingshott said. “It used to be that sales dictate the amount of hours scheduled, but nowadays it is not the case; it is all driven by costs.”
For union construction workers, long hours are part of the job, said Rick Poitras, Field Representative for the Carpenters and Joiners Local No. 756 in Bellingham.
“Jobs like building a bridge for the state make it so you need to get the job done by the deadline, so the bridge can be used,” Poitras said. “You need to work harder and perhaps do some overtime, but typically carpenters don’t like sitting around anyways because the faster and harder you work makes the day go by quicker, so working hard is not a problem.”
Even though some union members work hard at their jobs, they gain certain rights because of the collective bargaining by the union on their behalf.
In Bellingham and Whatcom County, the Central Labor Union is collectively bargaining with a broad range of employers to help union members frustrated with the increasing amount of work, Warren said. Essentially, if new tasks are being introduced to union members, then workers need to know which task is most important, so they will not try to do everything at once and become overwhelmed.
“We would like to believe that through a strong collective bargaining agreement with unions in different areas of the community it will also help those that are non-union members of the community by helping the employers see what an average wage in the community looks like and see what they pay,” Warren said.
In the United States, unions address overwork through bargaining to increase benefits and decrease overworking related problems, Potter said.
She said employees forming unions ensure workers have a fair and balanced workplace.
“In the United States it is an expectation no matter where you are employed — people want to squeeze more out of you,” she said. “Everyone wants more, and we are not machinery. We are going to break down.”
