The AFL-CIO just released an announcement that heralds the following: “Catholic Bishops, Health Providers, Unions cooperate to support workers’ rights”. The headline and the subsequent list can easily leave the reader believing that employer, workers and union organizers have agreed to a set of very good and positive principals. However, you’d be wrong because according to the AFL-CIO blog post that details this accord “the new guidelines cover seven principals for employers when workers seek a union”, the operative word here is employers. In short, the guidelines only apply to employers, not to the employee in favor or opposed to unions, or the union organizers themselves. And though this is not quite as egregious of an agreement as the odious Tenet/C.N.A. (an affiliate of the AFL-CIO) neutrality agreement, which handed over the personal information of registered nurses (without the knowledge of those same RNs) at C.N.A.-targeted hospitals it’s still nonetheless a one-sided accord.
The seven principals for employers when workers seek a union:
Respect;
Access to information;
Truthful communication;
Pressure-free environment;
Expeditious process;
Honoring employee decisions; and
Meaningful enforcement of these principals
How can I tell? because of the term employers in the sentence, and not phrases such as all parties, everyone, all concerned and so forth. So once again unions have found a way to stack the deck. What’s truly sad is that the guidelines suggested above are well meaning, but without them being applied to all, and I mean all parties (that would include employee both in opposition to and in favor of union representation and the union organizers) this then leaves the door open for union and their supporters to engage in bad behavior without fear of repercussions (this would also go for the employees who are in opposition to union representation).
Additionally several of the phrases are subjective rather than objective. For example, how are we defining truthful communication, pressure-free environment and meaningful enforcement? I ask this since one person’s pressure could be another person directly asked question. Truthful communication? What does that mean? For example in a recent flyer put out by the C.N.A., an AFL-CIO affiliate, numerous duplicate signatures, unidentified employee signatures, terminated employee signatures, and signatures of people in favor of decertification were found on a “petition” to encourage Cy-Fair nurses to vote against decertification. When a C.N.A. representative was asked why such a flyer was even being distributed the response was oh well it was a printing error; but to many individuals including myself this flyer was less than truthful, but apparently to the C.N.A. there was nothing “untruthful” about it.
So though the accord that seems to have been reached, I think it’s once step above an Election Procedures Agreement (EPA). If unions and employers were all about supporting the workers then these guidelines should’ve used more objective language and should’ve been written to include ALL parties. All too often unions accuse non-union nurses as being surrogates for management thus putting into question the motives of these nurses; and pro-nursing union nurses are often found exhibiting less then positive adult like behavior. The union gets the option of pointing the finger of blame to the first and ignoring the bad acts of the later; while employers do the same in reverse – meanwhile it’s the nurses themselves that suffer in the end. Or you have experiences such as the nurses in Houston and Philadelphia where hospital management was so cowed by the EPA that they decided to not respond to any questions that nurse had that remotely referenced the union, and barred any message by pro-union messages going so far as to give the union a glass covered bulletin board, but no such favor to the “No to the union” nurses. Is this fair? Does it fall in line with the above AFL-CIO guidelines?
You may wonder why I even decided to address the AFL-CIO accord with the Catholic Bishops et al; simple the link was sent to be by someone identifying himself or herself as:
hello
Submitted on 2009/07/09 at 3:24am
I’d like to know your thoughts on this:
I found the query trapped in my spam folder since both the name and email appeared suspicious to my spamblocker. I did a quick whois search and found that it had been sent from the servers at the California Nurses Association (see copy of search here). I wonder what ulterior motive the C.N.A. had in sending me this link to their affiliated organization? Are they contemplating adopting a similar, somewhat more restrained approach to their well know aggressive organizing? Well who’s to know the real reason, but respond I have with my opinion.