The Reality Check: photos from the edge 35 - SIT-IN AT THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD

photos from the edge 35 - SIT-IN AT THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD
By David Bacon

The classic unionbusting strategy for breaking unions - the permanent replacement of strikers by scabs - received its blessing from the Reagan administration in the PATCO strike of 1981. The odious practice was baptized in fire in 1984 in the bitter copper miners strike in Arizona, at Phelps-Dodge. And by the beginning of the 1990s that strategy had produced an era of labor wars - Continental Airlines, Eastern Airlines, International Paper, Caterpillar, Hormel, Watsonville Canning and Frozen Foods, Diamond Walnut, Pittston, Wheeling-Pittsburg, USX, and others.

Eventually that war was fought in the streets of Detroit, in front of the offices of the Detroit News and Free Press, The Detroit papers brought in 580 scabs to replace strikers, guarded by Vance International's gangsters-in-uniform, 20 of whom beat striker Vito Sciuto, breaking his skull. When the UAW struck Caterpillar in Peoria, Vance's Asset Protection Team provoked confrontations it videoed as evidence to refuse to rehire strikers. Another strikebreaker recruiter, BE&K, brought replacements into the mills of International Paper. President Bush later rewarded the company by giving it the power to govern all of southern Iraq after the U.S. invasion of 2003.

Complicit in these attacks was the hands-off attitude of the government agency responsible for protecting workers' right to a union - the National Labor Relations Board. I knew its attitude from personal experience, when union-supporting workers, myself included, were fired from Silicon Valley semiconductor plants in the 1980s. The board simply couldn't see any laws being broken, and we were abandoned to company blacklists and the unemployment line. Later, working as an organizer, I helped many workers survive similar experiences, while the board stood by as companies freely blocked their efforts to organize.

Joe Uehlein, past secretary of the AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Department, and director of its department of strategic campaigns, told me during those years, "That's why the companies want to make us deal with the NLRB. They control that process, and they know how to win using it." Despite often heroic efforts by workers, unions only won about half of the union elections supervised by the board, and couldn't get contracts in half of the workplaces where they did win. The process was so broken that most organizers searched for ways to help workers form unions that didn't depend on the board and its legal process.

That was the origin of Jobs with Justice. In the late 1980s, Larry Cohen, then president of the Communication Workers of America, convinced labor and community activists to begin building local coalitions that could provide a counterweight to the board's inaction. Community pressure and direct action, they thought, could help save individual campaigns, win back workers' jobs, and change the government's pro-company bias.

Finally in 1993 JwJ decided to take direct action. All over the country, wherever there were JwJ chapters, organizers and workers confronted the board. Here in San Francisco our nascent chapter organized a big picketline outside the NLRB Region 20 office. Then people went inside the building. Board officials came out to the lobby to hear our complaints, and after that the people sitting in were arrested.

Among those arrested was Virginia Rodriguez. Virginia, who passed away in 2018, and her former husband, Nick Jones, who died this April, were organizers who built the original UFW grape boycott during the Delano strike in the late 1960s. Virginia went on to become an organizer for my union, CWA Region 9. I had the chance to work with her when 235 workers organized a union at a Sprint boiler-room selling Spanish language phone service, La Conexion Familiar. Sprint closed the facility rather than negotiate a union contract, and we fought the closure for a year.

These pictures tell the story of our sit-in. La Conexion Familiar became a symbol in San Francisco of the failure to protect workers' rights. But civil disobedience in the board office included people from SEIU campaigns to organize janitors and Teamster taxi drivers who found no help from the board when deregulation destroyed their union.

The sit-in didn't produce a definitive victory. The struggle around labor law reform and the NLRB is still with us. Bill Gould was its rare pro-labor chairman in the late 90s. When President Biden appointed Julie Su Secretary of Labor and Jennifer Abruzzo the NLRB's general counsel, the board began to ban company psy-war tactics, like the captive audience meeting, and to include more protections for contingent workers. Trump, of course, is reversing these gains and more. But the positive actions taken by the board in the following years would never have been possible had it not been for the pressure produced by actions like this. Today, when our labor rights are again so endangered, it's good to remember how we defended them in the past.

[Note: My union, The Newspaper Guild, now the NewsGuild, joined CWA in 1995, a little more than a year after the sit-ins. The CWA's militant attitude, helping to organize this and other actions, must have been one reason why becoming part of this bigger union seemed like a good idea.]