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A Labor Day Statistic You Didn't See In The News-Gazette |
Current rating: 6 |
by tom joad
(No verified email address) |
05 Sep 2002
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The parade pictures were nice, but how about some hard facts, News-Gazette? |
 The parade pictures were nice, but how about some hard facts, News-Gazette? |
% Approving or Disapproving of Labor Unions
GALLUP - For over six and a half decades, Gallup polls have found Americans expressing widespread support for labor unions. Gallup's initial reading in 1936 showed 72% of Americans approving and just 20% disapproving of unions. During World War II, support declined somewhat but rebounded in the postwar years. In the late 1960s, public approval of unions began to wane and reached its low point in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during a period of immense economic uncertainty. In the most recent poll, the comparable figures are 58% to 35%. Over the past 30 years, the margin of public approval has averaged about 60% to 30%.
hmmm,
Now if we could just get some effective laws to let workers have the unions they want. The article in today's (Sept. 5, 2002) News-Gazette was a good start on some real labor coverage for a change from that quarter. But their reporter took the word of the National Labor Relations Board as some sort of judgement of the truth about whether the nurses at Covenant had their right to organize violated when they were fired for trying to organize.
This is the same sad joke of labor law enforcement by the NLRB that so many workers have heard over the years, including in Urbana when Supervalu fired their entire Transportation Department and contracted out the jobs to Brisk Transportation, a gang of professional union-busters from - that's right - Texas, in 1999.
Whose owner just happened to be the brother-in-law of Mike Wright, CEO of Supervalu at the time.
Despite the fact that members of Supervalu's management team were willing to testify that they had personal knowledge of Supervalu's actions in intentionally, but surreptistiously, breaking numerous parts of existing US labor law,.
The NLRB refused on account of technicalities to allow the testimony of these honest men and women against Supervalu. The NLRB found that Supervalu was in compliance and dismissed all the union's complaints of unfair labor practices. More than 150 efficient workers lost their jobs to the fact that Supervalu wanted to maintain a disvision that could specialize in strike-breaking centered in their surrounding chain of mostly union-worked distribution centers here in the Midwest.
Supervalu was willing to break the law.
And knew they could get away with it.
And it looks like Covenant will get away with it, too, while tragically undercutting the message of Catholic morality that they had remained committed to in the past by engaging in union-busting in the present.
The NLRB remains hopelessly ineffective and corrupt.
The only way the NLRB will find an employer guilty of breaking the law these days is if they get a confession from the CEO himself.
And we all know what a bunch of moral and upright characters these people are, don't we? |
