Ruling Threatens Nurses, All Labor

Fight NLRB Union Busting!

Nurses unions and the entire labor movement are faced with a fight against a union-busting ruling by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on October 3. The landmark 3-2 decision opened the door for employers to reclassify millions of workers as supervisors, which would bar them from union membership under federal labor law. It enables management in any industry to claim that workers are supervisors if they have the authority to assign or direct another worker and use “independent judgment” on the job, such as charge nurses (who run hospital shifts) or lead workers in the skilled trades. Already in the past few years, the NLRB had barred union representation for graduate students at private universities, temporary workers and newspaper carriers, among others.

The NLRB ruling takes direct aim at nurses unions. The day after the decision was announced, the head of the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA) announced at a panel discussion with the NLRB chairman that its members were prepared to strike in defense of the union. On November 13, the most overwhelming strike authorization vote in the MNA’s history took place at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. A week later, hospital officials agreed to a new contract with provisions protecting the union status of MNA members. Meanwhile, more than 30,000 members of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee have signed pledges to strike if their employers attempt to use the ruling against them.

Even before the ruling, a nearly month-long strike by 1,300 nurses at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, this past summer won an agreement from management not to contest any current nurse’s union membership, whatever the NLRB decided. The nurses also won improvements in their health care as a result of the strike, one of a number of recent nurses strikes across the country.

The very existence of unions came about through bitter class struggle, often in defiance of anti-labor laws. Today there is an evident appetite for labor action to defend the nurses unions. But instead, the main response of the top labor officials to the NLRB ruling was to use it to mobilize union members behind the Democrats’ midterm election campaigns, exemplifying the union bureaucracy’s reliance on phony “pro-labor” capitalist politicians. Fresh off the Democrats’ success, these labor lieutenants of capital are now intent on helping install a Democrat in the White House in 2008, hoping a more “labor friendly” NLRB will be appointed. The labor misleaders preach that the NLRB, given the right composition, would protect workers and discipline companies for interfering in organizing drives. The fact is that under the guise of “neutrality,” the labor boards are agencies of the capitalist government and are invariably stacked on the side of the bosses, despite their occasional slaps on the wrist administered to management.

The NLRB decision was prepared by a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that rejected the board’s earlier, more restrictive definition of workers exercising “independent judgment.” The latest ruling—resolving one of three cases collectively known as the “Kentucky River” cases—was a direct blow against the United Auto Workers, which had been attempting to organize nurses at Oakwood Heritage Hospital in Taylor, Michigan. Health care bosses nationally had eagerly anticipated this ruling. At least 120 other cases in which the employer was contesting certification election results were deferred until after the “Kentucky River” decisions. Earlier this year, Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle announced it would dispute the union membership of all 600 of its registered nurses. A further effect of categorizing many registered nurses as supervisors is to aid hospital bosses in driving a wedge between the better-paid and highly skilled RNs and vocational nurses, nurses’ aides and other hospital workers.

The health care industry is easily the fastest growing sector of the U.S. economy, having added 1.7 million jobs since 2001, and there remains a critical shortage of nurses. This gives nurses unions considerable leverage. But all too often, their ability to wield that power in strike action is limited by the class-collaborationist union tops, who bow to court injunctions and keep picket lines thin while hospital officials shuttle in scabs from strikebreaking outfits. When any section of the hospital workforce goes on strike, what’s needed is to build mass picket lines joined by all unionized workers on site and mobilizing public support for hospital workers.

There is wide sympathy for the overworked nurses and other health care workers in this racist capitalist society, where the bottom line in “medical care” isn’t healing patients but boosting profits. Health care workers have natural allies among working people who see their health benefits torn up by profit-gouging companies, and among the ghetto and barrio poor who for decades have faced the closures of public hospitals, losing access to the modicum of care they provide, as well as Medicaid cuts. At a time when fewer and fewer people can afford health care, attacks on the nurses unions will further erode the quality of treatment. For example, the unions regularly demand higher nurse-to-patient ratios in contract negotiations and during strikes.

The AFL-CIO tops charge that the October ruling violates the intention of the 1935 Wagner Act, which set up the NLRB. But the very purpose of the Wagner Act was to divert the tumultuous class struggle of the 1930s, particularly the mass union organizing drives, into the machinery of government control (see “Union Busting and Capitalist ‘Democracy’,” WV No. 867, 31 March). The “New Deal” Democratic administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed for the Wagner Act as a measure to rein in a strike wave that included citywide strikes in Toledo, San Francisco and Minneapolis in 1934—led respectively by left-wing socialists, Communists and Trotskyists—and to head off wider working-class rebellion. The Wagner Act outlawed key organizing tactics like the sit-down strike and gave the NLRB wide powers to determine which unions would be recognized as bargaining agents by the employers.

Immediately after World War II and with the onset of the anti-Soviet Cold War, the NLRB used this authority to break leftist-led unions on the heels of the greatest strike wave in U.S. history. The assault on the unions was codified in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which banned additional militant union tactics like sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts and required “loyalty oaths” from the unions in order to purge them of Reds and other militants. A majority of the Democrats in Congress voted for this union-busting law.

A lesser-known provision of Taft-Hartley excluded supervisors from joining unions and was the basis for the NLRB’s October ruling. True supervisors, who hire, fire and/or discipline workers, are agents of the class enemy and do not belong in the unions—but it is for the workers to keep them out of their labor organizations. Any attempt by the capitalist state to determine who should belong to a union is a blow against labor.

In courting the labor vote for the midterm elections, Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats issued token condemnations of the NLRB decision and urged passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would provide for union recognition by card checks rather than certification elections. The bosses can be counted on to intimidate and even terrorize pro-union workers and otherwise manipulate the drawn-out procedure for union recognition elections. But the notion pushed by the labor tops that new legislation would safeguard union organizing efforts against interference from the bosses is a pipe dream. The proposed law would not only keep union certification under the thumb of the NLRB but would allow companies to kick the negotiation of a union’s first contract to federal mediation followed by binding arbitration—a trap designed to stop strikes and leave workers with no say in the outcome.

Democratic Party administrations that won office with the support of the pro-capitalist labor tops have routinely battered unions with anti-labor laws. The Clinton White House invoked the Railway Labor Act 14 times to spike strikes by rail and air transport workers. And while the PATCO air traffic controllers union was smashed by the Republican Reagan administration in 1981, the plans to bust the union were drawn up under Democrat Jimmy Carter.

It takes class-struggle methods to defend labor against the class enemy. And that perspective requires fighting to break the ties forged by the labor tops to the bosses’ state and political parties. Labor needs a new, class-struggle leadership, one that would support the building of a workers party committed to the fight for a workers government.