UE Convention Resolutions
Collective Bargaining
Our current economy can only be described as having multiple-personality disorder. Official statistics say we are in the fourth year of a strong economic recovery. Corporate productivity and profits are at all-time highs. CEOs are being rewarded handsomely. But American workers have had little to show for all the money being thrown around at the top. Between the Bush administration’s perversion of regulatory agencies meant to protect workers, and the national labor movement being at a nadir, employers are less restrained by any countervailing forces than at any point in modern history – and quite often get exactly what they want. However, due to our democratic rank-and-file principles and our militant bargaining style, UE members have been able to rattle employer smugness, with better results in bargaining compensation, benefits, and other areas, compared to the national trends.
While value of hourly wages for many American workers has been stagnant or declining, UE members have continued to see real wage growth. In 2006, inflation grew 3.2 percent, but the wages for service workers grew by only 3.3 percent and manufacturing workers a paltry 2.3 percent. In times of lower unemployment like now there is normally substantial real wage growth. Part of the reason for the discrepancy is that the number of "discouraged workers" no longer collecting unemployment has grown. From 2000 to 2006, the working-age population increased by 8.1 percent, but the workforce only increased by 3.2 percent. In addition, higher-wage jobs (both in manufacturing and increasingly in the service sector) continue to be outsourced, be it to Asia, non-union plants in the south, or simply moved down the street to a lower-paid subcontractor. Most of the new jobs created are in the extreme low-wage sector of the economy, further putting pressure on the working class. However, despite all this, the average UE contract featured a 3.6 percent wage increase in the first year – edging ahead of both inflation and the average American worker.
Healthcare has remained the most thorny subject to negotiate at the bargaining table. In 2006 premiums still increased at over twice the rate of inflation. The average worker now pays nearly $3,000 annually towards premiums for family coverage, roughly double the amount paid in 1999. Nearly one out of five Americans didn’t have insurance for at least part of 2006. And new bare-bones health plans with family deductibles of $5,000 or more are proliferating, meaning even those who are insured increasingly find their insurance useful for little other than catastrophic care.
Given these ever-escalating prices, employers have been pushing hard for continual concessions and to destroy the union advantage on healthcare. In a survey of bargaining objectives for 2007, 63 percent of unionized employers were planning to seek health insurance concessions. Though virtually every local has reported this strong push-back, many have resisted successfully. Roughly half of UE contracts bargained since the last convention either have no healthcare concessions or featured improvements to cost sharing or benefits. Even in those contracts with healthcare concessions, UE militance often made the difference between company proposals to gut existing healthcare coverage and maintaining quality coverage where our members are still paying less than exempt people within the same shop.
Over the past two years, the ongoing retirement crisis has continued to worsen. Bosses continue to willfully bankrupt pensions and turn them over to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC). The solution of the outgoing Republican Congress in 2006, the passage of the Pension Protection Act, will likely make the problem worse. The PPA narrowly focuses on making sure all remaining pension plans are funded, while not only doing nothing to ensure companies don’t dump their pensions, but also making it far more expensive to maintain an ongoing pension plan. Even given these extremely negative national trends, with the exception of plant closings, frozen pensions have remained a rarity at the UE bargaining table in recent years. Many shops in our traditional manufacturing base continued to report pension multiplier increases of a dollar per year, and 401(k) plans at many of our newer-organized shops also saw improvements.
The private sector is not alone in the unprecedented assault on worker’s benefits. Though starting from more secure benefit levels, the public-sector is also feeling the pinch - despite popular misconceptions, the bargaining table can be just as difficult. The national budget crisis, and its state and local government ramifications, is long since over. However, the return to comparably good times has seen government pushing for questionable tax cuts immediately prior to elections. While this scores big with voters, it means budgets remain historically underfunded – and public-sector workers remain incredibly overworked. However, UE has been holding its own in the public sector, with many contracts having wage increases of 4 percent or more, annually and some locals actually decreasing health insurance paychecks deductions.
That UE has achieved the results it has in bargaining is especially heartening given the non-economic picture being so troublesome. We’re living through the lowest point in labor’s strength in over a century, with only 12 percent of the labor force now organized. As the size of the movement shrinks, labor standards erode, and union members’ fights at the bargaining table become ever more difficult.
The Bush administration is the most anti-worker administration since Ronald Reagan, and has made its contempt for labor and favor for management open. Bush has scuttled the ergonomics standard, blocked strikes at the nation’s airlines, invoked Taft-Hartley for the first time in a quarter-century to aid the Pacific Maritime Association in its assault on the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU), suspended black-lung regulations and responsible contractor rules, and declared entire workplaces and industries union-free with the stroke of a pen. His tax cuts for the wealthy have starved the government of funding for social welfare programs. He successfully rolled back the Fair Labor Standards Act, reclassifying millions of workers as ineligible for overtime. He pushed through Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and other so-called "free-trade" agreements with Bahrain, Chile, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, and Singapore. He signed into law the Pension Protection Act, which as previously mentioned, will quite likely actually hasten the decline of defined-benefit pensions. All elements of the Department of Labor (except those investigating labor unions) have been systematically underfunded. A lack of investigation by the defanged Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) in particular seems to have been directly involved in the recent mine tragedies in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Utah. And the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), now packed with extreme right-wing business partisans, has stripped collective bargaining rights from graduate employees, medical residents, and millions of workers suddenly judged to be "supervisors."
Given how much the deck is stacked against working people, UE members have accomplished a great deal. However, we can and must do more at the bargaining table – particularly regarding benefits such as healthcare and retirement. In our ongoing efforts to assist locals with the benefits crisis, the national union unveiled this year its Mobilization for Healthcare and Retirement Security. Both staff and members are being trained to become more savvy at the bargaining table around benefits issues. This includes everything from better understanding pension and healthcare terminology, to knowing how to cost out benefit changes, to learning mobilization tactics and strategy when the boss has the shop seemingly pinned. Just as in the early 1980s, when our no-concessions platform was at first an anomaly and later a model, it’s our hope that our positions and tactics will catch fire in the wider labor movement while we work to build the national political momentum to get progressive political solutions to the healthcare and retirement crises
In the GE negotiations, we saw the beginning of the elements that the national union hopes to see in more contract struggles. Despite making its biggest profit ever, GE went into negotiations wanting deep concessions – not only on healthcare, but also to eliminate a raft of retirement benefits for new hires, including pushing the retirement age from 60 to 65, eliminating pre and post-65 retiree healthcare, elimination of Supplemental Early Retirement Option (SERO), elimination of the Plant Closing Pension Option, and Special Supplemental Benefit Option, and drastic cuts in disability pensions taken before age 60. After a vigorous round of bargaining by a well-prepared committee, along with a militant general membership who showed their resolve through in-shop actions, members retained all existing retirement benefits for new hires except post-65 health insurance.
With only a year and a half left in Bush’s presidency, and Democrats looking likely to control both the executive and legislative branches, working people may get some respite in the more distant future. However, many elements will remain stacked against us. Inflation remains at historically high levels. The end of the housing bubble, and subsequent crash of the subprime mortgage industry, suggest the U.S. economy is likely to enter a recession within the next year. Downsizing, outsourcing, and privatization will continue to transform the economy for the worse. And even come 2008, without an active and politically engaged working class, we could simply see the replacement of corporate Republicans with corporate Democrats.
For the near future, there is little help to stop the employer onslaught, except what we provide each other through solidarity. However, if we continue to rely on an active, militant, and educated rank and file at the bargaining table, the union should continue to see real results, and remain a leading light in the labor movement.
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 70th UE CONVENTION:
- Calls for education and mobilization of UE members in preparation for the aggressive campaigns that are necessary for favorable contract settlements;
- Calls for broadened contract struggles, with outreach to communities and into political and financial forums, to educate the public and create additional pressure on employers;
- Calls for rejecting employer-initiated "interest-based" "win-win" bargaining;
- Calls for building solidarity with other unions engaged in contract fights, especially with workers seeking a first contract or fighting concessions;
- Calls for continued training, research and analytical support from the national union to locals engaged in bargaining;
- Urges UE locals to support the bargaining program of the Union by forwarding information on contract settlements to the national office;
- Calls for mounting a determined struggle to achieve UE’s collective bargaining goals, including:
On Wages, Hours and Seniority:
- A combination of wage increases and cost-of-living adjustments that significantly increases the real income of UE members;
- Time and one-half pay for all hours over eight in one day and on Saturdays, and double time for all work on Sundays, seventh-days, or holidays (in addition to holiday pay);
- A workday shortened to less than eight hours and a workweek shortened to less than forty hours, with no reduction in pay;
- A guaranteed work schedule, and, in the case of a continuous operation, additional protections and benefits for affected workers;
- Resistance to speed-up, measured day work, tighter piecework rates, mandatory overtime, and the scheduling of overtime when workers are laid off;
- Opposition to two-tier systems and replacing full-time jobs with part-time work;
- Support for equal pay for comparable work;
- Continued opposition to Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) which replace current wages with the promise of financial rewards in a future that never arrives;
- Improvements in vacation time, holidays, and sick and personal days;
- Stronger plant-wide, company-wide, and bargaining-unit-wide seniority provisions on job bidding, upgrading, bumping, layoffs and recall rights;
- Adequate shift premiums to reflect increases in cost of living;
On Benefits:
- Full employer-paid health insurance protection, including prescription drugs;
- Defined benefit pensions which, when combined with social security, provide retirement income of at least 75-90 percent of worker’s pre-retirement wages, early retirement with full pension and supplements, full medical coverage and life insurance for retirees and their families, and the right to bargain for retirees;
- Increased employer contributions to defined benefit pension plans which are substantially underfunded, and full investigation and monitoring of all plans;
- Where defined benefit pension plans are not possible, defined contribution plans which have an equivalent benefit (company contributions of at least 12 percent annually not dependent on employee match) with full investigation and monitoring of such plans;
- Contract language requiring employers to secure union approval before applying fund waivers on pension plans;
- Improved life, disability and other insurance protections for active and laid off workers;
- Employer-paid leaves of absence, including absence for injury and illness, jury duty, bereavement and military service;
- Resisting contract language which pays workers to decline health insurance;
On Workers’ Rights:
- A safer, healthier workplace with real power for union safety representatives and committees;
- Contract prohibitions against drug testing in the workplace;
- Contract prohibitions against covert monitoring of employee email, internet usage and phone conversations;
- Employer-paid ESOL (English Speakers of Other Languages) classes for those workers who desire them;
- Employer support, including financial support, for workers resolving conflicts between job and family responsibilities, including dependent care and paid, job-
- protected leave of absence in cases of birth, adoption, or serious illness of a family member;
- Language that will ban any campaigning on the part of employers when organizing sister shops;
- Language that protects the jobs and contract rights of all UE members regardless of immigration status
On Job Security:
- Strong protection against loss of bargaining unit work, including:
- Contract language that all plant closings, relocation, product line movement or subcontracting decisions require early notice and that they be a mandatory subject of collective bargaining;
- Contract prohibitions against contracting out or privatization of bargaining unit work;
- Provision for severance pay, extension of insurance benefits, retraining, and job placement for those losing their jobs as a result of such events;
- Contract language to protect workers from discharge for non-work related activities;
On Strengthening the Union:
- Strong grievance procedures with full rights for shop stewards and grievance committee members;
- The right to strike on grievances without loss of the right to arbitrate;
- Ironclad successors and assigns provisions;
- Full union security;
- Rejection of the trend toward longer contracts;
- Expanding or winning union leave and paid time off for union business.