Term Paper on Labor Laws in the United
States
Introduction
Under a wide-angle lens the American economy look as if it is very well built.
Joblessness is small, and earnings are creeping up after years of stagnation. In
center, despite the fact that, there are disturbing signs for Americans worried
on the subject of social justice and human rights. A two-tier financial system
and culture are taking profile. Income dissimilarity is at historically elevated
extent. Worker self-organization and cooperative accords, engines of
middle-class increase and social unity in the century now broken has attained
historically small scopes. Even though trade unions halted waning association
tendency in 1999, somewhat escalating the complete figure of workers who
negotiate jointly, the percentage of the workforce characterized by unions did
not increase.
Every day about 135 million citizens in the United States get up and go to their
jobs in service, industry, agriculture, non-profit, government and other sectors
of the massive and multifaceted American economy. The rate of new job formation
in the United States; almost twenty million in the 1990s, is the greed of many
other countries. Many Americans believe of workers' organizing, combined
accords, and strikes exclusively as union-versus-management argues that do not
hoist human rights apprehensions. This account approaches workers' use of these
tools as an exercise of basic rights where workers are autonomous actors, not
objects of unions' or employers' institutional interests. Both historical
understanding and a evaluation of present situation around the world indicate
that well-built, sovereign; self-governing trade unions are fundamental for
societies where human rights are valued. Human rights cannot thrive where
workers' rights are not forced. Researching workers' work out of these rights in
diverse industries, professions, and regions of the United States to arrange
this account, Human Rights Watch found that autonomy of organization is a right
below stern, often buckling force when workers in the United States attempt to
use it.
Labor rights abuses in the United States are particularly worrying when the U.S.
administration is pressing other countries to guarantee esteem for globally
documented workers' rights as fraction of the global trade and investment
system. For instance, a lot of developing countries accuse that U.S. suggestions
for a working group on labor rights at the World Trade Organization (WTO) are
aggravated by protectionism, not by an apprehension for workers' rights. U.S.
firmness on a rights-based relation to do business is weaken when core labor
rights are methodically dishonored in the United States.
Without retreating the importance of the obstruction and breach tackled by
workers in the United States, an impartial viewpoint ought to be upheld. U.S.
workers usually do not tackle gross human rights abuses where death squads
assassinate trade union organizers or communal bargaining and strikes are
outlawed. But the nonattendance of methodical government oppression does not
mean that workers in the United States have effectual exercise of the right to
freedom of association. On the contrary, workers' freedom of association is
beneath continued attack in the United States, and the government is over and
over again failing its liability under international human rights principles to
discourage such attacks and protect workers' rights.
The cases studied in this report are not remote exceptions in otherwise
benevolent surroundings for workers' freedom of association. They mirror a
broader outline long established by other researchers and borne out in
nationwide information and figures. In the 1950s, for instance, workers who
experienced retaliations for using the right to freedom of association numbered
in the hundreds each year. In the 1960s, the number climbed into the thousands,
attaining a little over 6,000 in 1969. By the 1990s more than 20,000 workers
each year were fatalities of prejudice leading to a back-pay order by the
NLRB-23, 580 in 1998.14 The incidence and mounting occurrence of workers' rights
abuses ought to cause serious anxiety amongst Americans who worry about human
rights and social justice. 2
Policy And Reality
Workers in the United States held a measure of legal protection for the right to
organize, to bargain collectively, and to strike with passage of the
Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 and the Wagner Act of 1935, the original National
Labor Relations Act (NLRA). 15 These developments came after decades of
resistance and sacrifice from the instance, a century before, when trade unions
were treated as an illicit scheme. The NLRA states a national policy of "full
freedom of association" and defends workers' "right to self-organization, to
form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through
representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted
activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or
protection . . ." The NLRA makes it unlawful for companies to "interfere with,
restrain, or coerce" workers in the exercise of these rights. It makes the
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to put into effect the law by examining
and remedying violations. All these actions comport with international human
rights norms concerning workers' freedom of association. The realism of NLRA
enforcement falls far short of its goals. A lot of workers who attempt to shape
and link trade unions to negotiate with their employers are spied on, hassled,
forced, threatened, suspended, fired, deported or otherwise persecuted in
retaliation for their use of the right to freedom of association.
Private employers are the major representatives of mistreatment. But
international human rights law makes governments accountable for caring
defenseless personnel and groups from patterns of mistreatment by private
actors. In the United States, labor law enforcement pains often fail to
discourage illegal behavior. When the law is functional, enervating delays and
weak solutions invite sustained breaches.3
Any boss intent on opposing workers' self-organization can haul out lawful
events for years, fearing little more than an order to post a written notice in
the workplace promising not to repeat unlawful conduct and grant back pay to a
worker fired for organizing. In one case cited here, a worker fired for five
years received $1,305 back pay and $493 interest.17 Many employers have
approached to sight solutions like back pay for workers fired for the reason
that of union activity as a custom cost of doing business, well worth it to get
clear of organizing leaders and disrupt workers' organizing labors. As a
consequence, a tradition of near-impunity has taken shape in much of U.S. labor
law and practice.
Furthermore, a number of necessities of U.S. law candidly clash with
international norms and create dreadful legal obstructions to the use of freedom
of association. Millions of workers are specifically disqualified from the law's
security of the right to organize. U.S. lawful policy permitting employers to
lastingly restore workers who use the right to hit efficiently invalidates the
right. Joint support among workers and unions documented in most of the world as
lawful expressions of unity is cruelly prohibited under U.S. law as unlawful
secondary boycotts. Labor laws have failed to maintain speed with changes in the
market and novel shapes of employment relationships making millions of
part-time, momentary, subcontracted, and otherwise "atypical" or "contingent"
workers whose use of the right to freedom of association is aggravated by the
law's insufficiency.4
Case Studies And Workers Voice
"I know the law gives us rights on paper, but where's the reality?" asks Ernest
Duval, an expert nurse supporter at a Florida nursing home. Duval and quite a
few coworkers were illegally fired in 1994 for actions like wearing buttons,
passing out flyers, signing petitions, and chatting with coworkers concerning
banding jointly in a union at their place of work in West Palm Beach. In 1996 a
judge found their boss responsible of illegal inequity and ordered Duval and his
coworkers restored to their jobs. In 1999 they were still out of work in spite
of an NLRB order keeping the judge's ruling. The boss persisting to plea these
verdicts, now to federal courts, where years' more delay is probable. In the
meantime, the fired workers stay off the job, and their coworkers are alarmed
into withdraw from the organizing and bargaining effort.
"We know our job, we love our job, we love our patients, but management doesn't
respect us," Marie Pierre, one more nursing home assistant, told Human Rights
Watch. Pierre labored as a union observer at two representation elections in
1998 and 1999 at a nursing home in Lake Worth, Florida. The union won both
elections, but Pierre was fired in December 1999 for speaking Creole with
coworkers. The company has declined to recognize election results, engaging them
to the NLRB and hoisting the views of years more of appeals before the courts.
"They don't let us talk to Legal Services or the union. They would fire us if we
called them or talked to them," said a farm worker in North Carolina to an Human
Rights Watch researcher investigating freedom of association among H-2A migrant
laborers.20 The H-2A program grants immigrant workers a temporary visa for
agricultural work in the United States. They labor at the sufferance of growers
who can fire them and have them deported if they seek to shape or join a union.
A continent's extent away, an apple picker in Washington State told Human Rights
Watch of threats from "the consultant that was telling [the company] how to beat
the union." fraction of a growing industry that specializes in telling employers
how to defeat workers' self-organization, the consultant told striking apple
workers, "You have thirty minutes to get back to work or you're all fired." A
convoy of police cars accompanied trucks and vans full of workers sent by other
apple growers to smash the strike. Farm workers in the United States are barred
from reporting by laws to defend the right to organize, to bargain, and to
strike, and can be fired for exercising these rights.5
Nico Valenzuela is one more kind of victim. He and his coworkers at a
Chicago-area telecommunications castings company voted by a great mass in 1987
to form and join a union. Valenzuela is still working, but combined dealing
proved futile in the face of a management campaign to punish workers for their
vote. In spite of repeated findings by the NLRB that the company acted
unlawfully, legal remedies took years to obtain. The workers discarded dealing
in 1999, twelve years after they shaped a union, never having attained a
contract. The delays "took away our spirit," said Nico Valenzuela of the
bargaining process. "I don't know how the law in this country can allow these
maneuvers."
Lloyd Montiel, a twenty-seven-year veteran employee at a steel mill in Pueblo,
Colorado, using the right to strike along with 1,000 coworkers in reply to
management's threats during bargaining. The company lastingly substituted them
with recently hired strikebreakers, many approaching from other states. "How can
the government and Congress allow companies to do this?" he asks. "They [the
employer] can plan a strike, cause a strike, and then get rid of people who gave
them a lifetime of work and bring in young guys who never saw the inside of a
steel mill." At a world of employment far detached from steel mills and nursing
homes, Barbara Judd, a high-tech contract worker in Redmond, Washington, found
herself and coworkers who shaped a union caught amid the firm where they worked
and their temporary employment agencies when they wanted to negotiate jointly.
As "permatemps"-long-term workers at a single firm, but supposedly working by
outside agencies-Judd's group had no one to negotiate with. Denying their
service status, the firm refused to bargain with the group. In the meantime, the
momentary agencies declined to bargain with workers placed at the firm.
The stories of these and other workers who have tried to use the right to
freedom of association promised by international human rights instruments and by
the U.S. labor law principles are the focus of this report. The cases accounted
here are not exceptional, and the findings are not novel for those familiar with
domestic U.S. discourse on workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively.
Congressional committees and presidential commissions have reached the same
conclusions, and Human Rights Watch has consulted these sources among others in
preparing this report. Smithfield Foods is the world's largest hog processing
company. A Smithfield Foods plant in Wilson, North Carolina, employs some 300
workers who manufacture bacon, sausages, hot dogs and other retail pork items.
Workers here attempted to shape a union in early and mid-1999, but they lost an
NLRB election. Human Rights Watch interviewed workers who detailed threats by
Smithfield boss in captive-audience meetings to shut the plant if workers
selected in support of joint dealing.
Conclusion
In recent months, the U.S. government has augmented calls for incorporating
human rights and labor rights into the global trade and investment system in
such venues as the World Trade Organization and the Free Trade Agreement of the
Americas. Freedom of association is the first such right cited in calls for
labor rights in trade agreements. But to offer effectual management to this
source that is not weakened by double standards, the United States must face up
to and commence to resolve its own failings when it comes to workers' rights.
Moving swiftly to reinforce labor rights enforcement and discourage labor rights
breaches in the United States will strengthen the genuineness of U.S.
apprehension for making certain worldwide admiration for core labor standards 7.
Endnotes
Hood, Hardy and Lewis. Workers’ Compensations and Employee Protection Laws in a
Nutshell, 2nd ed. 1990.
Caroline Gooding. Disabling Law, Enabling Acts. Pluto Press. Boulder, CO.
J. Ralph Lindgren and Nadine Taub. Law of Sex Discrimination, The, 2nd ed. West
Publishing Co., St. Paul, MN 1999.
L. Camille Hebert. Employee Privacy Law. Clark Boardman Callaghan, Deerfield,
IL, 1998.
Richard M. Steinberg, Harold Dankner and Ronald J. Murray. John Wiley and Sons,
Somerset. Pensions and Other Employee Benefits: A Financial Reporting and ERISA
Compliance Guide, 4th ed., NJ, 1993.
Paul F. Albergo and Dana J Domone. The Law and the Code, 1993 ed. Bureau of
National Affairs, Rockville, MD, 1998.
Stephen R. Bruce. Pension Claims: Rights and Obligations, 2nd ed. Bureau of
National Affairs, Rockville, MD, 1999.
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