We hear of janitors, nurses, and auto workers collectively fighting to improve their working conditions, but the financial sector isn’t known as a hotbed of organizing activity. Yet a recent case of debt consolidator solidarity should inspire others in this rapidly changing industry. Last week, the National Labor Relations Board charged Debt Settlement USA with illegally firing four debt consultants when they stood up to fight a proposed wage cut, and for illegally barring employees from discussing pay issues with each other.

Last week, the National Labor Relations Board issued a decision against Goya Foods in Miami, ordering the company to cease making unilateral changes to its employees’ benefit plans without bargaining with its workers’ union over the changes.  According to Bruce Raynor, President of UNITE HERE, which represents these workers, this decision was the eleventh won by the workers against Goya Foods. 

Yet in a recent speech before the American Sociological Association, Raynor noted that these legal victories mean little as the company still refused to sit down and bargain with the union.

As I recently pointed out, the Goya workers voted for union representation in 1998, yet 10 years of decisions by the circuit courts and the NLRB couldn’t bring Goya to the bargaining table. Clearly we need an overhaul of our labor law to ensure that workers who vote for a union actually secure a contract with their employers. The Employee Free Choice Act holds that promise for workers.

Sixteen years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing Blue Man Group’s original show in New York City.  I reveled in the drumming, marshmallow tossing, and sense of community the artists encouraged in the midst of the information overload of our time.  One longtime Blue Man summed up the show’s message in an interview with the Victoria Times Colonist in 2007:

We live in this technology age which connects us so amazingly... and yet, it's sort of made us more alone than we've ever been.

But Blue Man’s artistic vision for more personal connection is belied by its recent actions repressing its employees’ efforts to come together for a stronger voice at work. 

According to a recent decision by the National Labor Relations Board, the Blue Man Group’s company illegally barred its Las Vegas employees from freely discussing their working conditions, discriminated against a union supporter, and refused to recognize and bargain with the employees’ union—more than two years after they voted for representation.  These are typical violations of the law by anti-union American employers…but for Blue Man?  Looks like it’s just The Man now—more concerned with making money than respecting its employees’ rights.

You can’t have free elections if a candidate is not allowed to campaign freely and his supporters aren’t allowed to campaign without fear of intimidation.

Those were the wise words of President Bush, commenting on the recent sham election in Zimbabwe.  Yet here at home, Bush finds the National Labor Relations Board election process to be fair and democratic, despite the fact that it bears no resemblance to what we would consider fair elections. Workers have little freedom to campaign for a union in the workplace, and employer intimidation is pervasive.

An NLRB administrative law judge recently ruled that a fair election could still occur where an employer had illegally intimidated its workers out of organizing.  In 2006, a small group of car dealership employees in San Jose, CA, lost the benefits of union representation when their company changed ownership.  The new company forced them to withdraw their union membership in order to continue working there, and committed numerous illegal tactics to prevent the workers from forming a union.

The National Labor Relations Board just found Wal-Mart guilty of illegally firing a union supporter, bribing employees, and discriminatorily refusing to protect union supporters from the harassment of their anti-union coworker, all in an effort to prevent workers from forming a union at its Kingman, AZ, store.

How is this decision a gift to Wal-Mart?  Because it was issued eight years after the organizing effort began—eight years after it could have had any impact on the union effort.  Thus Wal-Mart breaks the law, successfully squashes the union effort, benefits from the slow case-handling procedures at the NLRB, and merely has to pony up a little backpay and interest to the employee it fired.  It’s no wonder this country’s largest private employer has managed to stay entirely union-free.

A Starbucks employee in Grand Rapids, Mich., is claiming he was fired last week for trying to form a union.  This allegation follows on the heels of a recent National Labor Relations Board settlement that ordered the company to reinstate two New York City workers it illegally fired for organizing, and to stop spying on employees, withholding raises, prohibiting workers from wearing union buttons, and other illegal tactics used to thwart their union effort.

Why, after this settlement, would Starbucks potentially break the law again?  Could it be that the company only had to pay paltry sum of $1,925 to the two fired New York City workers—with no penalties and no impact on the company’s bottom line?

If you need a reason for Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act and grant employees the right to form unions through majority sign-up, let me refer you to the case of Green Valley Manor.  In the span of three weeks last summer, employees of this nursing home in St. Louis, Mo., attempted to form a union and were forced to stop in the face of retaliation by their employer. 

Here is a brief timeline of events:

Some good news for hard-working nurses:  the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals just struck down a National Labor Relations Board ruling that allowed a hospital to ban nurses from wearing their “RNs Demand Safe Staffing” buttons during collective bargaining.  The Republican majority of the NLRB had condoned yet another employer policy aimed at muzzling their employees’ freedom of association, and once again, a circuit court found they were out of line.

For years I've been writing that Robert Battista, former chair of the National Labor Relations Board, has been doing the bidding of anti-union employers by dismantling protections for workers under the law.  Apparently, he's now going to be doing the bidding of anti-union employers and making a lot more money at notorious unionbusting firm Littler Mendelson (see a sample of their unionbusting strategies: Littler Mendelson’s Dos & Don’ts).

Battista asked Bush to withdraw his nomination as Labor Board chair, which was going nowhere, and joined the firm that John Logan of the London School of Economics called one of the "nation’s first law firms to conduct aggressive union avoidance campaigns."

Now Battista can make money telling employers how to exploit the law he helped to weaken in order to prevent their workers from organizing.

As more jobs stray from the traditional 9 to 5 office scenario, employee discussions over lunch in the break room are becoming a thing of the past.  Email has in many ways filled that gap, enabling employees to communicate about issues of common interest. 

But at Uloop, a social networking site aimed at college students, workers were fired 20 minutes after they first discussed forming a union on the company’s online message boards. 

The employees filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board, claiming that their termination was illegal because their communication was protected by labor law.  This charge will likely be a test of the precedent-setting Register-Guard case, where the Labor Board denied protections for employees who email each other about union-related issues, failing to recognize technological advancements in workplace communication.