Union
'Living Wage' Laws Are Union Lifesavers
Labor likes the measures because they make useful bargaining chips.
By MAXFORD NELSEN
Oct. 2, 2014 7:32 p.m. ET
Labor activists across the country are pressing local jurisdictions to dramatically raise the minimum wage. They argue that this is necessary to help workers escape poverty. Often, however, so-called living-wage laws are really devices to revive unions.
Los Angeles became the latest to join the movement when the city council approved a law on Sept. 24 requiring large hotels to pay employees at least $15.37 per hour and provide generous paid sick-leave benefits. But the ordinance includes a provision, increasingly common in similar ordinances, that permits unions to waive the requirements in collective bargaining.
This waiver enables labor organizers to approach a nonunion employer struggling to pay the new minimum with the following offer: assist them in unionizing employees by signing a "neutrality agreement," in return for which the union will use the collective-bargaining waiver to allow the employer to pay less than the new statutory minimum.
While the details of each neutrality agreement vary, they typically obligate the employer to remain silent on the unionization effort, provide union organizers with employees' personal contact information, and waive the employees' right to a secret-ballot election administered by the National Labor Relations Board.
Such deals may be good for the union and better than the alternative the employer faces, but workers lose their right to determine whether to unionize in a secret ballot election. And the living-wage ordinance is exposed as a cynical political ploy.
With minimum wage and mandatory paid sick-leave regulations spreading across the country, reports of unions using collective-bargaining waivers to their advantage are starting to accumulate.
In 2013 the Long Beach Business Journal cited the collective-bargaining waiver built into the city's $13 minimum wage law as an important factor in the unionization of two large hotels, the Hyatt Regency Long Beach and the Hyatt Pike Long Beach.
In February, following the passage of a countywide living-wage law, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the Service Employees International Union approached a local home-care business owner and offered to give her an exemption from the wage law "if she agreed to deduct union dues from all of her employees' paychecks."
A survey conducted in May by the Seattle, Wash., city auditor found that 37 of the 56 surveyed Seattle unions had waived the citywide paid sick-leave mandates in some or all of their contracts with employers.
Organized labor provides most of the political muscle needed to enact these regulations in the first place, contending that, as a matter of human dignity, no employee should have to work for less than $15 an hour or have to stay home sick without pay. But in their more candid moments, union organizers admit the prospect of boosting their flagging membership animates their support of the laws.
After unions succeeded in narrowly passing a $15 minimum wage ordinance in SeaTac, Wash., the local United Food and Commercial Workers union boasted in a newsletter that the initiative "provides an incentive for employers to collectively bargain with their employees." Similarly, when asked why unionized firms are exempted from L.A.'s new minimum-wage law, Unite Here union representative Leigh Shelton complained to the Huffington Post that "because it is so hard to organize a union, we have to do it any way we can."
Labor likes the measures because they make useful bargaining chips.
By MAXFORD NELSEN
Oct. 2, 2014 7:32 p.m. ET
Labor activists across the country are pressing local jurisdictions to dramatically raise the minimum wage. They argue that this is necessary to help workers escape poverty. Often, however, so-called living-wage laws are really devices to revive unions.
Los Angeles became the latest to join the movement when the city council approved a law on Sept. 24 requiring large hotels to pay employees at least $15.37 per hour and provide generous paid sick-leave benefits. But the ordinance includes a provision, increasingly common in similar ordinances, that permits unions to waive the requirements in collective bargaining.
This waiver enables labor organizers to approach a nonunion employer struggling to pay the new minimum with the following offer: assist them in unionizing employees by signing a "neutrality agreement," in return for which the union will use the collective-bargaining waiver to allow the employer to pay less than the new statutory minimum.
While the details of each neutrality agreement vary, they typically obligate the employer to remain silent on the unionization effort, provide union organizers with employees' personal contact information, and waive the employees' right to a secret-ballot election administered by the National Labor Relations Board.
Such deals may be good for the union and better than the alternative the employer faces, but workers lose their right to determine whether to unionize in a secret ballot election. And the living-wage ordinance is exposed as a cynical political ploy.
With minimum wage and mandatory paid sick-leave regulations spreading across the country, reports of unions using collective-bargaining waivers to their advantage are starting to accumulate.
In 2013 the Long Beach Business Journal cited the collective-bargaining waiver built into the city's $13 minimum wage law as an important factor in the unionization of two large hotels, the Hyatt Regency Long Beach and the Hyatt Pike Long Beach.
In February, following the passage of a countywide living-wage law, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the Service Employees International Union approached a local home-care business owner and offered to give her an exemption from the wage law "if she agreed to deduct union dues from all of her employees' paychecks."
A survey conducted in May by the Seattle, Wash., city auditor found that 37 of the 56 surveyed Seattle unions had waived the citywide paid sick-leave mandates in some or all of their contracts with employers.
Organized labor provides most of the political muscle needed to enact these regulations in the first place, contending that, as a matter of human dignity, no employee should have to work for less than $15 an hour or have to stay home sick without pay. But in their more candid moments, union organizers admit the prospect of boosting their flagging membership animates their support of the laws.
After unions succeeded in narrowly passing a $15 minimum wage ordinance in SeaTac, Wash., the local United Food and Commercial Workers union boasted in a newsletter that the initiative "provides an incentive for employers to collectively bargain with their employees." Similarly, when asked why unionized firms are exempted from L.A.'s new minimum-wage law, Unite Here union representative Leigh Shelton complained to the Huffington Post that "because it is so hard to organize a union, we have to do it any way we can."
A few countries agreed of a free movement for surviving.