News Analysis
Nevada
workers increasingly shun unions
Labor
brass, political allies respond with laws to tilt playing
field
By Steven Miller
Employees in the Silver State increasingly want no part of
unions. That’s the clear message of the latest data from the
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
But Big Labor has a plan: Go around Nevada workers,
using government. Get new laws imposed on the state so that
workers have less say in whether their work sites
become union-controlled.
The figures on union density in Nevada come from the BLS
Current Population Survey, available on the Web at
http://www.unionstats.com. Figures posted there reveal
that the unionized percentage of the Nevada workforce has
declined by 37 percent in just the last 5 years.
According to the BLS, in 1999 a bit less than 20 percent of
Nevada workers, 19.7 percent, were union members. As of 2004,
however, the percentage was down to 12.5.
The union strategy surfaced first in last year’s minimum wage
initiative, and then re-surfaced this year in several pieces
of union-backed legislation. In the minimum wage proposal—both
in the fine print of the initiative version and Assembly Bill
87 in the 2005 legislature—an odd, rarely discussed provision
would effectively give union bosses governmental powers by
allowing them to exempt companies that play ball from laws and
regulations that other, non-union businesses would have to
obey.
Section 2, paragraph 4 of AB 87 says that while the
“provisions of this section may not be waived by agreement
between an individual employee and an employer” … “All
or any part of the provisions of this section may be
waived in a bona fide collective bargaining agreement….”
(Emphasis added.)
In other words, if a business owner facilitates the organizing
of a worksite or his entire company—say, by allowing union
brass to evade a secret-ballot vote by workers and use the
intimidating, no-holds-barred “card count” process—union brass
can agree in the collective bargaining agreement to exempt the
worksite or business from state minimum wage law provisions.
Clearly, in this kind of arrangement, workers are the odd man
out. Indeed, in New York and elsewhere, the new partner of
Nevada’s Culinary union, the UNITE needletrades union, has a
long history of selling out workers for actually illegal
sub-minimum-wage salaries, in exchange for pay-offs from
hard-pressed and/or unethical businesses. At the same time the
union—continuing its long affiliation with the Columbo and
Luchese crime families—continues to enforce collection of
union members’ stiff dues. (For further details, see
Culinary’s Sinister New Partner, a brief report last
fall by NPRI. Or read labor consultant’s Robert Fitch’s 1998
statement and testimony before the
Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee
on Education and the Workforce of the U.S. Congress.)
Another attempt by Big Labor to use the 2005 Nevada
Legislature to circumvent the resistance of Silver State
workers has been Assembly Bill 69, which, until amended in the
last few days, would have forced workers to effectively pay
dues (called "fees") to the very unions that they choose not
to join. (See the discussion of AB 69 under
73rd Session Legislative Stinkers.)
Charts by
NPRI. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
