'A Last Vestige of Slavery & Segregation'
By Dick Meister
It's been three-quarters of a century since enactment
of the National Labor Relations Act that grants
workers the basic legal right of unionization - the
right to bargain with employers on setting their wages,
hours and working conditions.
But for all that time, two groups of our most highly
exploited workers have been denied the law's
protections - farm workers, and housekeepers, nannies,
and other domestic workers.
Congress should remedy the situation by amending the
law to include the excluded workers. Which is the goal
of a campaign - "Labor Justice" -- that's been launched
by two veterans of United Farm Worker union campaigns,
longtime UFW activist LeRoy Chatfield and former UFW
attorney Jerry Cohen. They've already won the backing
of labor, political, civil rights, academic, religious
and community leaders and organizations in more than 30 states.
Chatfield and Cohen played key roles in passing the
1975 law that granted union rights to
workers. There have been drives to enact similar laws
in other states, but none have even come close to
passing. Neither have drives for state laws to grant
union rights to domestic workers.
The need to extend the legal protections is obvious.
Most farm workers' pay is at or near the poverty level.
They typically have few fringe benefits and very little
legal protection from employer mistreatment.
Domestic workers, some of them self-employed, some of
them employees of companies that hire them out, also
generally earn little more than poverty-level pay and
have few benefits. Most are women, who often are
subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Some have
formed union-like organizations to seek better
treatment, but need the force of law behind them.
The "Labor Justice" campaign leaders call the exclusion
of farm workers and domestics from the protections of
the Labor Relations Act "one of our nation's last
vestiges of slavery and segregation."
Certainly the exclusion is at the least racist, since
the vast majority of
Latino immigrants. In a letter to Labor Secretary Hilda
Solis urging the Obama administration to back the
proposed expansion of the law, Cohen compared the
exclusion of farm workers and domestics to the
situation in racist
"Blacks," Cohen noted, were specifically excluded from
the protections of
National Labor Relations Act.
It was racism, in fact, that kept farm workers and
domestics from being granted the protection of the U,S.
law originally, although it was a more subtle racism -
a "sleight of hand," as Cohen said.
At the time of the law's introduction in 1935 as part
of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, most
farm workers and domestics were African-American. The
segregationist Southern Democrats in Congress, an
important part of FDR's political base, absolutely
refused to vote for a law that would grant
African-American workers the same rights as white workers.
So, as presented to Congress by
passed, the Labor Relations Act, the basic labor law of
the land, specifically excluded from its legal
protections "agricultural laborers" and anyone "in the
domestic service of any family or person."
But now, 74 years later, we finally have the
opportunity to correct that shameful exclusion.
Finally, we have the chance to provide every worker -
every one of them - the vital right of unionization.
Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based journalist, has
covered labor and political issues for a half-century
as a print, broadcast and online reporter, editor and
commentator. Contact him through his website at
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