Organized Labor

On January 4 a joint delegation from the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, from the Bay Area Council – two business organizations – and from the San Francisco Labor Council under its executive director, Tim Paulson, a member of Bricklayers and Allied Crafts Local 3, flew to Washington, DC to take part in events surrounding the swearing-in of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. I went with the delegation.

That night we attended a reception given by the California Congressional Delegation in Congresswoman Pelosi’s honor at the home of Esther Coopersmith, a former Ambassador to the United Nations. The next morning we had breakfast with Senator Barbara Boxer, then attended a brunch reception for the prospective Speaker. In the afternoon we went to the swearing-in of Senator Dianne Feinstein to another term, and in the evening joined a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Reception for the Speaker after her swearing-in. The next morning again we returned for a breakfast reception “by Speaker Pelosi for family, friends, and supporters.” We then went together, labor and business, to the offices of the United States Chamber of Commerce for a briefing on its legislative agenda and walked then together a block to the headquarters of the AFL-CIO, parent organization to most of the affiliates of this Council.

A few notes in this and next month’s Organied Labor will suffice in place of a full account of these events.

Senator Boxer spoke to about eighty delegates from San Francisco business and labor, seated ten to a round table in one of the windowless rooms hotels set aside for meetings. A petite woman, she joked about the platform she stood on to give her a good view over the podium.

She talked first about how remarkable and encouraging it was to see business and labor join together.

As I’ve noted in other columns, we in the San Francisco Building Trades may be more accustomed than other unionists to seeing business and labor together. Many of our employers have come from our ranks. Some still wear the tools. This has been true since the very beginning of this Council, before the turn of the last century. On the other side, many local business leaders see advantages in a unionized workforce. We may fight on occasion, but we each gain from our relationship with the other.

This recognition of mutual advantage between business and labor is a San Francisco value the Republicans failed to mention in the recent election.

Senator Boxer will chair the Environment and Public Works Committee. Her gavel will affect our livelihoods directly. We can be happy to have her as a friend.

At the brunch reception that same morning, ostensible friends of the Speaker-to-be jammed the Cannon House Office Building Caucus Room – a substantial hall – from back wall to front rope line. Some were certainly San Franciscans. Most were probably not. The high ceilings sent back a great din. Crossing the hall with coffee was chancy. To reach the rope line and an opportunity to greet the Speaker passing behind it on her way to and from the podium would have required elbow work. I kept my elbows to myself.

Nancy Pelosi is San Francisco’s Representative to Congress, but she belongs now to the entire nation. Although we can be sure she will strive to keep in close touch with us, there may be times when we San Franciscans find ourselves crowded away from the rope line and disinclined to elbow our way forward. I trust in Nancy Pelosi and her staff. We will be heard.

Congresswoman Pelosi was preceded at the podium by Congressman George Miller of Contra Costa County. Miller’s granddaughter accompanied him. After Miller introduced Nancy Pelosi, the congresswoman called for her children and grandchildren to join her at the podium. Her husband and one son managed to reach her. I recognized one of her daughters back in the crowd. She was keeping her elbows to herself.

Nancy paused a moment. When she saw that her other children and her grandchildren hadn’t reached the rope line, she went ahead with the opening theme for her speech, “This is for the children.”

Pictures in national media have shown how she returned to this theme after her swearing in a little later, when she called for the children and grandchildren of members of Congress to join her on the dais.

The Republicans have spoken often of “family values.” “Family values” should include a commitment to the livelihoods of those who must provide for their families; families under economic strain hold together only with great difficulty. As evidenced by the provisions in her “first hundred hours” agenda to raise the minimum wage and to lower the costs of student loans, the Democrats under Nancy Pelosi are committed to helping to support and grow the middle class, to establishing conditions for families and children to flourish. For the many like me who entered the trades to provide for a family, a Congressional agenda “for the children” has been a long time coming.

John Sweeney, Rich Trumka, and Linda Chavez-Thompson of the AFL-CIO were in the crowd for Pelosi’s speech. So were Anna Burger and Andy Stern of Change-to-Win. As Nancy listed the items on her agenda after the “first hundred hours,” she said, “and card check.” The labor contingent in the audience whooped and applauded. Steve Falk of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce playfully grabbed Tim Paulson by the neck. The little gray-haired man in front of me turned to the tall red-headed woman next to him and shrugged.

Most Building Trades members would react like the little gray-haired man. When we join our unions we all sign cards that authorize them to represent us. By themselves these cards do not determine whether or not Building Trades employers are unionized. In most other industries, however, a company is unionized only when a majority of its eligible workers express a decision to be represented by a union. This decision can be expressed in two ways under current law: Through the signing of representation cards, or through a secret ballot election. Employers are not now legally obliged to accept the representation cards as proof of their employees’ decisions, but can call for an election. The law then mandates a period of some months in which the employer can campaign against the union. The campaign is supposed to follow certain rules, but unions believe that in recent years employers have broken those rules all too consistently. They have fired employees who support the union or have otherwise penalized them at work. They have threatened to shut their doors if a union is voted in. They have spied on employee meetings. When fined for breaches of the law in the campaign, they have written off these fines as the cost of keeping out the union. Unions, then, see the election process, which appears fair on its face, as unfair and weighted heavily against them in practice. They have asked Congress for legislation that obliges employers to accept the representation cards as proof that their employees want a union.

This process is the “card check” to which Congresswoman Pelosi referred. It will excite more opposition from business than anything else she has proposed. Our numbers and our share of work may have declined nationally, but business recognizes the latent power in our movement.

And Nancy Pelosi, by declaring her support for “card check,” declared her allegiance to us.

The crowd in the Caucus Room was invited to stay and observe the Speaker’s swearing-in onscreen. Some of us from San Francisco decided to take advantage of the expected wait to visit Tom Lantos, Congressman for San Francisco and San Mateo counties, a longtime and constant ally of labor. The Congressman graciously invited us to watch the swearing-in from his personal office. Thinking incorrectly that this would be a brief ceremony, we didn’t at first realize just how gracious his invitation was.

We sat in the leather chairs of his office, with its art on the walls and its huge glass-encased model of the Omani sailing ship that inaugurated trade between that sultanate and the young United States, and viewed the ceremony on a flatscreen television. A little dog that belongs to friends but spends its days in the Congressman’s office lay on the couch and watched us without raising its head. Tom Lantos’s wife, Annette, came and went from the office. So at first did the Congressman himself, as the procedure on the floor of the House of Representatives went through its informal early stage, the establishment of a quorum. One moment he would be at the door of the office. A few minutes later, having taken the little electric tram that runs underground from the office building to the Capitol, he would be on the House floor and the television. A few minutes again and he would be back at the door.

Two of Congressman Lantos’s aides, Ron and Candace, sat with us and explained the procedure and its attendant ceremony. As the Reading Clerk of the House called out one by one in alphabetical order the names of members of Congress for their vote on either Nancy Pelosi or Republican John Boehner for the Speakership, Ron and Candace told us a little about each of them. Some gave brief speeches before declaring their votes, but because they were not at a microphone the speeches were inaudible through the television.

The Reading Clerk called, “Lantos.”

There he was, on the House floor and the television again, saying clearly even without a microphone, “The pride of San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi.”