Divide and Conquer

Right now, our employer is holding meetings every day in the Midtown auditorium. These meetings are all under the usual guise of being for "informational" purposes, being conducted by "impartial" or "ambivalent" 3rd parties.

These are paid Union Avoidance experts, otherwise known as "union busters".

One of them may or may not have worked for the NLRB at some point, but they most definitely do not work for the NLRB now.* The NLRB is a government agency; they do not send people to "inform" workers in situations like this.*

*(Update #1: There seems to be a few different reports about how one of the presenters, Kia Stevens, is presenting herself. Among them:


- She works for or used to work for the NLRB

- She's a teacher of labor law somewhere
- She's a physical therapist who had a bad/good experience with unions


Very strange. Hopefully we will find out more tomorrow when all the vocally pro-union teachers are herded into a meeting together. If anybody has attended a meeting, post a comment about who she said she was to help clarify this.)


Update #2: LOL. I just realized something: Both Jay and Kia at our "training meeting" on Tuesday acknowledged Update #1 of this post, but yet said they had no idea when they were told that we were all pro-union people.


And we still don't know who the heck this Kia person is...unless we're just to believe our company would stick "a physical therapist who just knows a lot of about unions" next to a legal heavyweight like Jay to be to one to advise us about the NLRA and NLRB practices. They must really think we're stupid.

So far, these meetings have only been for people who Kaplan has deemed to be anti-union or undecided. People who have been vocally pro-union people have not been invited to attend. Some of us have asked to attend, and were turned down for "scheduling reasons". One Three even showed up at meetings asking to attend, and were turned away at the door. Kaplan has canceled other people's classes to have these meetings, yet many pro-union people who don't have a class at these times were not invited, even though it's in a large auditorium.

They may invite vocally pro-union people to a separate meeting next week. With us isolated from everyone else, they won't have to worry when we call out on their distortions and misrepresentations.


One distortion that has surfaced from these meetings is about the "Exclusive Representation" part of the NLRA. It's an attempt to scare people into thinking they will be giving up all their rights to the union. Here is what the NLRA really says:

REPRESENTATIVES AND ELECTIONS

Sec. 9 [§ 159.] (a) [Exclusive representatives; employees' adjustment of grievances directly with employer] Representatives designated or selected for the purposes of collective bargaining by the majority of the employees in a unit appropriate for such purposes, shall be the exclusive representatives of all the employees in such unit for the purposes of collective bargaining in respect to rates of pay, wages, hours of employment, or other conditions of employment.

This means that if we elect a union to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement for us, management must bargain the contract with that union. They can't go around the union or bargain with a different union. It says nothing about what can or can't happen after the collective bargaining agreement has been signed.

The NLRA, signed into law by FDR in 1935, is a fantastic document that is all about protecting workers' rights. Read it here:

https://www.nlrb.gov/national-labor-relations-act