From: A Calver (andreacalver@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Nov 02 2001 - 09:47:22 EST
Labor Board Finds Sodexho-Marriott Illegally Fired Six Union Supporters at
Michigan Hospital
Latest NLRB Decision Also Finds that the Company Committed Numerous Other
Unfair Labor Practices
Sodexho Continues Litigation in Federal Appeals Court
November 1, 2001 -- In a recent decision, the National Labor Relations Board
found that Sodexho-Marriott, the predecessor company of Sodexho, had
illegally fired six workers and committed a host of other unfair labor
practices during an organizing campaign.
Sodexho has refused to accept the NLRB order. It has appealed the Labor
Board decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
The Labor Board upheld a December 1998 decision by administrative law judge
Bruce D. Rosenstein that Sodexho-Marriott had illegally fired several
employees for their union activity during an NLRB election campaign in March
1998 at the Botsford Hospital in Farmington Hills, MI.
The Labor Board also upheld Rosenstein's earlier finding that
Sodexho-Marriott had committed numerous other violations, including
threatening pro-union workers with loss of benefits, interrogating employees
about their union activity, and promising promotions and raises if employees
stopped supporting the Union.
Background
Workers at the Botsford Hospital began their organizing campaign with SEIU
Local 79 in 1997. In early February of 1998 they filed for an NLRB
election, which was scheduled for March 11 and 12th. During that
five-and-a-half week period, the Labor Board found that Sodexho-Marriott
illegally fired six union supporters and also:
"violated Section 8(a)1 and 3 of the National Labor Relations Act by
interrogating employees concerning their union sentiments, disparately
enforcing its no distribution/no solicitation policy against supporters of
the union, threatening employees with loss of wages and benefits, giving
employees the impression that their activities on behalf of the union were
under surveillance, promising a raise and a promotion to an employee if the
employee abandoned support for the Union, and threatening employees about
wearing buttons in support of the Union."
The official vote was 62 for the Union and 66 against the Union. The six
employees who were illegally fired voted, but their votes were sealed and
not counted.
The Labor Board ordered Sodexho to offer the six fired workers their jobs
back and compensate them for any lost wages during the three years that the
case had been litigated. The Board also ordered that their six votes, which
had remained sealed for three years, be unsealed and counted.
Sodexho has appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals. The six
fired workers have not been reinstated and their votes remain sealed.
Botsford workers, who have already waited three years, will have to wait
even longer to find out if the six contested votes will ever be counted.
The Botsford Hospital case is not an isolated incident. For more
information about Labor Board proceedings against Sodexho-Marriott and its
predecessor Marriott Management Services, see www.eyeonsodexho.org.
According to Marty Leary, Senior Research Analyst at the Hotel Employees and
Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), Sodexho has also engaged in
countless anti-union tactics that have not been subject to litigation. Some
of those tactics are described in Sodexho-Marriott's infamous "Union
Avoidance Manual" for managers. "Even the tactics that are legal are
inherently anti-democratic," says Leary. "The one thing all of these
tactics - the legal ones and the illegal ones -- have in common is that they
are only effective in the context of an NLRB-supervised election."
Leary says the Botsford case illustrates that NLRB elections, characterized
by intense anti-union campaigns, are not like other types of elections.
Employers like Sodexho hold great coercive power over their employees;
namely the power to deprive a person of his or her livelihood. This
imbalance of power is unparalleled in any other type of elections in our
society. Even if the employer does not expressly threaten employees with
adverse consequences if they support the union, employees cannot help but be
aware of this possibility any time an employer intervenes to prevent its
workers from organizing. If a majority of the employees manage to withstand
the traumatizing employer campaign and vote for the Union, the employer can
simply appeal the results indefinitely.
HERE believes that the only way to ensure that workers truly have an
opportunity to decide for themselves in a timely way and in atmosphere free
of intimidation and coercion is to insist that employers like Sodexho sign
written neutrality agreements with the Union.
Under this increasingly common method, also known as the "Right to Organize"
neutrality agreement, the employer remains neutral and the workers sign
authorization cards indicating whether they support the union. The employer
only agrees to recognize the union if a third party verifies that a majority
of all employees have signed cards. This is the very method by which
hundreds of thousands of low-wage service workers have won union
representation rights in recent years.
A recent study published in the Industrial and Labor Relations Review
("Union Organizing Under Neutrality and Card Check Agreements," October
2001) found that such agreements significantly reduce the likelihood of
illegal employer tactics such as those employed by Sodexho-Marriott at
Botsford Hospital. The authors, who studied 132 card-check neutrality
agreements in the United States since the early 1980s, found that the
agreements "reduced the use of illegal tactics such as discharges and
promises of benefits, as well as the supervisory one-on-one campaigns that
are destructive of relationships and emotionally traumatizing. These
findings would appear to bolster the case for card check as public policy."
Says HERE's Leary: "If the Botsford Hospital had insisted three years ago
that its subcontractors enter in to card-check neutrality agreements, it is
highly unlikely that six workers would have been illegally discharged,
workers would have been subjected to numerous high-pressure anti-union
tactics - legal and illegal - and that workers would still be waiting, three
years later, to find out whether or not they had won the right to have a
union."
For more information contact: Marty Leary, 202-661-3681
- # # # -
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
USAS webpage: http://www.usasnet.org
Unsubscribe from USAS list:
email blank message to usas-unsubscribe@egroups.com
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Mon Oct 28 2002 - 02:52:31 EST