News Guild’s Schleuss: Give big labor law breakers fines and jail terms

The labor law panel at the Press Club, from the Press Club's Twitter/X feed. Left to right: Brian Petruska, General Counsel, Laborers Union Mid-Atlantic Region; Jennifer Abruzzo, NLRB General Counsel; Jon Schleuss, News Guild President.

WASHINGTON—Big labor law violators among corporate honchos should face “strong fines and potential jail terms” for their law-breaking, says News Guild-CWA President Jon Schleuss. He wants the Block brothers of Pittsburgh to feel that lash.

“We’ve got CEOs paying millions of dollars to attorneys to violate the law,” Schleuss said of the union-busters whom the likes of the Blocks, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and the Walton clan of Wal-Mart routinely hire. The Economic Policy Institute calculates such union-busters reaped $433 million in 2022, the last year for which figures are available.

Schleuss singled out the Block brothers, owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, as an example. The Guild’s Pittsburgh local and several other unions have been on strike against the Post-Gazette for two years and counting. And last year, The Guild set its modern record for strikes,

Most were one-day walkouts, from large chains of exploitative papers. Pittsburgh isn’t. The Blocks unilaterally imposed a more expensive and skimpier health plan on the paper’s unionists, after no raises for at least five years, and offered raises so small the higher premiums would eat them all up. That was the Blocks’s take-it-or-leave-it offer. The workers overwhelmingly rejected it and struck.

The Blocks are defying NLRB bargaining orders, with the board having ruled against the two. So it now seeks to wield its strongest tool, a federal court 10(j) injunction, citing irreparable harm to the workers and ordering the Blocks to both immediately take them back, restore the old health plan, and make them financially whole, including expenses workers incurred while being out. Otherwise, NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo demands the Blocks face the courtroom music.

“At the Post-Gazette, the actual cost” of settling with The Guild and the other unions, “is minuscule compared to what they’re spending” to fight the Guild and its allies, said Schleuss. It’s also minuscule compared to dragging out bargaining at their other paper, the Toledo Blade, for 17 years.

Their conduct is so bad that if the Blocks defy the injunction, too—whenever Abruzzo gets it—“it’s not out of the realm of possibility for the board to call U.S. marshals” to arrest them, Schleuss said.

Since then, another corporate scourge has hit newspapers, Schleuss added: Secretive hedge funds, answerable to nobody, who swoop in on newspapers, buy them cheap, fire dozens of staffers, destroy local coverage and accountability, sell off their real estate, then either close the papers or leave them as hollow shells, in news deserts, and with devastated staffers’ lives.

Exhibit A in that group is Alden Global Capital, which bought the Tribune Company’s papers and other media, led by its flagship Chicago Tribune. Alden carried out all those moves and the staff of the paper, whose owners had been virulently anti-union for more than 125 years, unionized with the Chicago Guild. Other papers whose staffers are battling Alden include the Denver Post, the Hartford Courant, and papers in Florida and the mid-Atlantic region. The Baltimore Sun was until it was sold.

After six years of bargaining, the two sides—the Guild, the Tribune’s staff and its suburban papers’ workers on one side and Alden’s managers on the other—are on the verge of a first contract. With talks done, Alden’s General Manager fired the union’s most-veteran worker and its lead bargainer, by abolishing her position.

Sequences like that prompt labor’s campaign for the Protect The Right To Organize Act, which would help return to a level playing field between workers and management, said Schleuss and Brian Petruska, the General Counsel for the Laborers Mid-Atlantic region, at a press conference in D.C. on October 15. NLRB General Counsel Abruzzo, the board’s top enforcement officer, joined them.

All three agreed the NLRB is vastly understaffed. Schleuss advocated doubling its budget, too. The shortage of both people and dollars makes it hard to enforce the law, Abruzzo said. “We’ve lost 62% from our field offices” where most cases get heard and settled “since 2011.”

But bosses and union-busters, whom the law calls “persuaders,” aren’t the sole on-the-job problems workers trying to organize face. Abruzzo said another is “non-compete” contracts, with “stay or pay” variations forcing workers to repay exploitative employers tens of thousands of dollars if they want to leave before their pacts are up.

That means if they do leave, Abruzzo added, they can’t find jobs in the same industry. And non-competes even stretch down to road workers holding up “slow” and “stop” signs for traffic as colleagues spread tar or pour cement, Petruska said. Employers declare the workers with the signs could be privy to proprietary information about the road work, he explained.

And really nasty construction bosses “shake road workers down for part of their paychecks” especially migrant workers, whom the bosses threaten with deportation if they speak up.

The same day as the session, Democratic President Joe Biden hailed an enormous increase in union organizing drives during the prior fiscal year. Abruzzo, one of Biden’s first appointees to a sub-Cabinet post, in January 2021, announced the hike during the press conference.

Number seeking unionization doubled

“The number of workers filing for union representation doubled since the start of my administration—the first administration in five decades to have an increase in union petitions,” Biden said. “I am proud to have secured the NLRB’s first budget increase in almost a decade, and I will continue fighting for more funding so the board can empower workers on the job.”

That hike is needed, Abruzzo told the D.C. session. In the last decade and a half, the NLRB has lost almost half of its workers and couldn’t replace them due to a funding freeze for more than a dozen years. It still needs more money and more workers, regardless of who’s in the White House the next four years, Abruzzo said.

It needs more workers, she declared, to carry out the objectives of labor law, to level the playing field for workers against companies. It wasn’t level during the Republican Donald Trump regime, added Biden—who appointed Abruzzo, a top Communications Workers counsel but also an NLRB veteran.

If Trump comes back, Abruzzo told one questioner, “We’re here to enforce the law and we’re not going to stop.” Trump, who is notoriously anti-union, as are his corporate backers and the GOP,  faces Biden’s VP, Kamala Harris, in this fall’s election.

“We are a government of the people, by the people and for the people,” Abruzzo said, quoting a pro-worker Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. “We will do whatever is possible to protect workers’ rights. If you’re on the job, you do the job and you enforce the statute.

“After the previous administration sided with big corporations to undermine workers—from blocking overtime pay protections to making it harder to organize—my administration has supported workers, including restoring and extending overtime pay protections, holding employers accountable for union-busting, and calling on Congress to pass the PRO Act. Because when unions do well, all workers do well and the entire economy benefits,” the president said.

Even though a Republican Senate filibuster threat, backed by a looming multimillion-dollar corporate disinformation campaign, killed the PRO Act, there are other good signs on the horizon besides the big jump in union organizing, Abruzzo and the others said.

One is the NLRB has signed agreements with other federal enforcement agencies handling workers’ issues, including the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for cross-training and cross-enforcement. Abruzzo explained an NLRB labor law violator is likely to have broken other labor laws, too.

“We are talking to one another, connecting and co-enforcing,” she added. One example, though Abruzzo did not mention it, is that the recent trial in Portland, Ore., pitting the FTC against the monster Kroger-Albertson’s merger, saw FTC lawyers emphasize the impact of that proposed monopoly not just on food prices and lack of competition there, but on workers’ wages and lack of competition there, too.

And there’s another reason for the rising organizing, Abruzzo added.

“Workers in underserved populations are now realizing their voices can be heard. And that they can be more empowered to organize in different ways, and in different sectors of the economy.” And she added, for workers, the NLRB is it. “They now realize they have no private right to sue.”

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CONTRIBUTOR

Mark Gruenberg

Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.