Unions Want UN Affiliate to Decide U.S. Labor Policy

Human Events, Nov 12, 2007 by Bandow, Doug

Organized labor won last November's election lottery. The unions officially spent $105 million and, in return, received a promise from the new Democratic majority to push labor's redistributionist economic agenda. They are desperate to convince politicians to give them what they cannot win in the marketplace.

The impact on domestic public policy is clear. Already the House approved a minimum-wage hike as part of its "first 100 hours" program and voted to ease union organizing.

But unions in the United States are also pressing their case internationally. They no longer think that improving working conditions is purely a domestic issue. Instead, they are trying to circumvent U.S. labor policies and labor law. Most notably the AFL-CIO is bent on convincing the International Labor Organization (ILO), a United Nations-affiliated body headquartered in Geneva, to support its agenda. For some union activists, the U.S. is little more than a tin-pot dictatorship that requires international oversight by UN bureaucrats.

Presidential authority to negotiate new free-trade agreements (FTAs) has expired, and the Bush Administration faces strong opposition in Congress to pending FTAs with Peru, Columbia and South Korea. The Democrats have set as the price for approving any new accords the inclusion of international "labor standards." But this could become a vehicle that allows the ILO and other international agencies to trump U.S. law and the Constitution.

Labor Plays International Card

Americans are accustomed to having spirited debates over employment policy. For instance, should employees of the Transportation security Administration (TSA) be able to unionize? That's a practical policy question about dealing with government employees' handling security checkpoints at the nation's airports.

While America's armed services are not unionized, city police and fire departments typically are. It's the job of U.S. policymakers to consider these issues. Whether TSA would become less competent-and travelers less secure-if TSA workers joined unions is a policy decision. Regular air travelers may find it hard to believe, but things could be worse. A union strike could cause chaos.

Whatever America decides, the decision should be made by the U.S. Congress and the courts appealing to the U.S. Constitution, not by appealing to international law. In fact, Congress authorized the President to say no to unions when it created TSA, but organized labor is now lobbying to change that policy. Union officials are busy working with their friends who currently run Capitol Hill.

In early January, the House voted to allow 56,000 TSA screeners to unionize. "The new House has begun the process of lighting's terrible wrong," declared American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) President John Gage.

At the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland security, similar battles over employee unionization are being waged, and the unions appear to be winning. AFL-CIO blogger Mike Hall recently exulted that "federal courts have ruled against new personnel rules" involving both agencies.

However, U.S. labor leaders no longer are satisfied playing solely by U.S. rules. They don't accept the final outcome of the American political system.

In August 2003, AFGE, an AFL-CIO affiliate, filed a complaint with the International Labor Organization. The union charged mat the U.S. government's ban on unionization "has resulted in the exclusion by executive fiat of hundreds of thousands of federal employees from [organizing rights] and thus from the rights stemming from ILO conventions on freedom of association and collective bargaining," according to a 2006 TLO report.

In the TSA case, the ILO's Committee on the Freedom of Association announced that it was "concerned about two issues: (1) the use of an ever-enlarged definition of work connected to national security to exclude employees that are further and further away from the" type of employee considered to be 'engaged in the administration of the State;' and (2) the apparent lack of, or at least severely limited, jurisdiction to review possible excesses of authority in excluding federal employees" from union membership.

Added the ILO: "Recalling that priority should be given to collective bargaining as the means to settle disputes arising in connection with the determination of terms and conditions of employment in the public service, the committee requests the government to carefully review, in consultation with the workers' organizations concerned, the matters covered within the overall terms and conditions of employment of federal airport screeners which [sic] are not directly related to national security issues and to engage in collective bargaining on these matters with the screeners' freely chosen representative."

Furthermore, the committee "requests me government to keep it informed of the measures taken in this regard," since it "trusts that all necessary measures will be taken to ensure mat the organizational rights of these employees are effectively guaranteed."