Union Busting - Use of Public Funds in The United States

Use of Public Funds in The United States

Although nonprofit hospital workers were covered by the original Wagner Act of 1935, they were excluded in 1947 with the Taft-Hartley amendments. However, during the 1960s, hospital workers at nonprofit hospitals wanted to form unions and demand better pay and working conditions. Major American cities were also experiencing hospital strikes which raised the consciousness of labor leaders and government regarding the issue of how to continue life sustaining patient care delivery during work stoppages. Hospital workers and labor leaders petitioned government to amend the NLRA. In 1974, under President Richard Nixon, the National Labor Relations Act was amended to extend coverage and protection to employees of non-profit hospitals. “When the new legislation was considered by the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, it was recognized that labor relations in the health care industry required special considerations. The Senate Labor Committee sought to fashion a mechanism which would insure that the needs of the patient would be met during contingencies arising out of labor disputes. The new law represented a sound and equitable reconciliation of these competing interests.”

Tax payer funds provide State treasuries the monies for public employee salaries from which public employees pay union dues. At one time State laws did not allow government contracts to provide public money to labor relations consultancies to represent management and was incongruent for taxpayers to fund public employee union activities but not management activities. One such law, passed in Wisconsin in 1979, was struck down by the United States Supreme Court in the decision Wisconsin Dept. of Industry v. Gould. The 1986 Supreme Court decision means that it doesn't matter if the punishment for illegal behavior under federal labor law is limited, those punishments are the maximum allowed and states cannot eliminate such companies from government contracts. Critics charge that, in effect, "federal labor law forces states to hire unionbusters."

Also in the 1970s, the Department of Defense partially financed union busting by its contractors. Such activities appear to be illegal, for they conflict with the NLRA. In 1998, Catholic Healthcare West, the largest private hospital chain in California and a major recipient of state Medicaid funds, conducted a campaign against Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in Sacramento and Los Angeles at a cost of more than $2.6 million. After the Catholic Healthcare West campaign, the California state legislature passed a law prohibiting the use of taxpayer funds for anti-union activities.

However, in a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America et al. vs. Brown, Attorney General of California et al., the court ruled 7-2 that federal labor law pre-empted a California law that limited many employers from speaking to their employees about union-related issues. Justice John Paul Stevens stated that Federal labor law had embraced "wide-open debate" about labor issues, as long as the employer did not try to coerce employees into accepting its point of view. Consequently, the state law is incompatible with federal labor law.

Other efforts to restrict the use of tax dollars for union busting have also been struck down. A major recipient of state Medicaid funds, the Center for Cerebral Palsy in Albany, New York, hired a law firm to fight a UNITE organizing drive. In 2002 the State of New York passed a labor neutrality act prohibiting the use of taxpayer dollars for union busting. The law was passed as a direct result of the campaign against UNITE. In May 2005, a district court judge struck down the labor neutrality law in a ruling that the legal representatives of the Center for Cerebral Palsy described as "an enormous victory for employers."