And in October, Rite Aid began to lay workers off, citing the bad economy. The company had never laid off any of its warehouse employees before. Although the law requires the company to bargain over layoffs too, it terminated 19 workers on October 21, cut the jobs of 29 others to 10 hours a week, and bargained only after its fait accompli. “The Union also contends that Rite Aid violated Section 8(a)(3) when it retained individuals outside the Union’s bargaining unit to perform the same work,” claimed a new charge the ILWU’s attorneys filed with the NLRB. Warner says, “Since the election I’ve seen 36 union supporters let go.”

Especially on top of the firings before the election, the fall layoffs had a devastating impact. Lancaster is a city in crisis, where the economic meltdown has produced a foreclosure rate far in excess of most other California cities. It’s not hard for workers to understand the cost of losing a job by just looking at the sale signs on their neighbors’ lawns.

The net result is more fear. While the union can’t rely on the legal process to force the company to negotiate, that fear is a potent barrier to any action the workers might consider to force the issue. “We were starting to hold lunch meetings in the cafeteria,” Warner recalls. “More and more employees were getting involved. We did a rally right in front of the building. Managers could see it happening. The next thing you know, they’re laying off people. That works. It’s effective. Now they’ve got everybody scared about losing their jobs with the economy the way it is. They beat the people back in line with this fear of ‘you’re not going to have a job anymore.'”

EFCA’s third provision would have avoided this situation too. After ninety days of fruitless negotiations, the bill would require both parties to submit the issues still in dispute to an arbitrator. The arbitrator would then be empowered to come up with a compromise, and the company would have to sign the resulting contract.

Instead, Rite Aid workers are likely to get a second “democratic election” – this one intended to get rid of union representation, and return matters to where they were when workers started to organize.

The right to such secret ballot elections has won a wave of corporate protectors. The US Chamber of Commerce, trade and manufacturer associations like the American Meat Institute and large corporations have lined up to condemn EFCA. The National Right-to-Work Committee, famous for its extreme anti-union rhetoric, says, “It goes without saying that in order to have a true democratic election, the voters should be free from coercion, intimidation, irregularity, or illegality. The only way to guarantee this is to make sure the voting is done in secret, safe from the prying eyes of union officials.”

Rite Aid agrees. “We believe that our associates have the right to choose to be represented or not represented by a union. We just think that it’s fair for them to vote by secret ballot, just as all of us vote by secret ballot for the elected officials who represent us,” Slavinsky told The Daily News of Washington State.

“If NLRB elections were run like normal elections, that would be fine,” Warner counters. “But they’re not. From an employee’s point of view, we would have loved not to have had to go to that secret ballot election. If we had been able to do it by card check, we would have had our union and contract a long time ago, and we wouldn’t have lost so many of our people.”

Employers have even proposed their own bill to kill EFCA, the Secret Ballot Protection Act, whose sponsor, US Sen. Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina), claims “voting by secret ballot is a fundamental principle of American democracy, and it’s time to guarantee this basic right for every American worker. The Secret Ballot Protection Act is urgently needed to stop the growing attacks on workers’ rights.”

You can almost hear the Rite Aid workers laughing. Posted by Bulatlat.com

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