Read Workers' Stories: Workers Wait and Wait for the NLRB to Enforce the Law

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.araw.org/stories.cfm?storyID=16

4/21/2004

Verna Bader

Taylor, Michigan

Workers Wait and Wait for the NLRB to Enforce the Law
UPDATE ON VERNA - Read More...
Verna Bader has been waiting nearly 12 years for justice to be served. In 1992, she and five other machinists in her department were fired after they voted to form a union at Taylor Machine Products. At age 72, Verna refuses to give up on receiving the almost $100,000 that the company owes her for her illegal termination. But after years of searching for work, testifying in court, and coping with huge medical bills, Verna is losing faith in the legal system designed to protect her. This is her story...

In 1989, Verna began work as a machine operator for Taylor Machine Products, a Detroit-based company that manufactures parts for the auto industry. In 1991, she joined her co-workers in their attempts to form a union in order to win better wages and improve health and safety on the job. She was earning only $5 an hour, and machinists with more seniority were barely making over $6 an hour. As a widow, Verna was the sole breadwinner for her father, her dying sister, and her sister’s children, and desperately needed to earn more money.


Former Taylor employees fired (L-R): Front row: Rose Mary Smith, Josephine Mallia, Ruth Cecil. Back row: Flora Russell, Bonnie Warren, Verna Bader

Occupational safety was a pressing concern of Verna’s, and one not adequately addressed by Taylor. Verna believed Taylor employees should vote to form a union to address health and safety issues. Soon after the workers began organizing with the Machinists union—the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers—an inspector from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) visited the plant. The inspector immediately shut down a machine Verna was working on that had exposed wires, which threatened to electrocute her. Another machine—nicknamed ‘The Monster’—required repetitive, strenuous movements that caused Verna such severe back pain, she missed days of work.

Unfortunately for Verna and her co-workers in her all-women’s department, organizing their co-workers with the Machinists marked only the beginning of a battle that would span two decades. Once Verna and other union supporters were identified, harassment by the foreman and anti-union co-workers plagued their final months at the company. Verna described instances where the foreman would stand behind her machine for hours, watching her every move. She recalled him threatening her, “‘If you do get a union in here, you’re gonna find out that you aren’t gonna have a job, because it’s by the grace of me that you’re here.’” When two anti-union Taylor employees repeatedly threw metal parts at the glass window of the lunchroom where she and the other pro-union workers sat, the managers ignored their complaints. After Taylor employees voted to form a union on March 25, 1992, the escalating harassment became unbearable for Verna: “There’s days that I literally went out of there crying.”

n August 6, 1992, Taylor shut down the entire department where the pro-union women worked. The workers were told to get their belongings and to not come back. That night, Taylor shipped their machines to Kentucky, where according to a letter provided to the employees, the company could better fill last-minute orders in the South. In response, Verna and her co-workers, with the assistance of the Machinists, filed unfair labor practice charges against Taylor with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that enforces provisions of U.S. labor law.

Three years later, in 1995, the NLRB ruled that Taylor had discriminatorily terminated the workers based on their union support, and ordered that the company offer to reinstate the six women, along with another pro-union worker fired, and to compensate them with backpay and interest.** However, the company appealed the ruling, and justice for the workers was delayed through multiple court filings, hearings and decisions for almost another 8 years. Finally, in March of 2003, the NLRB issued an order for the company to “make whole” the former employees with backpay and interest owed. But as of April 2004, over a year after the order was issued, the company still refuses to pay the almost $380,000 owed to the workers to redress the wrongful terminations.

FULL story at link.