By Stephen Singer
Hartford, Connecticut (AP) 11-07
The National Labor Relations Board during late October ordered a union election at Foxwoods Resort Casino, which has been targeted by the United Auto Workers in a drive to organize 3,000 dealers.
The decision could set the stage for one of the first unions at a tribal casino. Foxwoods, one of the largest casinos in the world, has 340,000 square feet of gambling space in a 4.7 million-square foot complex.
Peter Hoffman, regional director of the NLRB’s regional office in Hartford, rejected the argument by Foxwoods owners, the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, that the tribe’s employment law has jurisdiction in the matter.
“In reaching this conclusion, I have fully considered but find no merit to the employer’s claim that its ‘inherent authority’ to regulate employment and labor relations on its tribal lands precludes” the NLRB’s jurisdiction in this matter, Hoffman said.
Hoffman also said he found “particularly unpersuasive” a claim by the Mashantuckets that a strike against the casino would severely disrupt the tribe’s ability to provide essential services to its members.
A federal appeals court ruled earlier this year that Indian casinos are bound by the NLRB, and Hoffman cited that ruling in his decision.
The Mashantuckets said in a statement that the NLRB does not have jurisdiction “as the tribe is the governing body which has the inherent authority to regulate employment on its reservation and it has historically done so.”
Spokesman Bruce MacDonald said the issue is not about a worker’s right to organize.
“The issue is one of respecting the tribe as a government,” he said.
Foxwoods has 14 days to file a request with the NLRB in Washington for a review. MacDonald said tribal officials have not yet decided whether to appeal.
Bob Madore, director of UAW Region 9A, said the decision is a victory for Foxwoods employees.
“We were confident we would win this case,” he said. “It’s simple: Regardless of where you work, you have a right to form your own union. That’s the law, and that’s why the NLRB ruled in favor of an election.”
UAW officials during September filed for the election, saying it won a “supermajority” of the 3,000 dealers who signed cards backing a union drive. At least 30 percent of employees of a proposed bargaining unit must sign cards to force a vote, which is supervised by the NLRB.
A date for an election has not been set.
Foxwoods opposed the union’s petition to the NLRB for an election, prompting a hearing and the ruling that was issued.
Madore said UAW Region 9A, which represents university employees, legal aid workers and others in New England, New York City and Puerto Rico, decided to start its union campaign at Foxwoods with the 3,000 dealers. About 11,500 people work at a variety of jobs at Foxwoods, which opened in 1992.
“You walk before you can run,” he said.
Jacqueline Little, a poker dealer at Foxwoods for 15 years, said she was ecstatic at the news of the NLRB decision.
Little, of Coventry, R.I., said health insurance is inadequate and annual pay raises do not keep up with inflation. She even criticized cigarette smoke in the casino, which is exempt from Connecticut’s no-smoking laws.
Foxwoods and the nearby Mohegan Sun have been in the sights of unions for years. In 1999, the president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union declared Indian-operated casinos the new frontier for union organizing.
Both casinos have said unions are unnecessary because workers are paid well and receive good benefits. Tribal sovereignty also precluded unions, the Indian tribes said.
That argument was struck a major blow with the federal court ruling earlier this year.
Little said she believes the NLRB decision will pave the way for an ultimate union victory.
“It’s inevitable. We’re going to have a union at Foxwoods,” she said.
On the Net:
www.foxwoods.com
www.uaw.org
www.nlrb.gov
Source
The financial crisis gripping the U.S. has the largest banks and insurance companies begging for massive government bailouts. The banking, investment, finance and insurance industries, long the foes of taxation, now need money from working-class taxpayers to stay alive. Taxpayers should be in the driver's seat now. Instead, decisions that will cost people for decades are being made behind closed doors, by the wealthy, by the regulators and by those they have failed to regulate.
Tuesday, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury Department agreed to a massive, $85-billion bailout of AIG, the insurance giant. This follows the abrupt bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the 158-year-old investment bank; the distressed sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America; the bailout of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; the collapse of retail bank IndyMac; and the federally guaranteed buyout of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase. AIG was deemed "too big to fail," with 103,000 employees and more than $1 trillion in assets. According to regulators, an unruly collapse could cause global financial turmoil. U.S. taxpayers now own close to 80 percent of AIG, so the orderly sale of AIG will allow the taxpayers to recoup their money, the theory goes.
It's not so easy.
The financial crisis will most likely deepen. More banks and giant financial institutions could collapse. Millions of people bought houses with shady subprime mortgages and have already lost or will soon lose their homes. The financiers packaged these mortgages into complex "mortgage-backed securities" and other derivative investment schemes. Investors went hog-wild, buying these derivatives with more and more borrowed money.
Nomi Prins used to run the European analytics group at Bear Stearns and also worked at Lehman Brothers. "AIG was acting not simply as an insurance company," she told me. "It was acting as a speculative investment bank/hedge fund, as was Bear Stearns, as was Lehman Brothers, as is what will become Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. So you have a situation where it's [the U.S. government] ... taking on the risk of items it cannot even begin to understand."
She went on: "It's about taking on too much leverage and borrowing to take on the risk and borrowing again and borrowing again, 25 to 30 times the amount of capital. ... They had to basically back the borrowing that they were doing. ... There was no transparency to the Fed, to the SEC, to the Treasury, to anyone who would have even bothered to look as to how much of a catastrophe was being created, so that when anything fell, whether it was the subprime mortgage or whether it was a credit complex security, it was all below a pile of immense interlocked, incestuous borrowing, and that's what is bringing down the entire banking system."
As these high-rolling gamblers are losing all their banks' money, it comes to the taxpayer to bail them out. A better use of the money, says Michael Hudson, professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and an economic adviser to Rep. Dennis Kucinich, would be to "save these 4 million homeowners from defaulting and being kicked out of their houses. Now they're going to be kicked out of the houses. The houses will be vacant. The cities are going to [lose] property taxes, they're going to have to cut back local expenditures, local infrastructure. The economy is being sacrificed to pay the gamblers."
Prins elaborated: "You're nationalizing the worst portion of the banking system. ... You're taking on risk you won't be able to understand. So it's even more dangerous." I asked Prins, in light of all this nationalization, to comment on the prospect of nationalizing health care into a single-payer system. She responded, "You could actually put some money into something that pre-empts a problem happening and helps people get health care."
The meltdown is a bipartisan affair
Presidential contenders John McCain and Barack Obama each have received millions of dollars from these very companies that are collapsing and are receiving the corporate welfare. President Clinton and his treasury secretary, Robert Rubin (now an Obama economic adviser), presided over the repeal in 1999 of the Glass-Steagall Act, passed after the 1929 start of the Great Depression to curb speculation that caused that calamity. The repeal was pushed through by former Republican Sen. Phil Gramm, one of McCain's former top advisers. Politicians are too dependent on Wall Street to do anything. The people who vote for them, and whose taxes are being handed over to these failed financiers, need to show their outrage and demand that their leaders truly put "country first" and bring about "change."
Denis Moynihan contributed to this column.
© 2008 Amy Goodman
By Esi Ejumabone
