Cross-posted from the Philadelphia JwJ Blog.
One of the main road blocks that workers face to exercising their rights on the job is the powerful and frightening coercive power that an employer has over an employee.
Imagine an election in which the party in power could force you to attend mandatory meetings to tell you why you should not vote for the other party. Imagine the party in power could also make you lose your job, and harass your neighbors who support the opposition party. The party in power could bring in professional campaigners (lawyers and anti-union consultants) to help them win their election. They were guaranteed access to the voters every day leading up to the election — but the opposition party could only campaign in secret and when their volunteers happened to catch other voters at home. Let’s say that the party in power could also sit you down, all by yourself, and interrogate you to see how you intended on voting?
Sounds pretty intimidating, huh? Well these are the troubles that the security guards at the Philadelphia Museum of Art are bound to face in the next thirty days as they try to form a union.
We don’t know if AlliedBarton, the contractor who employs them, is going to fight the workers as they attempt to exercise their legally protected right to form a collective group to negotiate work place improvements. It is also unclear how much anti-union scare tactics and union-busting Mr. Timothy Rub, the new museum director, will allow in his house. However, a posting that appeared in the AlliedBarton guards’ break room this Sunday is probably not a good sign of things to come.
Mandatory meetings are generally the first stage of a fear campaign against workers who are trying to get organized. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is hosting this meeting in the on-site auditorium. Security guards who are union supporters will be able to tell us about the nature of the meeting on Wednesday night. We are hoping that it is not an anti-union meeting. Let’s hope that the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a publicly supported institution, is not allowing this type of behavior on museum property.
Read more on the Philly JwJ blog.
Fabricio Rodriguez is an organizer at Philadelphia Jobs with Justice.
