Guest Opinion: The Quadrtech Case: A Victory to Build On

Editor’s Note: Quadrtech, a jewelry-making company near Los Angeles, attempted to move to Mexico last fall to thwart negotiations with a new IUE-CWA bargaining unit of 118 workers. The union filed unfair labor practice complaints, leading the National Labor Relations Board to go to court to try to stop the company from leaving. In an unprecedented decision, a federal judge issued an injunction against the company, barring the move.

Stay put and negotiate with your union, a courageous federal judge told California-based Quadrtech Corp. For labor rights advocates, the Quadrtech decision is worth celebrating. It shows that strong labor law enforcement by a resolute National Labor Relations Board and fair-minded courts can protect workers’ basic right of association. And if any workers needed their rights protected, Quadrtech workers did. They turned to self-organization after enduring years of minimum wages, no benefits, job speed-up and 12-hour days without even a place for many of them to sit.

The judge rejected Quadrtech’s cynical claim that competition from low-wage workers in China motivated the move to Mexico. “The rhetoric of ‘cheap foreign labor’ is a shibboleth that employers may not rely upon to justify unlawful, anti-union conduct,” the judge declared. That sentence ought to be posted in big letters on every workplace bulletin board in the land — and in federal courthouses, too.

The decision did not create new legal precedent. It already was unlawful to shut a workplace in retaliation for workers’ successful organizing. But now this principle has been applied to a cross-border runaway shop, not just to a move within the United States.

Showing determination and unity in the face of plant-closing threats, company spying and supervisor pressure, Quadrtech workers wrote a new chapter in U.S. labor organizing history. First they voted overwhelmingly for their union. Then they showed how to use effective labor law enforcement to bring management to the bargaining table instead of helplessly watching their jobs get moved. They sent a sharp warning to companies out to break worker organizing drives by moving overseas. Big Business can’t just cry “cheap foreign labor” and find a safe haven abroad when its real intention is to punish U.S. workers for exercising freedom of association.

The challenge now is to make sure the Quadrtech decision is not a one-shot deal for workers’ rights. Swift, sure enforcement of workers’ rights should be the rule, not the exception, in U.S. labor law and practice. The NLRB should seek more injunctions to stop workers’ rights violations, and federal courts should grant more injunctions like the one in Quadrtech.

Employers screamed bloody murder when the NLRB’s general counsel sought 90 to 100 injunction remedies per year in the late 1990s, compared with 40 to 50 in earlier years. But 50 or 100 injunctions each year only scratch the surface of employer lawbreaking.

Taking a cue from the Quadrtech case, labor law authorities should move more forcefully and more often for injunctions to halt employer unfair labor practices. The NLRB should seek injunctions not only to stop unlawful closures, but also to quickly reinstate workers fired for organizing and to stop bad-faith “surface bargaining” by employers who want to punish workers by denying them a contract.

But a long-term solution cannot rest with case-by-case injunctions or settlements. Far-reaching labor law reform is needed to address problems of plant closings and runaway shops. These problems will persist as long as companies enjoy uncontrolled capital mobility in a global market economy. For help beyond the Quadrtech case, workers and their allies have to elect a Congress and an administration willing to challenge corporate privileges and to strongly enforce workers’ fundamental rights of association, organizing and bargaining.

Lance Compa teaches labor law and international labor rights at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Ithaca, N.Y.