Back in this post, I talked about the attempts in 1979 to get Animation Writers out of the Animation Union and into the Writers Guild. That attempt failed, as did a later attempt with which I was also involved.
Of the '79 attempt, I wrote, "Craft severance is very difficult to achieve and it's even harder when…the National Labor Relations Board is full of Republican appointees, as it was then so soon after Nixon." Correcting me, Gregory Thompson wrote me to say…
The NLRB was Democrat controlled in '79. Three Democrats and two Republicans, with a Democratic chairman. I suspect you were just doing a little reflexive G.O.P. bashing and assumed Republicans sided with the big studios. But I also doubt either party would have had much stake in a dispute between two labor unions.
He's right about the first part, I am amazed to learn. I was told what I was told at the time and it apparently was not true. But the second attempt in the early eighties was blocked by a Labor Board with Reagan appointees on it…and that was a very anti-labor N.L.R.B. Even one of the lawyers opposing us gloated that he'd win because of it…and he did. We triumphed easily at the local level where Democrats prevailed and it was overturned at the national level where Republican appointees held the power. The overturning made so little sense, it was later overturned but by that point, it didn't do us any good.
I no longer venture near labor law — my Norma Rae days are behind me — in part because it struck me as a rigged game. The guys in power would rule the way they wanted, regardless of the law or the evidence. And in neither case was it really a dispute between two labor unions. The opposition to us in the second case was the employer, a non-union animation company we were attempting to unionize.
In the 1979 matter, we wanted to leave a union that did a bad job of representing us and instead join one that would do a good job. The bad union fought us but their case was funded and directed by the employers. When I testified in that case, the lawyers on "their" side of the courtroom were from Disney, Warner Brothers, etc.