Mutual Aid and Protection
It was already hot as the mid-morning sun rose over Tucson, Arizona, but the temperature inside the Don Chavas tortilla factory was worse. The air conditioning had been broken for weeks. A dusty box fan hummed in the corner, whirring its small motor in vain as it blew the hot, smoky air around the room. Day after day, Mariela Soto and her coworkers labored through their 12-hour shifts, kneading, pressing, tossing, and flipping small pieces of dough on the hot griddles.
The factory operated 24 hours a day, shuffling exhausted employees in and out between the night and day shifts. They had no official meal breaks, so sometimes they ate standing up, taking bites between work stations kneading dough or cooking tortillas. On the worst days, they looked like wounded soldiers on a battlefield, covered in bandages from the burns and gashes that had been dished out by the old, broken industrial cooking equipment they’d asked their boss to fix more times than they could count.
The mostly female workers had also been working more and more hours, but their paychecks seemed to shrink — the more they worked, the less money they seemed to receive. Mariela had done the math. There were weeks she hadn’t even made minimum wage. When she complained, nothing ever happened. If she really dug her heels in, the factory owner would say the thing she dreaded the most. “Go talk to Adrian.”
Adrian was the general manager, and the owner’s son. He had greasy, stubby fingers that he’d brush over Mariela’s hips or breasts as he walked by. He made sexual comments about the women’s bodies as they slogged through their shifts, and would press his pelvis against their thighs as he leaned over their shoulders to inspect their work. Nobody dared to complain too much, because even worse than being underpaid, was having to go “talk” to Adrian.
Two thousand miles away in Washington, D.C., the sun was setting as the United States Senate adjourned at the end of another day. For more than six months, the Senate had failed to vote on or even consider President Obama’s nominees to serve on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — a federal law enforcement agency charged with protecting workers’ rights to join together to fight for better working conditions. Because of the gridlock in Congress, the NLRB was languishing without a full slate of Senate-confirmed members.
As the sun rose again in Tucson, Mariela pushed through the kitchen door and greeted the tired women who were getting ready to leave. They’d spent the night mixing, pressing, flipping and packaging tortillas on the overnight shift. She overheard her coworkers arguing again in the back of the kitchen. They had been short staffed the past few days, forcing the women who were there to work longer and spend more time in the hottest part of the industrial kitchen, with no air conditioning, in the heat of an Arizona summer. Mariela and the other women stood in silence for a moment as they realized they were going to be short staffed again for another 12-hour shift.
All of the long hours, shortchanged paychecks, and Adrian’s greasy fingers were finally adding up to be too much. That day, Mariela and her co-workers turned off the old, broken griddles, cut off the lights in the kitchen, and walked out of the tortilla factory. They were engaging in a work stoppage to protest and finally call attention to everything happening to them at work.
They were engaging in a work stoppage to protest and finally call attention to everything happening to them at work.
It was just after 6 p.m. in Washington, but the agency’s top lawyers had all been assembled at the NLRB’s headquarters. The Senate had failed to vote on the president’s nominations to the Board for nearly a year. Because the Senate refused to even hold a vote on the president’s nominees to run the agency, the Board was operating with recess appointees who were filling in the gaps.
The NLRB is a federal law enforcement agency that protects private-sector workers’ rights to join together, with or without a union, to fight for better working conditions at their jobs.
The National Labor Relations Act, enacted in 1935, says that it is “the policy of the United States” to protect workers’ “full freedom of self-organization” for the purposed of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or for “mutual aid and protection” at work. The NLRB enforces these rights by processing tens of thousands of cases all around the country each year. Workers who have been demoted, transferred, or fired for attempting to form union, asking for better pay, or engaging in work-stoppages — like the one Mariela and her colleagues had — can go to the NLRB when their legal rights at work are violated.
In fact, Mariela and her coworkers went to the NLRB’s regional office in Phoenix, when they were all fired the day after they walked out and spoke out about their job conditions. And after he fired them all, the tortilla factory owner refused to give them their last paychecks.
Back in the board room on the top floor of the government office in downtown, Washington D.C., the NLRB’s top lawyers scoured every page of the Supreme Court’s 108 page opinion and could find no way out. Because the Senate failed to perform its constitutional job of confirming the president’s nominees, the United States Supreme Court found that the agency was operating in violation of the law. That meant that the hundreds of cases the agency had processed in the meantime were void. Including the case that Mariela and her coworkers had filed — and won.
While the Supreme Court was deliberating, and while the Senate continued to adjourn day after day without voting on the nominees, Mariela and her co-workers had gone through a full trial at the Labor Board’s regional office in Phoenix. They’d testified, produced documents, and brought in witnesses explaining in detail how their claims of stolen wages, hazardous working conditions, and Adrian’s unwanted sexual advances were all true. They’d celebrated when the judge’s ruling came down in their favor, ordering back wages for everyone fired in violation of the law and reinstatement for those who wanted — or needed — their jobs back. The tortilla factory filed for bankruptcy, trying to get out of paying the judgement to Mariela and her co-workers. Filing for bankruptcy is nothing new — the NLRB’s law enforcement agents regularly intervene in bankruptcy proceedings to make sure that workers’ back wages are paid. But this time the NLRB’s attorneys were stopped dead in their tracks. When the Supreme Court’s decision came down, the tortilla factory’s attorneys immediately moved to have the entire case thrown out. Mariela and her coworkers had done everything right. But after working long hours at a dangerous job with an employer who stole from their paychecks, Mariela and the other women she worked with got nothing in the end. The NLRB was forced to stop pursuing her case because of the Supreme Court’s decision. Because the Senate failed to perform its job, it failed to keep the government agency that protects workers’ rights to fair pay and treatment on their jobs up and running.
The Senate failed to perform its job, it failed to keep the government agency that protects workers’ rights to fair pay and treatment on their jobs up and running.
Today, the NLRB has a slate of senate-confirmed presidential appointees to keep the agency functioning. But recent reports of the White House possibly cutting back the NLRB’s funding have started to percolate. It remains to be seen what will happen the next time — and there surely will be a next time — that workers in America seek out the law enforcement agents at the NLRB, when they too engage in mutual aid and protection at work.
This is a true story based on a real case, and real events that occurred in the U.S. Senate, the National Labor Relations Board, and the U.S. Supreme Court. The story is slightly fictionalized because the events, while they all occurred, did not happen exactly in this order. But the story is better told this way.
