Chicago Tribune, January 18, 2008, Friday

Copyright 2008 Chicago Tribune Company

Chicago Tribune

January 18, 2008 Friday

Chicago Final Edition

SECTION: BUSINESS ; ZONE C; Pg. 3

HEADLINE: Monitor hired for bus union vote;

Teamsters upset over lack of input in the selection

BYLINE: By Stephen Franklin, Tribune reporter

BODY:

First Student, the nation's largest school bus firm, has set up an internal monitor's office to help ensure workers can freely decide whether to join a union.

The monitor, William B. Gould IV, a professor emeritus at Stanford University Law School and former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, said he hopes the effort will serve as a potential model for other companies.

Supported by a six-person staff, Gould said he will investigate workers' complaints and report findings to company officials.

And while the Teamsters Union, which has been trying hard to organize First Student's 68,000 workers in the U.S. and Canada, has high regard for Gould, union officials said they don't like the fact they had no input in the decision.

Still, Gould is hopeful. When company officials approached the 71-year-old labor law expert about the effort, he said he was taken back by the idea.

"My biggest surprise was that anybody would do this," he explained. "So many companies see things going their way, and so they figure why change anything."

The union's embrace of Gould is understandable. Gould's four-year term in the mid-1990s drew howls from corporate America over the agency's increased use of court injunctions against companies.

Teamsters Union President James P. Hoffa, in a letter this week to the chief executive of FirstGroup PLC, First Student's British-based parent company, detailed the concerns about its decision to "unilaterally" install a monitor.

Company spokeswoman Liz Valdes said Thursday that the monitoring effort was launched Jan. 1 "to give employees another chance to let us know how they feel."

First Student does not take a stance on whether employees should belong to a union. However, the Teamsters, which represents about 14,000 workers at First Student, has accused the company of waging anti-union campaigns. Last year alone the union filed about 50 complaints against the company with the NLRB.

Valdes would not comment on the union's complaints or on Hoffa's letter.

FirstGroup last year bought Naperville-based Laidlaw International Inc., the nation's largest school bus firm at the time, and merged it with First Student, the second largest, and moved the operations to Cincinnati.

In Illinois, the company has about 7,000 employees.

Organized labor has made corporations' resistance to their organizing efforts a major theme in its plan to reform the nation's labor laws.

"Harassment of workers who want to join a union is extreme in this country," said Kate Bronfenbrenner, a labor expert at Cornell University.

And for such a monitoring program to succeed, workers must be assured that they will not be fired for speaking up, she added.

"It would be interesting to see if it gets picked up elsewhere," said Martin Malin, a labor law expert at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. "I don't think [Gould] would agree to do something like this unless he was assured independence."

sfranklin@tribune.com

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