Why U.S. Workers Need the Employee Free Choice Act

by Tula Connell, Feb 2, 2007

Some 60 million workers say they would join unions if they could, according to recent polling.
Yet U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data released last week point to a decline in union membership from 12.5 percent of the workforce in 2005 to 12 percent in 2006.
So what’s wrong with that picture?
It’s true, we in the union movement could be more aggressive in recruiting workers to join unions. But a big reason U.S. employees don’t join unions is because they can’t.
And America’s workers all too-often are blocked from joining unions because our nation’s labor laws, originally created in the 1930s, are broken. So broken that employers routinely harass, intimidate and even fire workers who they suspect of trying to form a union.
Let’s face it, how many people want to lose their jobs? (Firing workers for forming unions is illegal, but management does it anyway, counting on the fact that it often takes years for a workers’ appeal to wind its way through the regional and national labor boards and even the courts.)
Our nation’s labor laws need to be changed. Some 230 House members—a number that’s growing—already have signed up as co-sponsors of the Employee Free Choice Act. Rep. George Miller and Sen. Edward Kennedy have been with us on this bill from the time we first sought co-sponsors for it in 2003
The Employee Free Choice Act would:

• Establish stronger penalties for violation of employee rights when workers seek to form a union and during first-contract negotiations.
• Provide mediation and arbitration for first-contract disputes.
• Allow employees to form unions by signing cards authorizing union representation.

A poll conducted in December by Peter D. Hart Research Associates showed a strong majority of the public—65 percent—approve of unions, up from 55 percent in 1981. But that same poll, taken for us at the AFL-CIO, also showed that nearly one-third of the public does not realize how hard management fights workers who seek to form unions.
In fact:  

• 51 percent of private-sector employees threaten to shut down partially or totally if the union wins the election.
• 25 percent of private-sector employers fire at least one worker during organizing campaigns.

And management does more, lots more, to intimidate and harass workers seeking to form
And most import, the Employee Free Choice Act is about raising the standard of living for all of us in this nation.
As AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff puts it:
[There is a] direct correlation between 25 years of stagnant, flat-lined wages and the assault on unions. Forty-seven million of us are without health care and 40 million with inadequate health care, [and] 20 percent more of us [live] in poverty now than when this decade started.
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Laura Garren, a nurse at Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg, Ore., has been delivering and taking care of babies for 20 years. About two years ago, she began to worry about increasingly inadequate staffing levels having an adverse effect on patient care. Garren says they were short 40 nurses and the situation was getting worse.  Eager to turn things around at Mercy, Garren and her coworkers began forming a union with the Oregon Nurses Association/United American Nurses to gain a voice in the decisions affecting their work and to ensure quality patient care.  But the hospital was not interested in letting the nurses make a free choice. Management fought back with a campaign of fear and misinformation.  Making the staffing ratio even worse, nurses were pulled off the floor and forced to attend anti-union meetings during work time. Garren remembers thinking to herself:
While I’m here at this mandatory meeting, the nurse upstairs who is covering my patients, now has 12 patients.
What does that say for management’s priorities? Or, for that matter, what does it say about the priorities of this nation?
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In 2005, a group of Nobel Peace Laureates, including the Rev. Desmond Tutu, former Polish President and Solidarnosc leader Lech Walesa, former President Jimmy Carter and the Dalai Lama, issued a joint statement calling every nation, including the United States, to “truly protect and defend workers’ rights, including the right to form unions and bargain collectively.” In their statement, the Nobel Laureates lambasted this nation’s refusal to ensure the basic Freedom of Assembly guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, writing:
Even the wealthiest nation in the world—the United States of America—fails to adequately protect workers’ rights to form unions and bargain collectively. Millions of U.S. workers lack any legal protection to form unions and thousands are discriminated against every year for trying to exercise these rights.
[http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/02/02/why-us-workers-need-the-employee-free-choice-act/]

10 Key Facts about the Employee Free Choice Act