Commentary - John Sweeney and Joslyn Williams: Workers need protection in Employee Free Choice Act

But you might not ask Elaine Chao, the Bush Administration’s Secretary of Labor, who is traveling the country on tax dollars, meeting with newspaper editorial boards about the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation her office doesn’t even oversee.

She’s not making these public relations trips to talk about layoffs or health care or slashed wages — but instead is asking newspapers to oppose this new legislation that would help workers improve their lives by forming unions.

Sixty million of America’s workers say they would form a union tomorrow if given the chance. After all, a union card is the single best ticket to the middle class in this nation. Workers with a union earn 30 percent more than those who don’t, and are much more likely to have employer-provided health care and retirement benefits.

Yet when employees try to exercise their rights to form unions, employers routinely block them, and labor law is helpless to stop it. A recent study shows that one out of five activists who try to form unions is likely to be fired.

More than three-quarters of private employers require supervisors to deliver anti-union messages to the workers whose jobs and pay they control, according to research by Kate Bronfenbrenner at Cornell University. Half threaten to shut down if employees join together in a union.

And even after workers successfully form a union, one-third of the time employers never negotiate a contract. Some of this is legal and some is not. The current system has such weak remedies and lax enforcement that it actually encourages employers to violate workers’ rights.

The Employee Free Choice Act, which passed the House by a substantial margin and is now pending in the Senate, would level the playing field for workers and restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain. It would strengthen penalties for companies that coerce or intimidate employees, establish mediation and binding arbitration when the employer and workers cannot agree on a first contract and enable employees to form unions when a majority signs union authorization cards.

This legislation does not outlaw the election process; workers can still have an election if they want one. However, this law puts the choice of how employees form their union — by ballot or card — in workers’ hands. Right now, the employer — not the workers — gets to choose how, when and where workers form their union.

Secretary Chao and other opponents to the bill claim that the Employee Free Choice Act would leave employees open to intimidation by other employees. Let’s look at the facts. A recent review of 113 cases, which the corporate-backed HR Policy Association claims involved fraud or coercion in the signing of union authorization forms, found that there were actually only 42 cases since the Act’s inception in 1935 in which there was such coercion or fraud. That’s less than one case per year.

Compare that to the 31,358 cases in 2005 — one year alone — in which employers had to pay backpay to workers in connection with cases involving illegal firings or other discrimination against workers for exercising their federally protected labor law rights. That’s a ratio of over 30,000 to 1.

America’s working people fought for and won an end to child labor through their unions. They fought for and won a 40-hour workweek, health and safety legislation and Social Security. And also they fought for… and then lost… the real freedom to come together in a union.

The Employee Free Choice Act would give working men and women back this basic right to self-organization, and give them a real tool in their daily fight to stay out of the ranks of the working poor.

John Sweeney is president of the AFL-CIO, while Williams is president of the AFL-CIO’s Metro DC Council.