Labor & Employment Law

Op-Eds Highlight Support of Employee Free Choice Act

By Seth Michaels

Here are four great op-eds from around the country that explain why we need the Employee Free Choice Act.

In Pennsylvania’s Centre Daily Times, Penn State professor Paul Clark looks into the history of workers’ freedom to form unions over the past several decades and concludes that the Employee Free Choice Act is critical to restoring balance in the workplace and a healthy economy:

This legislation is designed to reform our nation’s primary labor law and re-establish the system of checks and balances between unions and management that historically has proved so beneficial to our nation…

Its passage would move us closer to economic recovery and toward a more equitable society.

Ron Hemingway, a member of the United Steelworkers (USW), a veteran organizer and the vice president of the Maine Labor Council, has first-hand experience of the process for forming unions and writes in an op-ed in the Lewiston Sun-Journal that the system is broken:

Our local union in Rumford recently tried to organize a satellite wood operation in South Paris. The employer hired a lawyer from Portland who muddled the process, delayed bargaining and dragged his feet every way he could. We did win the election, but lost the union there, as the contract process was dragged out for more than a year.

Several workers were fired and others were intimidated. By the time we were done, union supporters were gone due to the company’s interference. There is no union there now. Wages are low, safety is dismal and working conditions horrid.

They needed a union to represent them. The system failed them, as it has in other locations I have been involved with….

Robert Bruno, the University of Illinois professor who’s written an important study on the majority sign-up process, writes in the Northwest Indiana Times that workers, not corporations, must have the freedom to choose how to form a union. He quickly cuts through corporate spin to explain why we need Employee Free Choice:

It is simply intellectually dishonest to portray this new workers’ rights legislation as not promoting “free choice.” Contrary to claims that the act would strip the right of workers to vote in a union election, this bill restores workers’ choice to join a union and bargain with their employer.

Public policy honestly arrived at requires that if a majority of workers want a union, they should get a union.

In the Bangor Daily News, Jack McKay, president of the Eastern Maine Labor Council, reflects on the Fourth of July and the need to let workers have the freedom to bargain for a better life:

Workplace democracy isn’t revolutionary. It isn’t anti-business. It is commonsense. Workers are entitled to have a say on the job, and the most common means of doing that is through unions.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on July 06, 2009 (boomark / email).