The Day, New London, April 5, 2009, Sunday

The Day, New London

April 5, 2009, Sunday

The Day, New London

Better Wages, Benefits Will Come With Free Choice Act

By Greg Kotecki

Why does the country need the Employee Free Choice Act? The answer is simple, because we need to rebuild the middle class.

Unions have historically provided higher wages and benefits as compared to their non-union counterparts. According to the Center for American Progress, unionized workers earn 11.3 percent more, or $2.26 more per hour. Union workers nationwide are 28.2 percent more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and 53.9 percent more likely to have employer-provided pensions.

Unions boost wages

Workers in low-wage industries, women, African-American, and Latino workers have higher wages in unionized work places than in non-union workplaces. For all my conservative friends, these benefits are private sector not public sector and controlled by market forces not taxation.

The proposed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would address the current flaws in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). From the beginning of NLRA, union elections were just one method used to determine majority interest in unions.

Card-check recognition was a widely accepted method used and resulted in millions of workers gaining the right to bargain collectively. This all changed in 1947 when Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act. Taft-Hartley swung the pendulum away from workers' rights and it has never swung back. Taft-Hartley began the long succession of regulatory restrictions and hostile National Labor Relations Board decisions that have helped undermine the NLRA's stated policy of encouraging collective bargaining.

What will the legislation do? Today, millions of American workers are denied their right to form a union, because the process of voting has been corrupted. Workers that consider forming a union today face an undemocratic system and are frequently intimidated by their employer.

A new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research finds that in 2007 at least one pro-union worker was fired during 30 percent of union-election processes.

Forced anti-union meetings

According to Cornell University Scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner's studies, 92 percent of private sector companies force employees to attend closed-door mandatory meetings to hear anti-union propaganda and 78 percent of companies require supervisors to deliver anti-union messages to workers.

The EFCA would toughen the penalties against employers who break the law. Currently, the only remedy available to illegally discharged workers is limited to what is described as a “make whole remedy.” This means that although the employer is found guilty of violating federal law, the employer's only liability is to pay the employee back wages minus any earning he/she may have earned during the period of discharge.

Understand that this process of reinstatement can take years and does not account for things like pain and suffering, loss of home, property or even the impact of bankruptcy.

The EFCA would also allow employers and/or unions to request mediation and arbitration of the first contract. Why is this necessary? Again, according to Bronfenbrenner, only 38 percent of unions certified under the current system achieve a first contract after one year and only 56 percent ever get a first contract.

Finally, the law would restore the right of the employees not employers to make the unionization decision by allowing workers to form a union through majority sign-up. Just like you can freely join your local VFW, Democratic or Republican parties employees could just sign cards and if the majority agreed the union would be certified.

Opponents argue there is the possibility of reverse intimidation from the union, but the right to decertify the union is and has always been part of the NLRA. Left unchanged by this legislation is the right of a secret-ballot election if 30 percent of employees demand a decertification election. So if the intimidation threat rings true, than the union can and will be removed.

As a former union organizer, I understand firsthand the difficulties associated with helping workers organize. I never asked a worker to sign a card “just to have an election.”

Debate about the Employee Free Choice Act comes down to one's position on the right to organize. It is not about change in the right to organize unions, it's about the right to organize them.

Our Country needs EFCA to bring back the balance lacking in the current system and to restore workplace democracy.