Sheldon Friedman, with the AFL-CIO Voice@Work campaign, offers highlights from a recent speech by historian Nelson Lichtenstein on the nation’s broken labor laws.

Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act by the 110th Congress is a “necessary first step in the reconstitution of freedom and dignity in the American workplace,” according to noted historian Nelson Lichtenstein. The University of California-Santa Barbara professor spoke recently at an AFL-CIO-sponsored breakfast during the 2007 Labor and Employment Relations Association conference in Chicago.

Lichtenstein explained that without rapid unionization and the spread of collective bargaining, the key economic and social achievements of the 1930s and the 1960s—such as passage of the Social Security Act and the Civil Rights Act—would not have been possible. Yet even though labor has been the indispensable to the adoption and defense of a broad progressive agenda over the past 70 years, protection of workers’ basic freedom to form unions and bargain collectively has become an increasingly elusive goal.

Lichtenstein, most recently author of State of the Union: A Century of American Labor—and the leading biographer of fabled UAW former President Walter Reuther—explained how the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) representation election process has failed America’s workers. Fewer than 70,000 workers succeeded in forming unions last year via that management-dominated process, a tiny handful of the 58 million workers who tell pollsters that they want to have a union in their workplace.

To fix the nation’s broken labor laws, union activists and our allies are working for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, the most significant legislation proposed in a generation to protect crucial workplace rights. Lichtenstein’s remarks turned a spotlight on the vehement opposition by Big Business to this vital bill, and put the self-serving objections of the bill’s enemies under a critical microscope.

The Employee Free Choice Act would reform the failed NLRB process by moving the law in the direction of the Wagner Act’s original intent. For much more from this distinguished historian on the urgent need for Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act—and for articulate and compelling arguments that will be useful in this fight—read the full text of Nelson Lichtenstein’s remarks here.

Nelson Lichtenstein is professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy.
 

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