SEARCH
Hearings Begin on Employee Free Choice Act |
|
Just two days after the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 800) was introduced, the new Congress began hearings on the bill, which would make the process of choosing a union more fair. Several workers and academics will tell the House Committee on Education and Labor’s Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions that the current system of elections through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is broken and that some employers abuse the system to deny workers their free choice of whether to join a union. Paul Pimentel will be sending live blogs from the hearings throughout today.
Subcommittee Chairman Robert Andrews (D-N.J.), told a Capitol Hill press conference Tuesday:
The basic underpinnings of middle class life—decent wages and benefits—have been eroded by coercive employers determined to obstruct any effort to allow workers to organize.
I believe that restoring workers’ free choice, through the Employee Free Choice Act, is the only way to ensure that they have the right to bargain for fair wages and benefits. It is imperative that Congress take this action for all middle class Americans and particularly for the over 60 million nonunion workers who seek nothing more than decent wages and health care. Restoring the right for workers to negotiate for fair compensation is critical if we are to have America’s middle class grow over the next 50 years as it did over the past fifty.”
The bill, which was introduced by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the chairman of Education and Labor, and 232 co-sponsors, including Andrews, has a strong chance to pass the House because working people showed the value of political organizing by helping elect a new Congress in 2006. Click here to see if your representative is a co-sponsor.
Just days after the Nov. 7 elections, newly elected House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) promised that after the first 100 hours of business the 110th Congress would move to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.
If passed, 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.
Currently, if employees present an employer with union authorization cards signed by a majority, the employer can demand an election process through the NLRB. But the NLRB election process is broken because it enables employers to intimidate, coerce and harass workers and drag out the process indefinitely.
The bill is working its way through Congress just as support for unions is growing. Some 60 million U.S. workers say they would join a union if they could, based on research conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates in December 2006.
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 employers 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.
1 Comment
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I am always amazed at how some companies stand up in opposition to EFCA and claim if their workers wanted a union they could organize one. But, they say, the workers are happy, and besides, they pay competitive wages and give decent benefits. At the same time, of course, the company is sending every worker through “trainings” designed by (expensive) legal consultants specializing in union busting to convince workers of the futility and perniciousness of unions. (I would love to sit through one of these seminars, as I am sure they are rich with every union boss cliché imaginable – but I digress.)
The truth is, if said company pays decent wages, it is most likely part of a conscious strategy to convince workers they don’t need a union. Of course if arch-conservative Grover Norquist could wave his magic wand and make organized labor disappear tomorrow, those same workers benefits and wages would fall off a cliff. Hence, corporate America’s duplicitous argument that a) workers must not want a union because they simply have not formed one, b) workers don’t need unions generally because they make decent wages now. Though if either of these were true, then why is corporate America, and all its proxies on Capitol Hill, so vehemently opposed to legislation that would largely just require them to stay out of the way of workers who want to form a union?