Senate Hears Testimony on Employee Free Choice Act

by Mike Hall, Mar 27, 2007

After management at the Front Range Energy ethanol plant ignored workers’ complaints about safety procedures and dangerous working conditions and reneged on the promises of wage increases and improved health benefits, Errol Hohrein says he and other workers decided they wanted to form a union to bargain for a better life.Ninety percent of the workers, based in Windsor, Colo., signed cards through a majority verification process saying they wanted to join the United Steelworkers (USW) but were harassed and threatened with job loss by their employer, says Hohrein. He spoke this morning at a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee this morning on the Employee Free Choice Act, which would level the playing field when workers try to form unions.

The House passed the Employee Free Choice Act March 1 and the Senate version is expected to be introduced soon. The legislation would put an end to the kind of employer harassment, intimidation and anti-worker tactics Hohrein and tens of thousands of workers encounter every year when they try to form unions. Others testifying today included Cynthia Estlund, a law professor at the New York University School of Law, Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), and Peter Hurtgen, a management lawyer with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.

Hohrein says Front Range denied the workers’ choice of USW representation and forced them to go through the flawed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election process. Hohrein, with 20 years experience as a union member on his previous job, was the point man on the drive to win a voice at work.

They forced us to attend meetings where they slammed the union and hardly let us say anything. They said if we went union it would come out of our paychecks…the company questioned everyone on how they were going to vote. They took them into backrooms and browbeat them.…

They would follow me around the workplace and not permit me to talk to my co-workers…during the election they stood at the door of the break room where we were voting as a silent reminder of their threats.

Even after the campaign of harassment, the workers voted for a union. Then, when the election was certified, Front Range fired Hohrein.

I’m no troublemaker. I served my country in Vietnam. I’ve worked with youth as a junior high school teacher; my wife is a special education teacher. I have one flaw and that’s telling the truth.

Labor law in this country is broken, it doesn’t support working people. We’re on the brink and no one’s looking out for us. It’s time for the government to do the right thing and pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass), committee chairman, says what happened to Hohrein happens to 30,000 workers a year, one every 17 minutes.

It’s illegal, it’s unacceptable, but it happens everyday….The current system is broken, it isn’t protecting workers….The rules of the NLRB are so biased, workers never get a chance to have their voice heard.

While Hohrein’s saga puts a face on the issue for lawmakers, Estlund and Mishel explored the flaws in the nation’s labor laws that make the Employee Free Choice Act necessary and how restoring workers’ fundamental freedom to organize and join unions can help rebuild the nation’s middle class.

Estlund told the panel that when employers harass workers, threaten to move jobs or close plants and fire workers who want to join unions, the current labor law’s “pallid response to illegality”

…has led many employers to regard the prospect of sanctions as the routine cost of doing business. Well worth it to get rid of organizing leaders and derail workers’ organizing efforts. As a result a culture of near-impunity in much of U.S. labor law and practice…[the Employee Free Choice Act’s] enforcement provisions are designed to give some teeth to a law whose toothlessness has become an international embarrassment.

She noted that the act’s tough new penalties against employers who violate workers’ rights and fire union supporters are an

effective answer to such direct and forceful interference with the right to organize. The discharge of a union activist during an organizing drive is the quintessential case of a violation that must be remedied quickly if it is to be effectively remedied at all. Too often, the real objective of such a discharge is not just to rid the workplace of one employee but to intimidate his or her co-workers and stall the organizing drive itself.

Mishel outlined the positive impact of unions on working families’ paychecks and the national economy. Workers who can join together in unions can help stop the squeeze on the middle class.

Most Americans are working harder and smarter than ever before, but they fear their efforts are not being recognized and rewarded. The growing gaps in wages and wealth threaten the productivity of our economy and the cohesion of our society. Unions can also make an historic contribution by making work pay for those who labor for low wages, by restoring the link between productivity increases and pay increases, and by providing training, health coverage, and portable pension benefits at a time when most Americans will keep moving from job to job.

Mishel pointed out that workers with a union contract earn higher wages and better benefits for their families, including

• 14.7 percent higher wages;
• 28.2 percent more likely to have employer-provided health insurance;
• 53.9 percent more likely to have pension coverage; and
• 14.3 percent more paid time off.

Says Mishel:

By reducing the opportunity for employers to intimidate and discourage workers from unionizing after they have reached a collective decision to do so, the Employee Free Choice Act can help spread the benefits that unions bring to workers and the economy.

To view a webcast of the hearing, click here; to hear more from Hohrein, click here.

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