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Join Final Push for Employee Free Choice Act
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Next month, the U.S. Senate is set to vote on the Employee Free Choice Act, the most important improvement to federal labor law in 70 years.
As the vote approaches, thousands of working families have joined the AFL-CIO’s nationwide campaign to collect signed cards in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.
You can join the campaign by signing the Online Card. By doing so, you’ll help bring this important bill one step closer to becoming law.
Our goal is to collect 1,000 cards in every state. The cards will then be delivered to the Senate in mid-June. Sign the Online Card here.
Over the next few weeks, it is absolutely critical to keep up the pressure as the bill’s opponents ratchet up their misleading attacks.
Corporate front groups have been throwing the “whole kitchen sink” at supporters of the Employee Free Choice Act. And as promised, their campaign against the bill’s supporters will become “even bigger and nastier” in the days leading up to the Senate vote.
The truth is, America’s working people are struggling to make ends meet, and our middle class is disappearing. The best opportunity we have to get ahead economically is by uniting with co-workers to bargain with our employers for better wages, benefits and working conditions.
The Employee Free Choice Act would change that by restoring workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain—without management interference.
Please take a moment to sign the Online Card and to tell your senators that you support the Employee Free Choice Act. If you’ve already signed the card, tell a friend about the campaign here.
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1 Comment
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Dear Mr. XXXXXXX :
Thank you for contacting me regarding H.R. 800 and S. 1041, the “Employee Free Choice Act.” I appreciate hearing from you.
H.R. 800 passed the House of Representatives on March 1, 2007, and is now pending before the Senate. S. 1041 was introduced in the Senate on March 29, 2007, and was referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. If enacted, this legislation would require the National Labor Relations Board to certify a bargaining representative without direct election if a majority of the bargaining unit employees have authorized designation of the representative and there is no other individual or labor organization currently certified or recognized as the exclusive representative of any of the employees in the unit .
At a time when the brave men and women of the United States Armed Forces are fighting and dying in efforts to spread democracy around the globe, here in America there is a push to take away the most basic democratic right a person can have – the right to a secret ballot election.
To certify a union through signed authorization cards, or “card checks,” would force employees to make public their decision whether or not to join or form a union. H.R. 800 and S. 1041 would make employees’ decisions known to union officials, their employer, and their coworkers. No employee should feel threatened or coerced at any time while at the workplace and the union organizing process should be fair, regulated, democratic, and private. Should this legislation come up for debate before the Senate, I will oppose it.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if I may be of assistance to you in the future. In the meantime, if you would like to receive timely e-mail alerts regarding the latest congressional actions and my weekly e-newsletter, please sign up via my web site at: http://www.chambliss.senate.gov .
Very truly yours,
Saxby Chambliss
MY RESPONSE TO THIS:
Suffice it to say, Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss is not going to help us. Is it not shameful to invoke the noble cause of the “brave men and women of the United States Armed Forces” that “are fighting and dying in efforts to spread democracy around the globe” while simultaneously denying “the most basic democratic right a person can have – the right to a secret ballot election” by forcing the liberated people of Afghanistan and Iraqi to dip their finger in purple ink (providing the powers that be an instant finger print identity data base by which the next dictator that takes over in the absence of U.S. forces may possibly bring future political charges against) in order to vote? Where is their privacy for which honorable soldiers serving the ‘coalition of the coerced’ have fought and died to provide? That is the most feeble excuse I have ever heard for not making it as easy to register to become a union member as it is to register to vote in the 1st place!!! Get real! I wish that Colin Powell had made the case for war on the premise of democratizing the globe in his U.N. speech. I’m sure that would have been well received by the Chinese, N.Korean, N.Vietnamese, Venezuelan, Saudi, Iranian, German, French, Syrian, and Jordanian Ambassadors, just to name a few. I thought the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction was the cause, and that preemptive measures must be undertaken because we couldn’t take the chance that a smoking gun of proof might come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
I have personally participated in several union organizing campaigns. I know that the real intimidation happens during the time between a petition to the NLRB for an election, and the date that election is scheduled to occur. This in-between time is utilized to scare the crap out of the employees by their employer. It doesn’t matter that the employer’s acts are illegal. By the time labor board charges are filed, processed, and appealed, the workforce has suffered so many additional illegal acts that require filing, processing, and appealing; it looses the will to continue to fight the good fight and the election is lost. Fines for such acts are considered to be just another operational expense by the employer; and money well spent if successful at deterring the Union. When faced with a choice of allowing a continuation of employer exploitation to persist or the perception of waiting at the back of an unemployment line; workers will continue to choose the lesser of the two evils. The net result is a degradation of our society’s standard of living down to the least common denominator. These same politicians will later proclaim that in order to balance a budget, taxes will have to be raised or services will have to be cut. All the while, ignoring the option of passing legislation conducive to growing the tax base, itself.
My understanding is that the NLRB commonly requires the names of the employees to be revealed to it for the purpose of determining whether or not they qualify to be considered part of the bargaining unit, to begin with. The union officials already have comprehensive knowledge and very few of their coworkers gain partial knowledge of who wants to join the Union because they are charged with the collection of the petition cards from the employees who desire to join, and then later have to present them to the NLRB. All of this is treated as highly confidential information by the union organizers because all too often employees suspected of signing on are targeted by the employer for abuse/termination. A minimum of 35% of the bargaining unit is required in order to petition the NLRB to call for and schedule an election to be held. The Union and employer will know who the union members are after payroll deduction of union dues are implemented. What privacy is he talking about? The major premise of his logic is without merit!