SEARCH
Employee Free Choice Act Heading to Senate Floor |
|
 |
|
The Senate is expected to begin debate on the Employee Free Choice Act (S. 1041) on Monday, with a vote to come as early as Wednesday, June 20.
Across the country, momentum is building for passage of the bill. Workers have been delivering thousands of messages via e-mail, phone calls or in rallies urging Senate support for the act. The Employee Free Choice Act would improve the nation’s labor laws to give workers greater freedom to make their own decisions about joining a union and bargaining for better wages, benefits and working conditions.
You can act today to let your senators know you want the Employee Free Choice Act to become law. Sign the online card to let your senators know you support the Employee Free Choice Act. Our goal is to collect 1,000 signed online cards in each state, combine them with the thousands that are being collected in communities across the country and deliver them all to the U.S. Senate.
On June 19, thousands of union members and workers who want to join a union will rally in nearly 60 cities nationwide to urge their senators to vote for the Employee Free Choice Act. More than 3,000 people are expected to rally on Capitol Hill in the middle of the debate to make it clear that giving workers a free choice is a priority.
Meanwhile, more and more elected officials are backing the Employee Free Choice Act. More than 45 state and local legislative bodies have passed resolutions supporting the legislation and urging their members of Congress to vote for it. Legislators like Maryland state Sen. Jamie Raskin (D), who says:
The union-busting and union-prevention campaigns of the last three decades have wrecked the dreams of millions of working people, and we need a new movement to safeguard the right of citizens to organize at the workplace. I totally favor the card-check majority plan and will do whatever I can to help it pass.
Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), along with 46 co-sponsors, introduced the bill in late March. The Senate co-sponsors include presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, Chris Dodd and Joe Biden. The other Democratic presidential candidates, former Sen. John Edwards, Gov. Bill Richardson and Rep. Dennis Kucinich, all support the bill as well.
The House passed the Employee Free Choice Act on March 1 by a margin of 241–185. The legislation would rein in the employer harassment, intimidation and anti-worker tactics tens of thousands of workers encounter every year when they try to form unions.
Currently, employers decide if workers can choose a union by majority sign-up or by the longer National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election process, which many employers exploit to threaten and intimidate workers who support the union.
The legislation would help workers such as Cathy Kahn. When she and other employees started talking to their co-workers about organizing into the Office and Professional Employees (OPEIU), management fought back hard.
Kahn recalls:
They used scare tactics. They had staff meetings that were really captive audience meetings. They made people afraid by predicting that the bargaining process could result in layoffs. Even if it’s illegal to threaten people, the management still gets it in their minds and they don’t forget. After a while, there were a lot of employees who were reluctant to support the union because they were afraid of what would happen to them if they stood up and spoke out.
Despite everything management had done, however, a majority of the employees voted in an NLRB election in December 2004 to organize into OPEIU—but then, management went to the NLRB and filed objections to the election, trying to get it invalidated. The NLRB heard management’s objections and overruled them all because they had no impact on the vote, but it took months for that to happen.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says with the Employee Free Choice Act, the Senate has “a historic chance to make sure that America works the way it should for everyone.”
A union card is the straightest ticket into a middle class lifestyle with a decent standard of living and the ability to provide for your family. But for too long now, working people have been denied the opportunity to have a union because corporations flagrantly and routinely violate workers’ freedom to form unions, and the law is helpless to stop them.
No Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
