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Six-Year Ordeal to Get Job Back Shows Why Employee Free Choice Is a Must |
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Here’s another clear example of why we need the Employee Free Choice Act. For more than six years, Russ Teegardin and Bill Lawhorn have fought to get their jobs back after they were fired for supporting a union at Consolidated Biscuit Co. (CBC) in McComb, Ohio. Even though the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ordered the company to rehire the workers, CBC all but ignored the order.
Finally, justice will be done at CBC after a federal appeals court on Nov. 14 ordered the company to comply with the labor board’s decision and reinstate the two workers with full back pay with all wages lost, plus compounded interest. If CBC, which makes Nabisco cookies and Kraft products, does not comply with the order, it could face thousands of dollars in fines. Check out Lawhorn talking about his firing in the video above and speaking before Congress here.
The court also ordered a new election for CBC workers to decide if they want to join the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM). During the first election in 2002, CBC mounted an aggressive campaign to prevent workers from exercising their freedom to form a union. Even though 650 of 875 employees signed union recognition cards, CBC responded to the workers’ campaign with threats, intimidation, harassment and, in Lawhorn and Teegardin’s case, by firing key union supporters. The company threatened workers with loss of benefits, plant closure and stricter discipline if they voted for the union.
Fear spread like wildfire throughout the company as workers, one by one, became afraid to speak up, then voted against the union. The workers filed more than 40 charges against the company for violations of federal labor laws.
Had the Employee Free Choice Act been in place, the company would have been required to recognize the union based on the signed cards and none of this would have happened, says BCTGM President Frank Hurt.
This is the very reason why the Employee Free Choice Act must become law. It is an absolute disgrace what these workers went through because they wanted to become members of the BCTGM and then be forced to wait more than six years for justice to be served. It is outrageous for workers to be treated like this in modern America.
Unfortunately, what happened to Lawhorn and Teegardin is not unusual. Studies show that 91 percent of employers, when faced with employees who want to join together in a union, force employees to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union propaganda; 80 percent require immediate supervisors to attend training sessions on how to attack unions; and 79 percent have supervisors deliver anti-union messages to workers they oversee.
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I went through this in 1975 with Heileman Brewing, in Newport Ky. My rights were violated, and being in a right-to -work state, with no resources, nothing could be done about it. Thank God, my partner (fired with me) and I, found good union jobs, in the next couple of years. Had the E.F.C.A. existed at that time, our petitioning group would have gone into the existing union on site, without any problems.
The corporate “spin machine” and all of their money is attempting to turn the EFCA as a law taken away employees rights by saying the secret ballot vote would be taken away and intimidation would be a factor. However the truth and facts are American workers cannot have a free and fair election, management are the very ones who threaten and intimidate workers by doing what they did to these two workers. This employer accomplished what he wanted to do by keeping these two Proud Americans out of work for six years, thus scaring the heck out of the rest of the workers!
The same thing is going on now at George Weston’s Interbake Baking in Front Royal Virginia. The company is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the decision of the NLRB to reinstate seven workers there with full back pay and to count their votes in their fight to organize their bakery. This fight has been going on for over a year.Their votes are needed to win the election at their bakery to organize. This is why the company is fighting the NLRB’s decision. The Employee’s Free Choice Act is one law that is needed to give all Americans the right to organize. The Repubicans have set the right’s of American workers back more than fifty years. Now is the workers time to get these rights back.