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Religious, Civil Rights, Environmental Groups Support Employee Free Choice
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Today’s introduction of the Employee Free Choice Act in the U.S. House and Senate was a long-awaited day for working families and those concerned about the freedom to form unions.
The bill has widespread support, including a broad coalition of allies from the civil rights, religious, environmental and human-rights community.
Here’s what some of these groups had to say about the Employee Free Choice Act.
Christine L. Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project:
Workers have a fundamental right to join together into unions, but any semblance of a free and fair process for exercising that right is destroyed by ruthless employer opposition to organizing and a legal framework favoring employers every step of the way. By insisting that workers alone get to decide whether to form a union and the process for making that choice, the Employee Free Choice Act will renew workplace democracy, improve jobs, strengthen the economy and rebuild America’s middle class.
The green economy holds great promise to build the American middle class. One way to ensure that it benefits the many, rather than the few, is by passing the Employee Free Choice Act.
National Partnership for Women & and Families:
With our nation’s work/family policies badly out of sync with the realities of this era, and the economy taking a terrible toll on families, the National Partnership for Women & Families strongly supports the Employee Free Choice Act because it has the potential to dramatically improve working conditions of millions of women and men around the country. Union participation improves wages, health coverage, pensions and other benefits that hard-working Americans need to hold jobs and care for their families and their health.
Center for American Progress Action Fund:
The Employee Free Choice Act holds the promise of restoring workplace democracy for workers attempting to organize, boosting unionization rates and improving the economic standing and workplace conditions for millions of American workers.
The Employee Free Choice Act supports important American values around workers’ rights to association. It provides workers a free and fair choice about how to form a union, helps workers secure their first contract in a reasonable amount of time and toughens penalties against employers that violate the law. This is a sound and measured approach to restoring workers’ rights—and to rebuilding and renewing our nation’s economy.
Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change:
Our economy can only prosper when it works for everyone. Especially in difficult times, American communities have a history of meeting challenges by coming together. The rise of corporate greed and irresponsibility has created the worst economic crisis in this nation since the great depression. It’s time that we empower American families and working people to hold corporations accountable. Through unions, workers come together to balance their voices with the power of companies, and to build an economy that works for all of us.
The National Consumers League is proud to join with our labor friends and other national consumer groups in supporting the Employee Free Choice Act. Consumer groups understand that the fair wages, benefits, and protections that union workers receive allow them to have a decent standard of living and be better informed consumers. That is good for America, and that is why NCL supports the Employee Free Choice Act.
The Employee Free Choice Act is the cornerstone of an economy that serves working families. The right to organize is foundational to Catholic social teaching. Catholics United stands with working families and supports the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.
The Employee Free Choice Act is an issue not only for workers but also for their communities. When workers are fired for organizing on the job, the effects ripple through their families, their churches and their neighborhoods. When workers can choose a union through a fair process, it creates a stable and prosperous community. That’s why Jobs with Justice supports the Employee Free Choice Act as a necessary part of a broad economic recovery that benefits working men and women.
Gabriela Lemus, executive director of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement:
Latino workers will strongly benefit from the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. It will assist them in their efforts to organize at the workplace, which in turn will ensure better wages, health benefits and the opportunity for a secure retirement. The introduction and ultimate passage of this legislation will help move workers into the middle class and thus help reinvigorate the economy.
Paula Brantner, executive director of Workplace Fairness:
The Employee Free Choice Act is the best stimulus package we have. Workers with good jobs, benefits and job security are able to confidently spend their earnings and help lift our economy out of this recession.
Kim Bobo, executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice:
As people of faith, we must stand with workers in their struggles and ensure that they are protected and can provide for themselves and their families. One of the most effective means to ensure workers’ protection is for them to join a union. Union representation is a vehicle to reduce poverty for workers in low-wage jobs, provide health care and pension benefits for families, and provide workers a role in workplace decisions. Furthermore, our religious traditions address the need for freedom in the workplace, basic human dignity and a voice at work. Our traditions affirm the right of workers to freely organize themselves: all workers have the right to form a union without fear or harassment. The Employee Free Choice Act will restore workers’ freedom to form and join unions.
Robert Borosage, co-director of Campaign for America’s Future:
The Employee Free Choice Act will help restore the right of workers to organize in this country. Over the last decades, that basic right has been shredded, as companies waged open warfare on union organizing, and administrations often failed to enforce the laws protecting that right.
But the Employee Free Choice Act isn’t just about worker rights. It’s about whether we can return to an economy with a broad middle class….It will be a critical building block of the new economy that we must construct from the ashes of the old.
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1 Comment
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PLEASE WRITE TO YOUR SENATORS AND CONGRESSMEN!!!
Sent: 3/10/2009 7:38:39 PM
Senator Saxby Chambliss
U.S. Senate
416 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-0001
I am writing to voice my support for the Employee Free Choice
Act.
The economic tailspin has put the middle class, our country’s
backbone, in peril. Rising health care costs, home foreclosures,
stagnant wages and shrinking retirement plans are all taking a
huge toll.
To revive the economy and rebuild the middle class in the long
term, we need to empower workers and enable them to bargain for better wages and benefits.
The Employee Free Choice Act will do just that–allowing workers
to form a union when a majority of them want one. It also will
stiffen penalties against employers who harass, intimidate and
fire workers for supporting a union.
The Employee Free Choice Act is a critical piece of our economic
recovery. I hope you will represent the best interests of
workers in your district by supporting it.
Sincerely,
XXXXX XXXXXXX
________________________________
Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 12:11 PM
Dear Mr. XXXXXXX:
Thank you for contacting me regarding S. 1041, the “Employee Free Choice Act.” I appreciate hearing from you.
S. 1041 was introduced in the Senate on March 29, 2007, referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and was not acted upon before the 110th Congress adjourned. If enacted, this legislation would have required the National Labor Relations Board to certify a bargaining representative without direct election. The decision is authorized if a majority of the union employees have selected a representative and there is no other individual or organization recognized on the behalf of the employees.
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. S. 1041 would have made 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. Therefore, on June 26, 2007, I voted against a procedural motion to cut off debate on the Employee Free Choice Act and advance the legislation towards a final vote. The motion, which required 60 votes in order to pass, failed by a vote of 51-48.
At this time, similar legislation has not been introduced. During the 111th Congress, I will continue to protect the rights of workers by opposing the Employee Free Choice Act if it comes before the Senate.
____________________________________
Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 11:39 PM
Senator Saxby Chambliss
U.S. Senate
416 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-0001
Dear Senator Chambliss,
Thank you for responding so quickly to the email I sent you, yesterday. I appreciate your thoughtful consideration relating to this issue. I noticed the attached ad ran in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to share it with you in case you haven’t already read it.
The statement signed by 39 of America’s top economists, including two Nobel Prize winners, points to the failure of U.S. labor laws to protect employees’ freedom to form a union and bargain as a major factor in our economic crisis. These economists, representing respected universities and policy institutions from across the nation, point to the corporate-dominated system for forming unions—and the coercion and anti-union campaigning by management—as the causes for declining wages and a gravely weakened economy.
Although current headlines are dominated by the crises in the stock market and the financial sector, working families have been struggling for years under the weight of an unbalanced economy. These economists say that restoring bargaining power and ensuring working people have a voice in their workplace, and in their health care, pensions and wages, is critical to rebuilding our economy. I tend to agree.
After carefully reading your response, you must be unaware that the Employee Free Choice Act was introduced in the Senate, yesterday, with 40 co-sponsors. (There were 223 cosponsors on the House side.) Moreover; there seems to be additional disconnects between the language contained within the Bill and the statements contained within your correspondence.
Currently, there are two (2) ways that workers can form a Union, and that WILL NOT CHANGE after the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. In case you have not had an opportunity to read the Bill, the Employee Free Choice Act WILL NOT eliminate the secret ballot. Under current provisions of the National Labor Relations Act, workers can form a Union through a majority sign-up process, OR they can form a Union by a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)-sponsored secret ballot election. (Two-2, repeat; two different ways) Today, EMPLOYERS decide which of these two ways workers can form their Union, regardless of the WORKERS(?) preference. The Employee Free Choice Act will provide WORKERS the choice to decide which of these two ways they want to utilize in forming their Union. Please resist any temptation to bear false witness against this Bill. Even if you speak against it, speak truthfully. The argument of secret ballot destruction has been thoroughly debunked. Such demonizing and intimidating tactics directed toward this Bill, by you and many of your colleagues, provides the American public perfect insight as to the type of employer demonizing and intimidating tactics suffered by workers when actually trying to form a Union via the current process of secret ballot.
As I trust you are already aware, when blank cards are requested by workers from an existing Union to sign so as to begin the secret ballot election process; those employees already make public, to the extent of the union officials charged with collecting them and possibly at some point presentation to the employer, their decision to sign such cards, in order to reach the 30% threshold required by the NLRB to call for and supervise an election, in the first place. In practice, the results of signing such cards are not presented to the employer unless 50-60% of the employees has signed them so as to help ensure those workers will prevail in the outcome. The privacy of the workers’ decisions is protected by the union officials with tremendous secrecy; for fear of employer reprisal, even though such reprisals are illegal. How would the inclusion of additional cards, indicating a preference for a secret ballot, infringe upon the already strictly guarded privacy of the workers? Therefore; any reasonable person would likely surmise the major premise of your privacy and democratic points of argument do not contain one shred of merit when applied to a real world scenario.
The majority sign-up process is a tried, true, common, and effective procedure already used by thousands of workers and many employers. Workers at businesses like Kaiser Permanente, AT&T and Harley-Davidson all use majority sign-up, just to name a few. If the Employee Free Choice Act did away with the secret ballot, as you have asserted; how do you explain how so many workers across America have joined Unions over the course of many decades without invoking the secret ballot procedure that you claim to be endangered? Answer: Their EMPLOYERS decided for them. The time has come for the EMPLOYEES to gain the freedom to choose for themselves; hence, this Bill is aptly named the EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT.
At a time of deepening recession and the loss of homes and health care, wouldn’t our Nation’s legislative and legal resources be more wisely spent trying to solve the budget crisis and making sure our schools and fire stations stay open; rather than engaging in political posturing? I IMPLORE YOU TO SHIFT FROM YOUR FORMER POSITION AND SUPPORT THE PASSAGE OF THE EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT. If you search your heart for the will of the people, rather than for the will of Corporate special interests; I am confident you will see your way clear to vote right on this important piece of legislation. A vote any other way would be wrong for the greater good of the public interest.
Sincerely,
XXXXX XXXXXXX