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Professional Workers, Public Would Benefit from Employee Free Choice
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The AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees (DPE) has released a fact sheet that explains why unions matter to professional and technical workers and the public—and why, in turn, we need the Employee Free Choice Act to protect workers’ freedom to choose a union and bargain.
From the DPE report:
Professionals are joining unions to preserve workplace integrity and respect, and create safe, professional, and rewarding work environments for themselves and their colleagues. The desire to do their jobs well attracts many professional employees to union representation.
Having a union gives employees in a wide variety of professions—from nursing to pilots and engineers—the tools they need to not only improve their own working conditions but also to improve the critical services they provide to the public. As the DPE report notes:
Unions allow professional employees to do their jobs to the best of their training, education and abilities through vital workplace protections. Rationalization of personnel procedures and protection against arbitrary dismissal afford professional employees the ability to speak up when they see a threat to professional integrity.
Through training programs and a strong stake in the quality of work they’re providing, professional employees’ ability to form unions has powerful benefits for the people they serve.
The DPE’s fact sheet says the Employee Free Choice Act is critical to ensure that professional employees can freely exercise their basic freedom to form a union and bargain. The legislation will make sure employees, not their bosses, can make the choice about which method to use to form a union—either a National Labor Relations Board election or majority sign-up. It will remove obstacles that frequently are thrown in the way of workers who want to form unions by creating real penalties for coercive management tactics, including the illegal firings that mar one out of every four union campaigns. And, by guaranteeing a first contract, the bill will prevent the routine management tactics of delay and refusal to negotiate.
Giving professionals the choice about how to form a union is critical to fairer workplaces, better service to the public and a stronger economy. It’s time to pass this critical bill.
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1 Comment
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Last April the FOX Television affiliate WFXT in Dedham MA voted to join IBEW local 1228. The vote was 70 to 30 in favor of Union. There were many reasons for the Union drive but the top factors included inequities in pay within the bargaining unit itself and significant disparities in their wages compared to the other Unionized competing television stations in the Boston market, for doing the exact same work. The WFXT 10PM news dominates the market ratings sometimes beating competing network programming.
Nearly a year has passed at the bargaining table. The members, realizing the futility of wage increases in the current economy recently proposed to simply repair the internal inequities now and freeze wages until 2010.
FOX demanded that the WFXT bargaining committee submit its company contract proposal to the bargaining unit by May 1 and walked away from the table calling it a “final” offer. Many important issues remain unresolved. Most of the employee benefits the bargaining unit has now, have been stripped down or eliminated in this proposed contract. On the day the company made this demand and left the table, FOX added a new proposal to reduce all bargaining unit wages by 5% as of July 1, 2009 in what the company termed a GWD or General Wage Decrease.
This is how corporate America responds to Unionization.
There can be no doubt the EFCA bill is of vital importance to the American worker. Corporate America is determined to end Unions in this country by doing whatever it takes to prevent them from starting and weakening existing unions. Workers and families are nothing more than numbers and statistics to be used and disposed of to adjust margins and bottom lines.
We must get this bill passed.