Video: Here’s How Labor Law Is Failing Workers

by Seth Michaels, May 5, 2009

As the debate over the Employee Free Choice Act heats up, the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF) is helping clarify the issues involved with a new video, “How Not to Form a Union.” The animated clip gives a real-world explanation of how the process for forming a union works and how badly the deck is stacked against workers who want the chance to bargain for a better life.

The video elaborates on some of the serious flaws in the process that the Employee Free Choice Act would rectify:

• Workers are required to gather signatures to begin the process, but after that, management is in charge of deciding how to proceed, even when a majority of employees want a union.
• Management controls the ballot election process, and workers are subject to abuses at the hands of the people who control their pay and their schedules.

• Penalties for firing workers who seek a union are so minimal many corporations make it standard practice—”the price of doing business.”
• The ability of corporations to control the process and force workers to attend mandatory meetings means that the election isn’t as fair as the phrase “secret ballot” suggests.
• Even after workers win and get their union certified, there’s no guarantee corporations will negotiate a fair first contract. In far too many cases, management stalls and delays to prevent a contract settlement.

As the video concludes:

Americans have suffered long enough under labor laws that jeopardize our democratic rights. We need real labor law reform that sets up a fair selection process, encourages first contract negotiations and penalizes lawbreakers.

The video may be a cartoon, but the events it shows are all-too real. Hard-working people who are supporting families are the victims of unchecked corporate power deployed against workers who want to form unions. Workers like Kelly Beringer, Billy Mason and Dianne Heeley, all of whom have experienced harassment and intimidation by their bosses when they sought to form a union. Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act is an issue of basic fairness, of the freedom to bargain for a better life, and the broken system needs to be changed.

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