Washington Post Op-Ed: Need for Employee Free Choice Grows as Workers’ Rights Decline

by Seth Michaels, Jun 3, 2009

All around the country, workers who try to form a union are routinely faced with interference and intimidation by managers who want to control the process and prevent workers from exercising their freedom to bargain. That’s why we need the Employee Free Choice Act—and few people know more about our broken system than Kate Bronfenbrenner.

Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, has completed a new study on the obstacles workers face when trying to form unions. 

In a great op-ed in today’s Washington Post, “A War Against Organizing,” Bronfenbrenner reports on her findings and explains what they mean for workers’ basic freedoms. She writes: ”The bottom line is that there has been a steady decline of workers’ rights in the past several decades.”

For the vast majority of workers who want to join unions today, the right to organize and bargain collectively—free from coercion, intimidation and retaliation—is at best a promise indefinitely deferred. In election campaigns overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, it is now standard practice for companies to subject workers to threats, interrogation, harassment, surveillance and retaliation for union activity. 

It’s a truly serious situation that undermines both basic fairness and the economy. Bronfenbrenner says the nation needs a new law to ensure that workers get a fair shot to choose a union. 

Unless Congress passes serious labor law reform with real penalties, only a small fraction of the workers who seek union representation will succeed. If recent trends continue, there will no longer be a functioning legal mechanism to effectively protect the right of private-sector workers to organize and collectively bargain. 

Read the whole op-ed here. To read Bronfenbrenner’s new study, “No Holds Barred,” click here.

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