Employee Free Choice: Snippets from Op-Eds Around the Nation

by Seth Michaels, Jun 12, 2009

Here are a few highlights from newspapers around the country that make the case for why we need the Employee Free Choice Act. 

In Maine, Bill Murphy, director of the University of Maine’s Labor Education Program, writes a great op-ed in the Bangor Daily News explaining how our current labor laws are broken and how the Employee Free Choice Act can fix the system for workers: 

The central legal principle of the National Labor Relations Act, or NLRA, is to provide workers in the private sector with the democratic right to organize unions in the workplace…. However, for large numbers of workers, the rights established under this law no longer exist, because of willful employer violations and a lack of adequate statutory enforcement. 

For all too many workers, the right to obtain justice on the job through unionization has been either denied or delayed. Enactment of the Employee Free Choice Act will enable workers and their organizations to remedy this injustice. 

Maine AFL-CIO President Ed Goreham takes to the pages of the Morning Sentinel to cut through the corporate anti-worker spin and explain that both workers and businesses will benefit from the Employee Free Choice Act: 

Corporate CEOs are playing politics, while unions and employers at hundreds of successful businesses are working together to form constructive relationships. Unions and businesses have worked together to train workers in new skills, preparing them for the kinds of jobs that will get this economy running again. Union workforces are more stable, with less turnover and fewer retraining costs. 

In Colorado, more than 200 small business owners have offered their support to the Employee Free Choice Act. Terri Monley, co-owner of a moving company in Denver, says workers with good wages, benefits and economic security are what keep small business alive: 

A way to really get this economy going again is to start building up the middle class by having people make decent wages. 

In communities where there are large numbers of people working at larger enterprises who are unionized, the small businesses do much better. 

Writing in the Texarkana Community Journal, the AFL-CIO’s Stewart Acuff explains how the decline of workers’ bargaining power contributed to our economic crisis and how the Employee Free Choice Act will help bring about a sustainable recovery: 

The most effective and real economic stimulus to get us out of our economic morass is to restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain collectively. Given the real freedom to form unions and bargain collectively, workers will bargain for a fairer share of the wealth we create and a return on our productivity increases. We will bargain for a larger, stronger middle class. We will bargain for an exit ramp from poverty. We will bargain for spending and buying power to generate consumer demand. We will bargain for an economy that works for all. 

Acuff urges Arkansas Sens. Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor to support a fairer, stronger economy by voting for the Employee Free Choice Act.

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