Human Rights Day: Freedom to Form Unions Being Denied

Dec. 10 is International Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Although much progress has been made to ensure human rights in the past 61 years, Sheldon Friedman, research coordinator for the AFL-CIO’s Voice@Work campaign, reminds us that much more remains to be done, especially to protect workers’ freedom to form unions.

On International Human Rights Day, there is much unfinished business before we fulfill the promise of universal rights for all people. In the United States, especially, the freedom of workers to join unions and bargain collectively for a better life is not being protected. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognized these basic workplace freedoms as basic human rights and necessary for human dignity, economic stability and social justice.

In a statement, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) said it well: 

Fundamental workers’ rights set out the rules for democracy and participation at the workplace and underpin human rights and democracy rights in society as a whole. They must be protected and recognized as the fundamental human rights that they are.

It is harder for workers in the United States to join a union and gain a better life with a union contract than in any other industrialized democracy. Employers in the United States routinely and illegally fire and threaten workers who want collective bargaining. They subject union supporters to surveillance, coercive interrogation and heavy-handed propaganda, often coordinated by professional union-busters. If these and other strong-arm tactics aren’t enough, the law allows employers to create and take advantage of interminable delays. 

Even when workers jump through all the hoops and vote for a union, more than 40 percent of the time they are unable to get a first contract.

Human Rights Watch has called attention to the glaring deficiencies of U.S. labor law. Because the laws don’t protect workers’ rights, the number of workers able to gain collective bargaining has been reduced to a trickle, even though numerous polls show millions of nonunion workers want a union in their workplace.

America’s workers and the nation are paying a high price for the failure to uphold workers’ freedoms: wages are lower, health care and pensions are in crisis and the workers are capable of producing more but unable to afford what they make.

Fortunately, there is a solution at hand: the Employee Free Choice Act. If enacted, the Employee Free Choice Act would be an important step toward protecting the fundamental human right of America’s workers to collective bargaining. On this International Human Rights Day, we rededicate ourselves to the fight to pass this vital bill, and we urge the nation’s political leaders to do the same.

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