Washington Post Op-Ed: Need for Employee Free Choice Grows as Workers’ Rights Decline
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.”
Workers Face Increasing Abuse in Attempts to Form Unions
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Today on Capitol Hill, labor law experts and a California worker exposed the ugly truth about corporate abuses of workers trying to exercise their freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life.
At the center of the discussion: Kate Bronfenbrenner’s new report, “No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing,” released by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the American Rights at Work Education Fund. The report shows that the problems the Employee Free Choice Act would address are getting worse.
Bronfenbrenner has studied these issues for decades as the director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial Relations. This is her fourth survey over 20 years, enabling her to put into historical perspective the obstacles workers face today.
At the Capitol Hill briefing, Bronfenbrenner said weak laws and a hostile environment have emboldened corporations, over the past decade, to step up their abuses against workers trying to form unions.
The research provides a detailed portrait of a system that has failed private-sector workers. Workers have come to understand what our data confirms: Employers are using an arsenal of legal and illegal tactic to interfere with workers trying to organize, and they are doing it with impunity.
Corporate Anti-Worker Tactics on the Rise
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A landmark study examining workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain shows that the problems the Employee Free Choice Act would address are getting worse.
“No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing,” authored by Kate Bronfenbrenner, the director of Labor Education Research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial Relations, documents a disturbing increase in corporate tactics to interfere with, block and delay workers’ attempts to form unions. Workers who want to form a union all too frequently are subject to harassment, mandatory meetings, threats and even illegal firings.
The study, released by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the American Rights at Work Education Fund, updates earlier studies by Bronfenbrenner. “No Holds Barred” examines more than 1,000 union representation campaigns over four years and finds that “intense and aggressive” tactics to block workers’ freedom to form unions are becoming more commonplace.
Bronfenbrenner: Employee Free Choice Is Key for Women
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Cornell University’s Kate Bronfenbrenner, a leading scholars in labor studies, discusses the Employee Free Choice Act and the future of the union movement in the latest issue of The American Prospect.
In a great interview, Bronfenbrenner, whose research has detailed the pattern of corporate interference and intimidation that prevents workers from freely choosing a union, says the Employee Free Choice Act is critical to giving workers bargaining power and restoring balance in an economy that has been undermined by corporate greed. Says Bronfenbrenner:
The public has seen that deregulation and letting employers do whatever they want has hurt a lot of people. Corporate capital does not work in the interest of the public good. Letting them act without any restraint puts us where we are today. The National Labor Relations Act as it is now enforced is a poor piece of legislation. The Employee Free Choice Act is nothing more than making the law do what it was supposed to have been doing all along.
America’s Real Patriot Act: The Employee Free Choice Act
When America’s founders crafted the Constitution, they knew more was needed to ensure the survival of democracy. So they created the Bill of Rights. They made sure that at the top of the list, the First Amendment included such rights as the freedom of assembly. That is, the freedom of all of us to gather together in groups of our choosing. Like, say, unions.
Some opponents of workers’ freedom to form unions seem to have forgotten that forming groups outside government—and corporate—purview is critical to a free nation. In Big Brother-speak, these corporate hacks are attacking the proposed Employee Free Choice Act—which would enable more employees and workers to have the freedom to form unions—as unconstitutional.
Here’s what’s really outrageous:
- Managers following employees and workers to the bathroom and around the workplace to harass them for seeking to form a union.
- Workers so intimidated by employers, they become scared of voting in a ballot for a union so they vote against the union or don’t vote at all, fearing that if they do, they’ll lose their job.
