Public Employee Press

The World of Work
The fight for the American Dream

The Employee Free Choice Act would stop employer intimidation of union organizing and raise the living standards of millions of working families. — Part 1

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Once upon a time, working people were rewarded for their labors.

During the 1950s and ’60s, wages moved roughly in sync with rising productivity.

But the labor-capital accord that characterized the Cold War era has steadily unraveled since the early 1970s. As a result, economic inequality has exploded and today we live amid vast differences in wealth and income.

The populist rage against the multimillion-dollar pay of the financial titans whose greed helped produce the current economic crisis reflects deep-seated resentment among ordinary Americans who are struggling to pay their bills. And they have good reason to be outraged.

Between 2000 and 2006, American workers were responsible for helping the economy grow by 18 percent.

Their reward? Over those years, the real income of the median working family, adjusted for inflation, fell by almost 7 percent — a total of $2,000 — while the top 10 percent of households gained 32 percent, and the top 0.1 percent raked in a 425 percent increase.

As the labor movement grew smaller and weaker during this period, the dream that hard work would be rewarded by steady constant gains and the hope that children would do better than their parents were shattered. The new economic nightmare that millions of working people face is the backdrop to the debate over organized labor’s top legislative priority, the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make organizing new members much easier.

Justice

At its heart, the fight for the new law is a fight to restore the American Dream. The revival of organized labor, which now represents less than 8 percent of the workers in the private sector, would lead to greater economic, political and social justice.

“It is no accident that the prosperity and consumer boom of the 1950s — a period of unprecedented middle-class expansion, broad business growth, increased home ownership, rising consumer spending, and the shared expectation that college education was within the reach of everyone and that the lives of our children would be better than our own — followed the greatest sustained expansion of unionization in American history,” Rutgers University Professor Paula B. Voos told the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in March.

Economists like Voos argue that unions encourage productivity by reducing turnover and leading employers to innovate, and that when unions are strong, the bargaining power of unions ensures that workers receive their fair share of the productivity gains.

Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says the Employee Free Choice Act is crucial for the more than 27 million workers in the retail, hotel and restaurant sectors, where employers like Wal-Mart are virulently anti-union because their profit margins depend on keeping wages low.

“The future of the American economy and our standard of living requires real wages to go up in this large sector,” Lichtenstein told PEP.

Women in particular — who make up 60 percent of the country’s 30 million low-paid service-sector workers, who earn less than $10 an hour with few or no benefits — stand to gain a lot from unionization.

In the service sector, unions raise women’s wages by an average of 11 percent, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Unionized women are 19 percent more likely to have employer-provided health care and 25 percent more likely to have a pension than their counterparts who lack representation.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its conservative allies are pouring millions of dollars into a nationwide campaign to scuttle the legislation. A central argument of opponents is that the Employee Free Choice Act would undercut the right of workers to vote whether to be represented by a union.

In fact, the Employee Free Choice Act would preserve the right of employees to have representation elections overseen by the National Labor Relations Board. But it would also allow workers to have a union if a majority of employees simply sign union representation cards.

Stop employer intimidation

By giving workers that right, the Employee Free Choice Act would put a stop to the campaigns of interference and intimidation that employees typically conduct during drawn-out election periods to prevent unionizing.

A billion-dollar industry exists to help employers defeat organizing campaigns. Nationwide, employers fire as many as one in five union organizers. An estimated 90 percent of employers require workers to attend anti-union meetings, and 50 percent threaten to close if workers vote in a union.

“The labor laws are so skewed toward the employers today that U.S. workers effectively don’t have the right to organize today,” said Jim Schmitz, director of organizing at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, DC 37’s parent union.

The Employee Free Choice Act would significantly increase the penalty for employers guilty of firing union organizers or violating workers’ rights during organizing drives. It would also impose mediation and binding arbitration if negotiations for a first contract drag on for 120 days.

Public employee unions generally don’t face the rabid anti-unionism that hits workers in the private sector. But, notes Schmitz, the Employee Free Choice Act would make it easier to organize former public employees and others in jobs that are privatized.

And by increasing the growth and strength of the labor movement, the act would give added power to the minority-liberal-labor coalition that elected President Barack Obama and supports progressive legislation.

“If we want to live in a country where ordinary workers can buy a home and send their kids to college and have a dignified retirement, we need the Employee Free Choice Act more than ever,” Schmitz said.