Democratizing the Demand for Workers' Rights: Toward a Re-framing of Labor's Argument: Responses
Friedman, Sheldon
AS JOSEPH MCCARTIN correctly notes, the year 2003 marked the launch of the most significant legislative campaign in a quarter century to protect the fundamental human right of America's workers...
...It is ironic that the socalled libertarians of the National Right to Work Committee advocate the use of state power to force workers who want to form a union into the meat grinder of a governmentrun NLRB election process, rather than allowing them to organize together freely of their own accord...
...Bronfenbrenner found that the frequency of several key employer tactics intended to suppress formation of unions—captive audience meetings, anti-union leaflets, anti-union letters sent by employers to employees' homes, and employer threats that the workplace would move or close if the employees voted to form a union—all increased dramatically between the mid 1980s and the late 1990s...
...The vehicle for this campaign is the Employee Free Choice Act, which, in the 108th Congress, attracted 208 House co-sponsors and 37 in the Senate by late fall of 2004...
...The Employee Free Choice Act is urgently needed because the freedom of America's workers to form unions is in tatters, particularly in the private sector...
...Employer misconduct has skyrocketed: in the last three years an average of 23,000 workers per year were illegally disciplined or fired for exercising their right to freedom of association in the workplace, up from 6,000 in 1969 and fewer than 1,000 per year in the 1950s...
...According to David Brody, a noted authority on union organizing, "The representation election looks democratic, but the reality is, it's a platform for coercion...
...The Employee Free Choice Act would stiffen penalties for illegal employer conduct...
...Given the importance of the fight to protect workers' freedom to form unions, McCartin is absolutely right that how labor and its allies make the case for it matters tremendously...
...How many more workers would form unions if they were free to do so...
...First Contract Arbitration: Even after workers jump through all the hoops under current law and succeed in forming a union, employers refuse to agree to initial collective bargaining contracts nearly half the time...
...According to a Peter Hart poll taken for the AFL-CIO, 47 percent of non-union workers want a union in their workplace...
...Most people associate elections with democracy, without realizing that the National Labor Relations Board election process bears no resemblance to political elections and has become a parody of democracy...
...AS JOSEPH MCCARTIN correctly notes, the year 2003 marked the launch of the most significant legislative campaign in a quarter century to protect the fundamental human right of America's workers to form unions and bargain collectively, without employer interference...
...His primary assignment is the Voice@Work Campaign, the Federation's program to protect the freedom of America's workers to form unions and bargain collectively without employer interference...
...Family-supporting wages, access to health care, and retirement income security hang in the balance—for all workers, not just for union members...
...In the wake of the effective disappearance of legal protection for workers' freedom to form unions, the last thirty years have been a time of stagnation of real wages—despite a two-thirds increase in productivity— and an increase of inequality in the distribution of income and wealth to levels not seen since the days of the robber barons...
...The noxious consequences of failing to protect the freedom to form unions extend far beyond the workplace...
...Remedies: Under current law, penalties for illegal employer conduct are so negligible that employers routinely violate workers' rights...
...Who, even in labor, said that it was...
...The act would address this problem by giving both parties access to mediation and, if necessary, binding arbitration in order to reach an initial collective bargaining agreement on a timely basis...
...Democratic majority verification is the most controversial of these provisions and the most difficult to explain to the public...
...He is also right that workplace democracy is and should be an important part of the case—and of making the case...
...McCartin is correct that protecting workers' freedom to form unions is not a sufficient condition for achieving a just and democratic society...
...The freedom not to associate is already protected extraordinarily well in the United States...
...According to Richard Freeman and Joel Rogers, forty-two million non-union workers want a union...
...Society's safety net is weaker, political participation suffers, and democracy itself is threatened...
...The reality on the ground is, as Roy Adams puts it, an "industrial relations holocaust" in which America's workers' fundamental human rights to form unions and bargain collectively are massively suppressed every day...
...the Employee Free Choice Act's provisions that protect the positive right to associate would not infringe on the negative right...
...But it is unquestionably a necessary condition, as readers of Dissent—of all people—should and must know...
...In most cases the failure to reach agreement results from employer delaying tactics and unwillingness to bargain in good faith...
...Absent the stronger labor movement that would exist if workers were truly free to form unions, there is no other private institution capable of restraining unbridled, amoral, anti-social corporate power...
...Workers who are aggrieved by this denial of rights have virtually no legal protection...
...SHELDON FRIEDMAN iS an economist in the AFLCIO Department of Public Policy...
...Research by Kate Bronfenbrenner, John Logan, and others underscores the intensity of employer campaigns to persuade or coerce workers to vote against forming a union...
...But McCartin cedes too much ground to the National Right to Work Committee and other enemies of workers' rights with his claim that a rights-based argument plays into the hands of "libertarian" defenders of freedom not to associate...
...In fact, these right-wingers care nothing about workers or their rights...
...According to Richard Freeman, "the National Labor Relations Act .. . has institutionalized a process that effectively gives management near veto power over whether or not workers become organized...
...What's at stake...
...If this argument is not being used effectively, it should be...
...The Employee Free Choice Act's three main provisions are democratic majority yeri6 8 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 WORKERS' RIGHTS fication, first contract arbitration, and more effective remedies when employers violate the law: • Democratic Majority Verification (also known as "card check"): People can join most organizations, whether they are religious denominations, book clubs, or amateur sports teams, simply by signing up...
...Without strong protection of their freedom to form unions, workers can forget about sustained economic progress and security, democracy in the workplace, or justice on the job...
...The act provides for the certification of a union when a majority of the employees at a workplace have signed written authorizations stating they wish to be represented by a union...
...No one knows, but the number is huge...
...DISSENT / Winter 2005 n 69...
Vol. 52 • January 2005 • No. 1
