Building Support for the EFCA

Last fall, conservatives partnered with business to spend $100 million in Senate elections "zeroing in on the labor-backed legislation that easily passed the House last year but was blocked in the Senate because its allies couldn't get the 60 votes needed for cloture." While Democrats won most of the targeted races (only Maine's Susan Collins survived from the original list), their efforts sent a shiver down the Senate's spine.

The Employee Free Choice Act remains sidelined today. During the recent District work period, unions all over the country kicked off a new effort to bring EFCA back to the forefront. The press conference in these videos was held in Chicago, a preshow, as it were, for the big event at Plumbers Hall.

The Chicago Federation of Labor says:

The bill [EFCA] would stimulate economic recovery by giving workers a chance to join the middle class through union membership. Union members on average earn 30 percent higher wages than their non-union counterparts, are 59 percent more likely to have employee-provided health coverage and four times more like[ly] to have pensions.

The fact that conservatives and business dumped $100 million to prevent this legislation from getting out of the Senate only serves to underscore the ongoing attempts to prevent workers from organizing themselves to gain a little power in their relationships with their bosses. The CFL tells us:

Workers interested in forming a union are routinely intimidated, coerced and illegally fired trying to prevent them from bargaining collectively.

Accusations of coercion are common for both sides. The Center for Union Facts, an anti-Union group, writes [PDF]:

Current law dictates that an employer can either choose to recognize a union
when the employer believes there is significant support from employees or call for an election to make certain that the employees’ true feelings are recognized.

Why would a business deny its employees the opportunity to conduct an anonymous, government-supervised vote? In those relatively rare instances in which an employer has agreed to card check, the employer itself has often been under union pressure—which includes threats of a negative public relations campaign intended to injure a company’s reputation until the company capitulates.

The CFL counters (in their accompanying press kit):

Under the current system, workers sign cards indicating their desire to form a union and then must wait several weeks before the NRLB election, during which time employers often wage anti-union campaigns. When workers request a union election, 91 percent of employers force employees to attend one-on-one anti-union meetings with their supervisors.

The whole point of unionization is to provide a more equitable balance of power between workers and their employers. Business accusations of coercion by the unions seem a bit strange. Anti-union advocates accuse unions of pestering workers. Union organizers accuses businesses of threatening people's jobs. If coercion is in the eye of the beholder, the balance of power here is not. Business has it; unions merely attempt to seek a balance.

The Employee Free Choice Act would level the playing field for employees and employers by strengthening penalties for companies that illegally coerce or intimidate employees in an effort to prevent them from forming a union, bringing in a neutral third party to settle a contract when a company and a newly certified union cannot agree after three months, and putting the choice of how to form a union in the hands of the workers through either majority sign-up or secret ballot election.

Our "free market" economy is not free of bias nor manipulation. Instead of trusting some mythical invisible hand to correct inequities in the marketplace, it is much better to give economic actors of all kinds the power to pursue their own selfish interests. Businesses start with that power. Employees have to fight for it. If the Bernie Madoff scandal has taught us anything, it is that even the smartest, most vigilant person in the "free market" can be fooled. An elegant theory is not a good reason to trust one's employer to do the right thing for everyone. It is much better to trust yourself, and unions have positioned themselves to help employees look out for *their* best interests. Building a balance of power in the workplace. What could be wrong with that?