Midlands Voices: Employee Free Choice Act would help prevent abuses

The writer, of Bellevue, is a faculty member with the William Brennan Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The opinions in this essay are his own and not an official stance by the university.

There is a great deal of misinformation about the impact the Employee Free Choice Act would have on the collective bargaining relationship between employers and employees.

When the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935, it became the accepted practice for unions to gain bargaining rights for workers by soliciting members to sign cards indicating the desire to have a union represent them.

When the unions secured 30 percent of the potential members, they could petition the employer to bargain with the union or request a secret ballot election. The employer could delay bargaining with the union by saying, “I doubt that you have a majority of my workers.”

The union or employer would then request that the National Labor Relations Board schedule a secret ballot election. In the past, that method worked. Unions won collective bargaining rights and negotiated collective bargaining contracts that gave workers a fair share of the wealth they created by their labor.

There is an illustrative analysis from Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. She is a researcher who has closely examined the NLRB organizing process for more than 20 years.

She has found “that patterns of employer behavior appear deeply carved into our legal framework and employment practices.” “They have become so deeply ingrained,” she writes, “that we as a society have begun to accept illegal behavior as the norm, and for a long time now many workers have become resigned to the fact that no branch of government was going to listen to their pleas that the system was not just broken but that it was operating in direct violation of the law.”

Bronfenbrenner found that the overwhelming majority of employers are willing to use a variety of legal and illegal tactics to interfere with the rights of workers to organize themselves into unions and that they do so with near impunity.

The following lists of infractions of the law were found by Bronfenbrenner. They are typical in spite of the fact that most of them are unfair labor practices as defined by Section 8 (a) of the National Labor Relations Act:

— Fifty-seven percent of employers threaten to shut down all or part of their facilities.

— One-third of employers fire workers for union activity during NLRB certification elections.

— Forty-seven percent threaten to cut wages or benefits.

— Twenty-eight percent attempt to infiltrate the organizing benefits.

— Fourteen percent use surveillance.

— Twenty-two percent offer bribes and special favors.

— Eighty-nine percent of employers require their workers to attend captive-audience meetings during work time.

— Seventy-seven percent had supervisors regularly talk to workers one on one about the union campaign, with a focus on threats of plant closings, wages and benefit cuts, and job loss.

— More than 60 percent use one-on-one meetings to interrogate and harass workers about their support for the union.

The infractions listed above take place during the time when the workers are waiting for a scheduled secret ballot election. The remedy for this list of infractions is merely a cease-and-desist order. There are no real penalties for violating the right of workers to organize themselves into unions.

Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations on Dec. 10, 1948, speaks to the rights of workers to or- ganize unions to act in their interests. The text of Article 23 follows:

Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

Everyone, without any discrimination has the right to equal pay for equal work.

Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interest.

The years following World War II were a period of union growth that led to an increase in the standard of living for the middle class and made the American economy the greatest in the world. Readers interested in more information on this topic should Google, “No Holds Barred by Kate.”

The Employee Free Choice Act would re-establish an element of fairness to the procedure used to gain bargaining rights for workers. It should be passed.

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