Freedom to Join a Union Should Be a Right. It's Not.

From the Editors

The freedom to organize is under attack. Coercion, threats, lies and outright firing of workers goes on with near impunity because of labor laws that fail to fully protect workers’ basic rights.

In the private sector, the law guaranteeing the right to form a union is weak and is not effectively enforced by a stacked federal labor board that takes the side of unscrupulous employers, instead of the workers it’s charged to protect. The National Labor Relations Act is supposed to protect workers who want to form a union, but that 1935 law, administered by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), is a paper tiger.

In the public sector, it’s often illegal to unionize at all. Only 21 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia now have full bargaining for public workers. In recent years, Republican governors in Missouri, Indiana and Kentucky took those rights away on the day they each were sworn in.

AFSCME has a two-part strategy for dealing with these obstacles: first, to extend the right to organize and collectively bargain to all public workers, as well as “independent providers” such as family child care and home care providers; second, to organize those who are employed by private agencies but who provide public services that were often formerly delivered by public-sector employers. This strategy raises the standards of pay and benefits for those workers, thereby creating a disincentive to privatize the services in the first place.

As private-sector organizing becomes more important to AFSCME, it has also become harder because of employer opposition. In the 1970s, workers who attempted to form a union faced a 1-in-100 chance of being fired illegally, according to a recent study by John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. By 2000, they wrote, those odds “jumped sharply — to about 1 in every 53 pro-union workers.” (See the entire study athttp://www.cepr.net/.)

All told, an estimated 10,000 people a year get fired “because they want a voice at work,” says AFSCME Pres. Gerald W. McEntee. That’s why AFSCME is calling on Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill — introduced in the House of Representatives in February and passed March 1 by a vote of 241 to 185 — that will impose real penalties for employers who violate workers’ freedom to make their own choice about a union. It will also give workers the right to build a union through a fair process known as majority sign-up (sometimes called card check), which would enable workers to form unions when a majority say that they want one.

What follows are some examples from within our union of why the legislation’s passage is vital.

—The Editors