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FEATURED WRITER:

American Workers Need a Fair Chance.

From 1935 to 1947, American workers’ rights leaped forward. After President Roosevelt passed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, we won Social Security, the 40-hour work week, unemployment compensation, workers’ comp, and protection against inflation, among many other advances. It is not a coincidence that the period was also American labor’s greatest advancement in unionization. The strong organizations of working Americans impelled the entire nation forward.

The year 1947 began the erosion of working Americans to

organize into unions, and it marked the end of the great period of progress. Around 1957, union membership peaked and began to dwindle. During the aggressive anti-worker years of the Reagan Administration, union membership dropped dramatically.

Today, unions organize about 9% of the private-sector workforce, compared to 35% in 1957! Instead of shorter hours, people work longer. Instead of gaining benefits such as pensions and health care from employers, workers and even retirees are losing them. Instead of having real power in the workplace, American workers find themselves working part-time or temporary jobs with low pay, no benefits, no dignity, and no say-so about job conditions.

The ability to organize, guaranteed under the Roosevelt Administration, has transformed into a burdensome and painful process that fails much more often than it succeeds. A good case in point is the effort of the National Nurses’ Organizing Committee to organize registered nurses in Texas . They began in 2006 with enthusiastic reception from nurses because they had successfully passed legislation in California to rectify the outrageous and dangerous practice of overloading nurses with too many patients. They sought similar legislation during their organizing drive in Texas.

One 30-year veteran nurse, Rossia Avery, was quick to take up the cause. She spoke out to other nurses and to the public about the dangerous situation in Texas hospitals and the need to organize the nurses. Hospital administrators fired and blacklisted Avery and other nurses. Avery is not working in 2009, but she is still speaking out for patient safety, hospital reform, and the right of Texas nurses to organize.

It would be nice to say that Nurse Avery’s situation was not typical, but unfortunately it is.

Time and again, the evidence shows that when workers try to form unions, they face harassment and intimidation from their employers. In fact, an analysis of labor board elections by University of California-Davis professor David Brody shows the odds of making it all the way through the process, from filing a petition to getting a first contract, years later, are only 573 out of 2,388 or less than 1 in 4!

The workers involved in organizing drives had a 97 percent chance of being subjected to an anti-union campaign by their employer —- usually orchestrated by a professional union buster —- and usually featuring captive audience meetings and one-on-one closed door meetings with supervisors, frequent threats to close or move the workplace if workers vote to form a union, and a one-in-five chance that active union supporters would be fired illegally.

Only 68,000 workers managed to form unions via the corporate-dominated NLRB representation process in FY 2008—and only a little more than half of these will ever obtain the protection of a collective bargaining agreement.

North Texas union organizers report that most efforts never even get into the statistical columns, because workers are too afraid to even sign enough membership cards to give them a fighting chance in the official process. Only 30% of workers in a given workplace need to sign cards to launch the legal process, but no organizer will try with fewer than 50%, and some require 70% before they feel that they can make it through the employers’ gauntlet of intimidation, harassment, and firing to win a certification election.

Even if they win, the statistics show that fewer than half of those will ever enjoy the protection of a first contract with employers.

America ranks the lowest among all industrialized nations in workers’ rights. American workers are protesting, and they are being joined by religious leaders. Even Pope Benedict XVI has spoken out. In a new encyclical released July 6 by Pope Benedict XVI, the leader of the Catholic Church discusses the challenges of a global economy. He notes that workers’ ability to form a union and bargain is at risk and makes it clear that it is a matter of moral imperative to preserve that freedom.

The Employee Free Choice Act is being debated in Congress and will likely come up for a vote in summer 2009. When Senator Al Franken was finally allowed to take his seat, his first official act was to join the many cosponsors of this important act.

The act would make it possible, again, for American workers to organize. It would put new penalties against employers who break labor laws. It would put time limits on the employers’ ability to stall organizing drives for years. It would allow employees to organize as soon as 50% of a given workplace signs membership cards. America has to have it!


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