Trapper John at Daily Kos has a long and detailed argument in favor of the Employee Free Choice Act, which he posted yesterday. He gives in-depth explanations about the benefits of unionization, the shortcomings of current labor law, and the need for the Employee Free Choice Act. As I’ve been presenting much about why the Employee Free Choice Act is needed and how it works, I think it’d be useful to quote Trapper John’s explanation of the failings of the National Labor Relations Board in doing what it is intended to do: help workers.

To put it plainly — it is a dangerous endeavor for employees to try and organize themselves into a union.  Over the past 40 or so years, a combination of factors — most importantly, the defunding of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB — the agency that oversees union-management relations) and the increasing sophistication of union-busting approaches — have made it extremely difficult for employees to choose to unionize.

Cornell University scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner studied hundreds of organizing campaigns and found that:

Ninety-two percent of private-sector employers, when faced with employees who want to join together in a union, force employees to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union propaganda; 80 percent require supervisors to attend training sessions on attacking unions; and 78 percent require that supervisors deliver anti-union messages to workers they oversee.

Seventy-five percent hire outside consultants to run anti-union campaigns, often based on mass psychology and distorting the law.
Half of employers threaten to shut down partially or totally if employees join together in a union.

In 25 percent of organizing campaigns, private-sector employers illegally fire workers because they want to form a union.

Even after workers successfully form a union, in one-third of the instances, employers do not negotiate a contract.

And it’s not supposed to be that way. In fact, even after Reagan and Bush, the United States government’s stated, legislated policy is still to promote collective bargaining, to promote unionization — as seen in Section 1 of the National Labor Relations Act:

It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.

Got that? It’s supposed to be the sole decision of workers, not their employers, whether to join a union and demand their fair share. But as the statistcs above show, that’s not the way things work.

When employees come to their employer as a unified group and ask to be recognized as a union, the employer can force tham to go to the NLRB and file for an election. Then, the employer can force the NLRB to delay the election for months, if not years, by raising all sorts of ticky-tack legal issues. During the delay, the employer can (and probably will) harass, intimidate, and even fire employees to coerce them into abandoning their support for the union — a workplace that was 90% in favor of unionization can easily be scared into voting against unionization. And even if the employees stand strong, and vote to unionize after all the threats and harassment, the employer can refuse to bargain with the union for years, instead litigating the results of the election. And even if the employer is finally ordered to bargain with the union, it can eseentially get away with refusing to do so — and there’s nothing meaningful that the NLRB can do, because the legal remedies available to it are completely ineffective and unintimidating.

In short, federal law is suppposed to preserve the free choice of employees to choose unions, but in practice it does no such thing. And that’s why we need the Employee Free Choice Act — to restore the right of workers to choose whether to unionize, and in so doing, to restore a real, secure middle class.

The Employee Free Choice Act is a remedy to existing problems.  It’s urgently needed not merely to help workers have a safe and easy path to form unions if they so desire, but to ensure that the government mechanisms that are supposed to protect this process is functional and strong.

I’ll look forward to more great posts like this one from Trapper John – he’s a labor expert and I’m sure he’ll have more to say about the Employee Free Choice Act as the debate progresses.