Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post explains the importance of first contract arbitration in the Employee Free Choice Act. First contract arbitration is the second main plank of Employee Free Choice.

But the kind of democratic choice that business favors is choice without consequence — a position made clear by its opposition to the other key component of EFCA: binding arbitration between company and union if they’ve been unable to agree on a contract within 120 days of a union winning the election. A study of first-contract negotiations by John-Paul Ferguson and Thomas A. Kochan of MIT’s Sloan School of Management makes clear why such arbitration is needed. After surveying 22,000 unionization campaigns between 1999 and 2004, the authors found that even after a majority of workers voted for a union, they actually reached a contractual agreement with management (which is currently under no legal obligation to come to an agreement) only 56 percent of the time.

Heads, management wins. Tails, the employees lose.

It’s ironic that businesses rely on arbitration all the time as a means of resolving differences; in this regard, arbitration is a tool for business success. Yet when it comes to giving workers recourse to have arbitration as a means of getting their first contract between the newly-formed union and their employer, big business is suddenly opposed to arbitration. Currently businesses stall by negotiating in bad faith, as they know that if a contract is signed in the first year, they can run a campaign to decertify the union. It’s a crime that even when workers fight and organize and choose to join together in a union, employers still have the ability to effectively ignore the results.