Marcy Wheeler has post up making a critical point about yesterday’s US Airways crash into the Hudson: namely, everyone responsible for the safe landing and recovery of all passengers on board without a fatality, with the exception of the Coast Guard, were union workers. That includes:

• The pilot, a member of the US Airline Pilots Association, because of which he received safety training to enable the safe splashdown;
• The flight attendants,  members of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA;
• The air traffic controllers, members of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association;
• The ferry operators and crews, members of the Seafarers International Union;
• The police and fire department rescue workers are members of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association and the Uniformed Firefighters Association and, via Lutton, in the comments, Uniformed Fire Officers Association.

Marcy concludes:

Bob Corker and Richard Shelby like to claim that union labor is a failed business model.

But I haven’t heard much about Bob Corker and Richard Shelby saving 155 people’s lives.

Indeed.

Art Levine, writing at the Huffington Post, has a very interesting article on the leading anti-American worker shill, Rick Berman. Berman runs the anti-union, corporate front group “Center for Union Facts” and has been the lead on a number of other anti-worker and anti-consumer front groups on behalf of Big Business.

The Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington yesterday launched BermanExposed.org, which has a ton of background information about Berman and his shady pursuits. Here’s how CREW announced their site yesterday:

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said today, “Richard Berman has become wealthy by deceiving the public through scare tactics, sleazy ads, and bogus websites. BermanExposed.org lists in one place Berman’s pay-for play activities, and demonstrates that his real expertise is making money.

Before one more story is published citing Berman as a credible expert, we encourage journalists and consumers to take a look at BermanExposed.org to better understand Richard Berman’s number one goal: to be the best snake-oil salesman ever.”

Via Huffington Post, American Rights at Work has launched a national ad campaign in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.

Pennsylvania State Rep. William Keller has an op-ed in the Philadelphia Daily News about the necessity of passing the Employee Free Choice Act:

From the perspectives of the national labor movement and big-business owners, perhaps no decision is more hotly anticipated than the fate of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). The ultimate decision will dramatically affect, for better or for worse, the future of America’s struggling middle class.

A new report out today from SEIU details the economic argument for passing Employee Free Choice. Here’s a small piece of a very lengthy study on why we need Employee Free Choice now and how it will help our economy.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that if 5 million service workers join unions:

• 5 million workers would get a 22 percent raise on average, or an additional $7,000 a year;
• $34 billion in total new wages would flow into the economy;
• 900,000 jobs would be lifted above the poverty wage for a family of four ($10.22/hr); and
• Between 1.8 million and 3 million dependent children would share in these benefits.
• The economic impact on individuals would be about four times as large as the recent federal minimum wage increase, and allow nearly six times more in new wages to flow into the economy.

This is just service workers. It’s certain the impact is even greater when you look at numbers for unionizing non-union employees.
Disclosure: I’m proud to work for the Service Employees International Union. This post was neither approved by nor with the knowledge of SEIU. It represents my views alone.

Registered nurse and SEIU member Fredo Serrano of Las Vegas pens an op-ed in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Serrano takes on some basic assumptions about unions and the impact unionization has on businesses, making a powerful case for passing strong Free Choice legislation to help workers continue to grow the economy.

I’m an operating room registered nurse at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas. Shortly after I came to Sunrise Hospital 13 years ago, my co-workers and I came together to form a union. Unlike the vast majority of employees who seek to form a union in their workplaces, we were ultimately able to negotiate free and fair conduct guidelines for the campaign.

Under current law, employers can demand an election process wherein, according to research, 91 percent of employers force employees to attend intimidating one-on-one meetings with their supervisors, and 30 percent unlawfully fire workers who support forming a union.

Because of our landmark agreement with HCA, we saw none of these tactics. It was a positive experience for management, staff, and the patients whose care was never disrupted. But unfortunately, the free and fair election at my hospital was a special exception to a broken rule. The Employee Free Choice Act will guarantee the basic right to a free choice like I had to employees everywhere. …

Having a union has made a dramatic difference in our lives. Before we united under the Service Employees International Union, the health plan available to hospital employees was too expensive for many ancillary staff to afford, meaning that dozens of the people working in the hospital did not have health care themselves. Today, we all have access to employer-provided health care for ourselves and our families. We’ve negotiated a pay scale to attract and retain high-quality and experienced caregivers. Nationwide, workers in unions earn 30 percent higher wages on average and are 59 percent more likely to have employer-provided health coverage.

And we’ve ensured that registered nurses and other direct care providers have the ongoing training and education we need to provide the highest quality care.

Wal-Mart’s Lee Scott and his corporate allies want us to believe that giving workers a seat at the table and a hand on the steering wheel will lead to them running the ship aground. But my experience at Sunrise has proved just the opposite.

Over at FireDogLake Tula Connell has posted a detailed report on polling done relating to the Employee Free Choice Act. It’s not surprising that in these tough economic times, an overwhelming majority of Americans think workers need to be able to organize.

The survey, conducted Dec. 4–10 for the AFL-CIO by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, found:

• 75 percent of those surveyed support recognizing a union when a majority of workers have signed up in support.
• 64 percent support strengthening penalties against companies who illegally intimidate or fire workers who are trying to form a union.
• 61 percent favor binding arbitration if a company will not agree to a first contract. (This provision had the highest number of respondents who weren’t sure how they felt about it.)

Support for the Employee Free Choice Act crosses party and state lines, with 74 percent of those who identify as moderate or liberal Republicans in favor. Conservative Republicans were the only group not expressing majority support.

Those surveyed were told arguments for and against the bill, including the falsehood spread by opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act that it would take away the secret ballot (it wouldn’t). Support remains steady, even when those surveyed heard messages from both supporters and opponents of the bill.

The survey found that most people don’t realize the extent to which management fights workers’ efforts to form unions. That matters because the more people realize employers harass and intimidate workers, the more they support the Employee Free Choice Act.

It’s really great news that Big Business astroturfing and huge paid media campaigns aren’t  penetrating public consciousness. There rhetoric isn’t passing the smell test…maybe it’s because big corporate lobbyists and shills like Rick Berman have vastily underestimated the intelligence of the American public. It will be interesting to see how the forces opposed to worker rights rejigger their efforts in the face of failure to find a successful message to pitch their swill.

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.

Errol Louis of the New York Daily News predicts the impact of the Employee Free Choice Act in 2009:

As Barack Obama takes office, the single most important piece of legislation aimed at helping the middle class will be the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that makes it easier to unionize workplaces.

The law would correct an epidemic of workplace intimidation, much of it illegal, that’s unleashed when employees consider unionizing: 25% of the time, at least one worker gets fired for even proposing a union, and 51% of the time employers threaten to close a plant if workers approve a union.

That’s why an estimated 60 million nonunion workers say they’d like to join a union, but can’t – and why wages have been stagnant or falling since 2000.

If Obama wins passage of [the Employee Free Choice Act], tens of millions of people could start down the road to winning middle-class wages and benefits – exactly what’s needed to shorten the recession.

This is about as straightforward an argument for the passage of Employee Free Choice as I’ve seen expressed in a mainstream media outlet. Kudos to Louis for getting it.

Joseph Slater of PrawfsBlawg evaluates the different parts of the Employee Free Choice Act and finds the conventional opposition to it, particularly regarding majority sign-up, to be lacking.

First, card check. Yeah, yeah, how can anybody oppose elections? I’ll get into why the union elections aren’t much like political elections, but I’ll begin by suggesting that requiring employers to recognize unions if the union produces cards, signed by a majority of workers in an appropriate bargaining unit where there is no proof of coercion or fraud, is not actually a radical idea. For one thing, mandatory card check was the law under the NLRA until the 1950s.

Also, from the passage of the NLRA through today, employers always have been allowed to recognize unions via card check and without an election. This means, among other things, that EFCA does not take away any right that any employee has to an election. EFCA would merely take away the right of an employer to force an election, in the face of a valid majority card showing. Employees would still have the same rights to, say, decertify the union later. Indeed, under Dana Corporation (NLRB 2007), before a card check recognition would be granted any protection from a decertification election, there must be a 45-day window after the recognition in which 30% of the employees are entitled to demand an election.

Further, in the public sector, where labor law is state and local law, five or six states have enacted mandatory card check recognition. I am not aware of any incidents of menacing union/mob stereotypes – the kind one sees in anti-EFCA ads – coercing employees in these jurisdictions. Similarly, mandatory card check recognition is the law in some Canadian provinces.

He also goes on to make a very powerful case for the strengthened penalties for employer violations in the Employee Free Choice Act is necessary, reasonable, and not objectionable. Regarding arbitration, Slater makes the important conclusion on the actual effect of binding arbitration mechanisms in the Act: “it’s likely that if this part of EFCA were enacted, the vast majority of negotiations would not actually use binding arbitration; rather, the law would serve as an incentive to bargain in true good faith.”

Slater’s whole piece is worth a read, as it’s one of the most accessible legal looks at what the Employee Free Choice Act does, what role each part of the legislation would play, and why it’s likely that the legislation as written is nowhere near the sort of bogey man Republicans and big business have portrayed it to be.

Marie Cocco has an op-ed in Oregon’s Statesman Journal on how the Republican Party is using the United Auto Workers as a whipping post to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act. This is a very important dynamic to understand, but I think what’s also particularly relevant is Cocco’s discussion of how union busting business practices necessitate the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

When Reagan supplanted the striking controllers with “replacement workers” (previously known as strikebreakers or scabs), business got the message: It was perfectly acceptable, if not advantageous, to bust unions or to keep them from being organized. From there, it was a small step toward the widespread use of unethical, and sometimes illegal, tactics.

“When it comes to workers’ right to form unions, loophole-ridden laws, paralyzing delays and feeble enforcement have created a culture of impunity in many areas of U.S. labor law and practice,” according to a 2005 report by Human Rights Watch. In the 1950s, a few hundred workers each year suffered reprisals for union organizing. By the early part of this decade, according to the report, about 20,000 workers a year suffered a reprisal serious enough for the National Labor Relations Board to order back pay or take other steps.

Academic research has demonstrated that much of the illicit anti-union activity is conducted after employees have signed cards indicating they want a union, but before a formal election is held.

This is what the “free choice act” aims to eliminate: a waiting period during which three-quarters of companies hire consultants to thwart the organizing drive and engage in a variety of pressure tactics to keep employees from ultimately voting “yes.” About half of companies threaten to close the plant if the union wins the election, according to research by Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University.

Go read all of Cocco’s piece. It’s a strong warning that the GOP will not back-off their attacks on America’s workers in an effort to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act and please their friends in Big Business.