Opinion |

Employee Free Choice Act spreads democracy to American workplaces

By Mario Moretto

Posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008, 12:00 am

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Every election season, Americans celebrate and participate in one of the founding principles of the United States – democracy. In the U.S. democracy is seen as both the means and the ends. It is one of the true shining lights of American cultural and political history, from pre-revolution to post-twentieth century. Americans truly value democracy.

But democracy does not only take place at polling points every election season. Democracy also takes place every day in some of the most democratic institutions of the modern era – labor unions. Union members vote regularly in a democratic fashion about wages, benefits, working conditions and representation.

Why then, would any self-respecting American oppose the passage of H.R. 800, S. 1041 – The Employee Free Choice Act, which will take steps to fix the broken system of labor and union organization, and restore democracy to the workplace?

The current labor system is a mess. Workers are not free to choose for themselves whether to join a union, which will provide them with a means to bargain for better wages, benefits and working conditions. Employers regularly coerce, harass, intimidate, threaten or even fire workers who engage in organizing campaigns in attempts to gain a voice in the workplace.

A Cornell University scholar surveyed hundreds of organizing campaigns and found that more than 90 percent of private-sector employers facing organization force employees to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union propaganda. Eighty percent require supervisors to attend anti-union trainings. Seventy-eight percent require supervisors to speak out against unions to their employees and 75 percent hire outside consultants to run anti-union campaigns – often based on mass psychology and distortion of the law. Half of employers threaten to shut down, and 25 percent of private-sector employers illegally fire workers for engaging in their legal right to form a union. Many workers who do manage to successfully join a union are never met at the table to negotiate a contract.

Scholars from my field of study also lay down the facts. The American Anthropological Association issued a policy brief in September 2007 stating that ethnographic research shows “there is significant management interference in employee’s right to freedom of choice and association. Such interference constitutes a human rights violation that the Act is intended to remedy.”

The act would solve many of the problems organizing workers face. Under the current labor system, employees have at least 45 days to engage in all of the practices above to intimidate and threaten workers before they vote on whether or not to unionize. During this time, they certainly don’t let union representatives come in and talk to workers. Imagine going to a poll this November after being threatened with unemployment if you vote for the candidate of your choice.

It is no wonder so many bosses and employers fight unions. The American workplace is one of the last places in the country democracy hasn’t touched. Employers and CEOs have benefits, high salaries, vacations and health insurance – things that many, if not most, workers don’t have. They have power over workers, and want to keep it that way in the interest of higher and higher profits.

Unions would bring democracy into the workplace, and history shows that people with power fear and hate democracy. Opponents of the act are exactly the people you’d think they would be: Conservative congressmen and women who are out of touch with the working class of this country and have only corporate profits in mind. This is why a strong labor movement is so important – democracy need not be spread only overseas but into our own workplaces. Any American who values democracy should agree.

Mario Moretto is the opinion editor for The Maine Campus.