Employee Free Choice Act

This is the third and final installment in a three-part series on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) published on Global Investment Watch.

Corporate Propaganda in the Information Age

One of the great benefits of the Internet is that it is the ultimate equalizer against corporate misinformation. It allows citizen activists and public interest groups to quickly and cost-effectively counteract right-wing propaganda. While companies shell out gobs of money to glitzy public relations firms to produce misleading TV infomercials and radio ads these days, organizers in the progressive community are reaching millions of citizens every day by tapping away on their keyboards and posting low-cost videos on You Tube – in real time, no delay. With these new, more flexible methods of communication comes the potential to dramatically increase the power of the message and saturate the marketplace of ideas and opinion building.

Corporations and their misinformation peddlers have a real problem right now. Traditional forms of media – daily newspapers, weekly magazines, television and radio – no longer reach audiences once their exclusive domain. Today, a myriad of communication channels have opened up for organizers and policy advocates, making it far easier to interact with a much larger audience on a global scale. Internet-based tools for successful communication have radically changed the playing field for progressive groups, enhancing the effectiveness of campaigns in dramatic ways. The fight over the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) – legislation that would enhance the nation’s middle class at the cost of the corporate elite – is a case in point.

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If you were to believe the commercials in television these days, corporations care about working people and want to ensure that they have the right to vote. This is a relatively sophisticated approach crafted by the pretty boys and girls in the corporate PR departments who discovered that they could graduate from college with a communications degree by packaging their bullshit for pay.

While American jobs vaporize by the hundreds of thousands each week, Americans are bombarded with the message that if the Employee Free Choice Act were to be passed by Congress and enacted into law by the President, workers would be denied the right to choose unionization.

Here is a different perspective on this question put out by American Rights at Work:

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This is the second installment in a three-part series on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). The third and final installment will be published next Wednesday on Global Investment Watch.

A Dress Rehearsal for the Big Day

In March of 2007, organized labor forced a dry-run on its top legislative agenda – comprehensive labor law reform. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) handily 241 to 185 (bill H.R. 800). The House voted pretty much along party lines with only two southern democrats “dissenting” (Dan Boren of Oklahoma and Gene Taylor of Mississippi). In the Senate, the bill met more opposition as it was filibustered successfully after only 51 Senators voted for cloture, nine less than the required 60 (note: one Democrat, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, was absent so they were really only eight away). Truth be told, the legislation had little chance of making it through Senate then. Plus, President Bush would have vetoed it anyway.

What that 2007 vote did, however, was to shape labor’s money spending strategy for the 2008 election cycle. Namely, that dress rehearsal helped the AFL-CIO’s political affairs department pinpoint precisely who could be counted on to back EFCA, who opposes it outright, and who is still on the fence. Now that Democrats are coming off successful election victories at virtually all levels of state and federal government, the playing field is very different. Both the Senate and the House have many more Democrats than they did in 2007 and the battle lines look far more favorable for passage of EFCA than they did just a few months ago. Most importantly, labor now has an apparent ally for working people in the Office of the President.

At present, organized labor seems within tortuous reach of having the required votes in the Senate to pass EFCA (the bill is safe in the House). In November, the Democratic party picked up eight seats in the Senate (Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Virginia, and – for now – Minnesota). That gets them to the 60 necessary to avoid a filibuster. So passage is a done deal, right? Not so fast.

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The daily update of human rights events around the world.

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U.S.: The Employee Free Choice Act & Human Rights

The briefing paper details some of the glaring deficiencies in current US labor law that significantly impair the right of workers to freely choose whether to form a union.  Human Rights Watch

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This is the first installment in a three-part series on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). The second installment will be published next Wednesday on Global Investment Watch.

Progressives, Be Prepared!

One of the looming political battles facing the 111th Congress and the 44th President will pivot around the Employee Free Choice Act, or EFCA. The proposed bill, as currently crafted, would amend the National Labor Relations Act in three main ways:

1. Strengthen penalties for companies that illegally coerce or intimidate employees in an effort to prevent them from forming a union;
2. Bring in a neutral third party to settle a contract when a company and a newly certified union cannot agree on a contract after three months;
3. Establish majority sign-up, meaning that if a majority of the employees sign union authorization cards, validated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a company must recognize the union.

Anti-EFCA forces are now hard at work throwing millions of dollars in opposition of the legislation. These groups include: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Save Our Secret Ballot, Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, Americans for Job Security, the National Right to Work Committee, The Business Roundtable, Employee Freedom Action Committee, Freedom Watch, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Workforce Fairness Institute, and Center for Union Facts. Their goal is simple: intimidate moderate red state Democrats and blue state Republicans into voting against EFCA. Tons of money is being spent by unions to make sure this does not happen.

A number of politicians on both sides of the aisle have already lined up for and against the legislation. Many others are still undecided. It will be those “swing” votes in both the House and Senate which will likely determine the fate of EFCA (note: we’ll break down the possible votes next week). Elected officials in both chambers, but especially those newly elected Congressmen and Senators who have yet to cast previous EFCA-votes, will be taking the temperature of their constituency base over the next few weeks, as they should do with any major vote. The only problem with doing this in the case of EFCA is that many Americans have fallen prey to the incredible amount of anti-union rhetoric and misinformation about the proposed legislation.

Progressives need to know where they stand on this issue and be prepared to make the case for a more democratic workplace. So which side are you on?

Here are six points to counter the big business propaganda and intimidation machine:

• The business community is spending hundreds of millions dollars of their shareholder money to perpetuate misleading and false statements about EFCA. This is being done while the financial crisis – in large part created by corporate mismanagement and greed – has eroded trillions of dollars of wealth from pension funds and individual 401k plans.

• One of biggest myths pushed by the Chamber of Commerce and other corporate interests is that it would “do away with secret ballot elections.” The fact is that the EFCA does nothing to take away the right to a secret ballot election. If workers want to hold an election, they would still have that right to do so. EFCA would simply put that decision in the hands of workers and not the employer.

• Corporate interests repeatedly claim that allowing workers to sign cards when choosing to form a union will lead to union intimidation. Yet several academic studies have looked into this and there is simply no evidence to support this claim.

• The real reason Corporate America is fighting this legislation is because the bill toughens penalties against employers who violate their workers’ rights.

• Most CEOs don’t want to give workers the freedom to decide for themselves whether to join together for a voice at work. This is not surprising when you consider that CEOs are now paying themselves over 300 times more than the average worker. It’s plain and simple that corporate CEOs don’t want workers to share in the prosperity they helped create.

• Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott summed up the position of Corporate America best when he remarked on October 28, 2008: “We like driving the car and we’re not going to give the steering wheel to anyone but us.” Corporate CEOs like Lee Scott are driving this “car” (the economy) off a cliff.

Here are six points to persuade people why they should be telling their elected officials to support EFCA:

• Many reporters, lawmakers, and pundits continue to call the legislation “card check”- missing the fundamental democratic principles behind the legislation.

• EFCA provides a non-governmental solution to help create an economy that works for everyone. It simply says that when a majority of workers in a workplace choose to form a union, they are free to do so.

• Under current NLRB law, even after a majority of workers in a workplace sign cards saying they want to form a union, their employer can legally refuse to honor workers’ majority decision, demand an election and then hire high priced law firms and consultants to delay the election process for several months and even years.

• In the current company-dominated system, workers who ask for a union election don’t get a chance to vote in 4 out of 10 cases. If given a free and fair chance, surveys consistently show that many more employees would choose union representation.

• Economic success occurs when rising wages spur consumer spending. New research makes a solid case that passage of EFCA would deliver a “stimulus” package by raising wages that would help get our economy back on track and grow the middle class.

• The Employee Free Choice Act would help employees secure a contract with their employer in a reasonable period of time, providing both sides with access to mediation and arbitration when an agreement cannot be reached.

So that the next time you stare down a skeptical colleague at the water cooler on this issue be ready with the “6 & 6″ above so you can convert one more believer to the ranks of the politically enlightened.

Good luck out there!

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The poster child of anti-labor business practices has just launched a new mandate for its global suppliers to adhere to stricter ethical standards. The company made the announcement Wednesday in Beijing at its first “sustainability summit.” China is home to some of the world’s most lax labor and environmental regulations and it is for this reason – along with cheap labor costs – why companies like Wal-Mart consider the country the “go-to” source of goods for its stores.

The company plans to launch the new supplier agreement in January which would include contract provisions to allow for outside audits of specific social and environmental criteria, including a ban on child and forced labor and pay below the local minimum wage.

But many are still highly skeptical. For example, on Thursday the AP reported that Wal-Mart closed an auto repair center in Canada where workers had recently voted to organize. The closure comes after an arbitrator in Quebec had imposed a labor contract on the facility in August. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union called the closure an “attack” on all Wal-Mart workers. This act follows a store closure by the company in Jonquiere, Quebec in 2005 after workers there agreed to unionize. The union has a Canada Supreme Court case pending over whether those workers’ rights were violated.

In the U.S., Wal-Mart has been one of the most aggressive companies in opposing a bill called the Employee Free Choice Act before the U.S. Congress that would allow labor organizations to unionize workplaces without secret ballot elections.

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