You and I know that the same people and corporations who have destroyed our economy, shipped jobs overseas and created the largest gap in pay between workers and CEOs oppose the Employee Free Choice Act. See below for some of their erroneous claims and the facts that you need in order to refute them.
Claim 1: The current process for workers to organize unions and gain recognition is carefully designed and tested by time.
Corporate interest groups would have us believe that supporters of majority sign-up recognition are seeking to upend a stable, sacrosanct and long-established system for recognizing workers desire to form a union. However, a detailed and unbiased look at the history of union recognition paints a very different picture. Majority sign-up has established roots in labor law as a vehicle for achieving representation - indeed it is still used in situations where the employer agrees to voluntary recognition--and corporate interests have fought against it since its inception in a contentious debate that continues today. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has found that majority-sign up is a legitimate way to determine majority support.1
Majority sign-up was a legitimate union recognition option under the original representation process codified in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. Even after the statute was revised by the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments, the National Labor Relations Board still recognized majority sign-up unless the employer could show a good faith doubt about the majority status.2 Gradually, the burden shifted onto unions to prove that an employer was acting in bad faith, but only since a pair of Supreme Court cases in 1969 and 1974 have employers had the unilateral ability to reject majority sign-up procedures and require an NLRB-supervised election.3
Claim 2: The current process for workers to organize unions and gain recognition is fair and quick.
Corporate interest group-funded research points to general NLRB statistics concerning isolated aspects of the organizing process over narrow periods of time to support their argument that the union election process is quick and fair.
In fact, reliance on statistics about time frames for elections misrepresents the reality of what it really takes for workers' to unionize under current law. A comprehensive study of union-organizing drives across several stages of the process by two MIT Professors at the Sloan School of Management refutes these claims handily.4 After looking at 22,000 petitions for an election filed with the NLRB between 1999 and 2004, they conclude that:
- In only 20 percent of the cases where, after showing substantial support by workers for union representation, a petition was filed with the NLRB for an election, did the workers ever reach a first contract with their employer. Examining the process, from the filing of a petition to the end of the bargaining process, shows that the current system is structured for delay, obstruction and ultimate failure. Only 65 percent of petitions filed with the NLRB actually resulted in elections and workers won only 56 percent of these elections. Of the workers who won NLRB elections, only 56 percent reached a first contract with their employers.
- Unfair Labor Practices committed by employers after the petition for an election was filed made it less likely that an election would be held - reducing the probability by 25 percent. The largest effect of unfair labor practices was to keep employees who had indicated they wanted union representation from having access to a fair election.
The Employee Free Choice Act ensures that when a majority of workers sign cards saying that they want to form a union, they aren't subject to a lengthy and obstruction-filled process.
Claim 3: Union elections work just like a regular election for public office - supporters of majority sign-up are attacking democratic values.
If one looks closely at the current union election process, you would see that it does not resemble anything that would be considered fair or democratic. Simply labeling some process as a "secret ballot election" doesn't make it fair or democratic. The NLRB election process looks more like a lopsided and unfair election process set up by an authoritarian regime with anti-union employers playing the part of foreign dictator. Under current rules, management is allowed to spread its anti-union propaganda throughout the workplace , while pro-union employees are prohibited from doing the same. Employers are free to stage anti-union campaign rallies and meetings on work time in the work place with workers required to attend. Employers can also subject workers to mandatory one on one anti-union sessions with the very supervisors who have the power to fire them, give them work assignments, recommend them for promotion or discipline, grant overtime and authorize time off for family emergencies. In contrast, union organizers, who have no power to punish or reward workers or to compel their attention, are barred from the workplace - or even publicly-used, company-owned areas like parking lots.5
Studies by social scientists show that employer threats are a widespread part of election campaigns under the current process. A study by Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University (funded by the United States Trade Deficit Review Commission, not a big corporation) of 400 NLRB certification election campaigns found that more than half of all employers made threats to close all or part of the plant during a union organizing drive.6
These threats proved effective - the election win rate at plants where employers made these threats was 38 percent, compared to 51 percent where they did not. The study found no correlation between a company's financial condition and the likelihood that a threat would be made, instead it identifies anti-union animus as the principle cause of these threats. The Employee Free Choice Act includes meaningful penalties on companies that fire or intimidate workers, which the evidence suggests is widespread.
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