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One of the most important bills for working Americans of the last 10 years is likely to go down in defeat, even though Democrats control Congress. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is an anti-union-busting measure that would restore the right to form unions, a right working people have enjoyed mostly on paper since the "Reagan revolution" stacked the deck against workers trying to organize. The House passed the bill last month, but it's widely expected to be defeated in the Senate, and if it does survive, it will almost certainly fall to George Bush's veto pen.
If EFCA is defeated, it will carry little or no political cost, largely because America's corporatocracy has done a bang-up job of framing the debate. A coalition of big business groups conducted a wildly misleading poll, one that gave respondents the (false) idea that the bill will diminish rather than protect workers' rights -- specifically, their right to a fair vote about whether to unionize. They've taken that spin and synchronized it across the whole of the conservative communications infrastructure -- from business-funded think tanks to right-wing blogs, to the Wall Street Journal editorial page to lawmakers walking the halls of Congress.
But while the right's rhetoric has been in perfect lockstep, the bill's been pushed almost exclusively by organized labor, with too little outreach to the broader progressive movement and little in the way of a coordinated and effective message. As a result, the media's characterized it as a "union bill" -- which plays to the idea that it's driven by "special interests" -- and it's likely to die a quiet death with little notice among the general public.
Given the Democratic control of Congress and the debilitated state of working America, this is a tragedy. The need for reform is urgent. Union busting has reached a high art form in the United States. Companies no longer need thugs and gun-toting Pinkertons to keep workers from exercising their legal rights to organize; now they have high-priced, Armani-wearing lawyers, who simply brainwash workers into silence.
The tactics are as subtle as they are insidious. A study by Cornell University labor scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner found that: nine in 10 employers facing a union campaign force employees to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union propaganda; 80 percent train supervisors on how to attack unions and require them to deliver anti-union messages to workers they oversee; half of employers threaten to shut down the plant if workers organize; and three out of four hire outside consultants to run anti-union campaigns, "often based on mass psychology and distorting the law."
Increasingly, cunning forms of intimidation are often enough to produce a "no" vote. If organizers manage to get and win a vote among workers to unionize, management is able to dispute the outcome, and the case can drag on, often for years. While it's pending, pro-union workers lose their jobs: A study published this year (PDF) by economists John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer found that "almost one in five union organizers or activists can expect to be fired as a result of their activities in a union election campaign."
That's illegal -- workers are guaranteed the right to organize -- but since the Reagan administration gutted U.S. labor protections, companies that cross the line pay modest penalties that can be written off as part of the cost of remaining union-free.
The result has been predictable: Between 1975 and 2004, the rate of union workers in the private sector fell by almost two thirds (PDF). In 2000, only one in seven American employees were covered by a collective bargaining agreement, while two-thirds of all workers in the rest of world's highly advanced economies enjoyed that protection.
The decline in union membership can account, at least in part, for exploding income and wealth inequality. As economist Dean Baker writes in his new book, "The United States Since 1980," in the 20 years following the election of Ronald Reagan, "the share of national income that went to the richest 5 percent of families rose by more than one-third … [while] the share of income going to the poorest 20 percent of the population fell by more than 25 percent."
A stronger labor movement would go a long way towards reversing that trend. Unionized workers earn 15 percent more than their non-union counterparts, have more vacation time and are more likely to have employer-funded pensions and health insurance (PDF).
A strong labor movement isn't only vital for union members; labor's decline over the past three decades is at least partially to blame for American workers' loss of benefits and job security, for a dysfunctional immigration system, for the near absence of family and medical leave and for the easy passage of NAFTA-style corporate investment deals, despite Americans' widespread unhappiness with their outcomes.
See more stories tagged with: card check, congress, employee free choice act, labor
Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
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