More than ever, working people need a way to get ahead.

Our economy is in shambles. The wage gap between corporate executives and working people has never been wider. The decline in people’s purchasing power makes it even harder to get the economy moving again. Across the nation, wages are dropping, health care costs are rising and pensions are disappearing. People no longer believe that our children will be better off that we are.

Unions are the best route to the middle class.

It takes money to improve living standards. The whole point of having a union is to empower employees to get a bigger share of the pie. Union members make 30% more than workers who don’t have a union. That’s about $200 a week, or $10,000 a year for the average worker. Union members are 50% more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, and the benefits and costs are better. And 67% of union members are covered by defined-benefit pension plans through their jobs, compared with only 15% of workers who don’t have unions. And communities with strong unions have higher living standards for everybody.

Sixty million people who don’t have unions say they’d join one tomorrow, but too few will ever get the chance in our corporate-dominated system.

Companies routinely intimidate, harass, coerce and even fire people who try to form unions ­and current labor law is helpless to stop them. The penalties are so slight for breaking the law that corporations simply consider it a cost of doing business. The government found that companies violated the rights of 26,824 workers in 2006 alone (and those are just the documented cases). A quarter of companies even illegally fire workers for organizing-related activities. Even when workers win their unions, many companies delay bargaining any way they can. According to a recent study by MIT, 44% of workers who form a new union never reach a first contract.

The Employee Free Choice Act is the change we need.

The Employee Free Choice Act would put the choice of whether to form a union back in workers’ hands by giving them the option of using “Majority Sign-up,” an alternative to the current company-dominated system. Large national companies with good profit margins and good labor relations, such as AT&T and Kaiser Permanente, have used Majority Sign-up successfully for years. The Employee Free Choice Act guarantees that companies can’t just drag their feet on a first contract. To guarantee workers can win a union contract, it provides for mediation or binding arbitration when it’s needed.

The Employee Free Choice Act levels the playing field by putting real penalties on companies that violate the law during organizing and contract campaigns.

The time to take a stand is Now!

We finally have a president who supports Employee Free Choice and says he will sign the bill if it reaches his desk. A new poll taken in December 2008 shows that an incredible 73% of Americans want Congress to pass this important legislation. But the threat of a filibuster in the Senate could kill the Employee Free Choice Act when it comes to a vote during the first months of the Obama presidency. That’s why it is critical to contact our representatives now. Let them know that the time has come for Employee Free Choice.