Ask Your Legislators to Support the Employee Free Choice

Please ask your State Legislators to co-sign a letter to Support the Employee Free Choice Act. 

America's middle class is disappearing, good jobs are vanishing and health care coverage and retirement security are slipping out of reach. To get ahead economically, working people need the freedom to choose for ourselves whether to join together in unions to bargain for better wages and benefits. But the current system for forming unions and bargaining is broken. Corporations routinely intimidate, harass, coerce and even fire workers for trying.

The Employee Free Choice Act would change that by restoring workers' freedom to form unions and bargain—without management interference. The legislation would strengthen penalties for companies that coerce or intimidate workers, establish mediation and binding arbitration when the employer and workers cannot agree on a first contract and enable workers to form unions when a majority signs union authorization cards.

Sample Letter for Campaign

Subject: Please co-sign National Labor Caucus Letter Supporting EFCA

Dear [ Decision Maker ] ,

I ask you to support the Employee Free Choice Act, by co-signing the National Labor Caucus Letter Supporting the EFCA.

This legislation provides for recognition of a union when the majority of employees voluntarily sign authorizations, offers mediation and binding arbitration to resolve first contracts, and strengthens penalties for violations during organizing and first contract efforts.

The freedom to form and join unions is a fundamental human right protected by our constitutional freedom of association, our nation's labor laws, and international human rights laws, including the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is a right for which millions of Americans have struggled.

The freedom to form unions is of special importance to the civil and women's rights movements because unions help ensure adequate wages, health care coverage and retirement security. It was the right to form a union that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was supporting during the Memphis sanitation strike when he was assassinated in 1968. Unions also help to reduce the wage gap for women and people of color, and can prevent arbitrary and discriminatory employer behavior.

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 has long allowed employers to recognize a union when the majority of workers sign authorization cards, designating the union as their bargaining agent. The right to form a union, however, has been eroded over the last several years, resulting in increasing employer harassment, discrimination, and sometimes termination for workers taking initial steps toward forming a union.

Twenty-five per cent of private-sector employers illegally fire at least one worker for union activity during organizing campaigns. Even where workers successfully form unions, employers often refuse to bargain fairly with the workers. Moreover, 92% of employers illegally force employees to attend mandatory, closed-door meetings against the union.

The Employee Free Choice Act will protect workers from these abuses, provide for first contract mediation and arbitration, and establish meaningful penalties when employers violate workers rights.

When workers try to form unions, all too often they are harassed, intimidated, and even fired for their support of the union. These attacks on workers' rights, for which there are only weak -- if any -- remedies, occur all too frequently among the most vulnerable workers of our society, including women, the working poor of all races, and recent immigrants. As a result, those workers who need unions the most are often those who have the least chance of achieving the benefits of unionization.

I strongly urge you to support the Employee Free Choice, legislation that would begin to reinstate the right to form unions that Congress protected for Americas workers over 65 years ago.

Sincerely,

Campaign Launched:
August 13, 2007


Background Information

We need a new movement to restore workers rights to organize. The U.S. Senate faced a filibuster on the Employee Free Choice Act, already passed by the House, the most important improvement to federal labor law in 70 years. This winter the Vermont House passed the Vermont Employee Free Choice Act that would enable some state employees to exercise their freedom to join a union by signing cards, similar to the majority sign-up provisions for private-sector workers in the federal bill.

These votes are just the first round in a battle to be able to effectively organize ourselves to bargain for a better life, for justice at our workplaces and in society. Corporate front groups have been throwing the whole kitchen sink at workers rights supporters. Their campaign against EFCA supporters will become even bigger and nastier nationally and in Vermont. The labor bashers are well funded and well organized. We must do better!

This is why we cant leave it to the politicians, even those who say they are our friends. We need to educate and organize to put the pressure on, to write letters to the papers, and win the battle of ideas in this fight next week, next winter and beyond.

These laws would restore the freedom to make our own choice about whether to have a union and bargain for a better life -- without interference from management. They would help us restore our purchasing power, raising the living standards of the 90 percent of Americans who are enduring the middle-class squeeze.

Why is the EFCA necessary?

  • One in five activists who try to form a union is fired
  • 91% of employers force workers to attend one- on-one anti-union meetings with their supervisors
  • 87% of workers  must attend other kinds of mandatory meetings against their union.
  • workers who cant join together to bargain earn lower wages and benefits
  • 58% of nonunion workers would vote for a union if given the opportunity. But the system for forming unions is broken.

In Vermont, employment is "at will." Employers can fire us for no reason or any reason, except those specifically proscribed by law. By contrast, union contracts require that the employer establish just cause before disciplining or firing.

As working people have faced growing interference when we try to form unions, living standards have dropped and the middle class has shrunk. The assault on the rights of workers and the decline of the union movement make it harder to win public policies that benefit working people. That is why Corporate America understands that killing the EFCA is strategically important to a triumph of corporate power. We need to be as serious in organizing to win this fight!