So what's been going on with the Employee Free Choice Act? Lots, it turns out.
At the America's Future Now conference held earlier in the week, Sen. Tom Harkin -- who is leading the effort to get the bill through the Senate -- said:
If senators refuse to compromise, if they refuse to come to the table in good faith, I will take the original bill to the floor and demand an up-or-down vote. We will see where everyone stands, and working people can vote accordingly.
That's the state of things: There will be a compromise that respects the three core principles of Employee Free Choice:
- A fair and free chance to form a union.
- The ability to secure a first contract in a reasonable amount of time.
- Strong penalties when companies break the law.
Or we'll know why not. And that means that, behind the scenes at least, the fight is raging. Arlen Specter, continuing his political journey, on Saturday addressed the issue of Employee Free Choice in terms that Daily Kos diarist ALinSF characterized as support of "free-ish choice."
The SEIU reports on a variety of ways that a Chamber of Commerce lobbying event didn't go so well.
From bringing a major labor law violator to lobby on behalf of (wait for it...) labor law reform, to getting caught in a lie by Sen. Feinstein, this can't be how the Chamber wanted their lobbying week to go.
Being called out for a lie by Dianne Feinstein is pretty rich, but this has got to be the best. Ben Wootten, a Maine small business owner, said:
"The US Chamber of Commerce doesn't speak for small businesses any more than Burger King speaks for cows. While the Chamber works overtime to represent the narrow interests of bloated, wealthy corporations, our nation's small businesses are struggling simply to keep their doors open.
"We need common-sense measures like health care reform and the Employee Free Choice Act to help small business owners control costs and ensure that their employees feel truly invested in the long-term future of their workplace."
This pungently restates something said by one of my co-panelists at the Netroots Nation salon I reported on a couple weeks ago: The Chamber of Commerce bills itself as a voice of small business, but it is funded by and speaks for giant corporations.
Wootten wasn't the only business owner to announce his support for the Employee Free Choice Act, either. A new coalition called Business Leaders for a Fair Economy features more than 1,000 businesses.
Roger Smith, the president and CEO of American Income Life Insurance Co. and the chairman of the coalition’s advisory committee, says that giving more workers the freedom to form unions and bargain won’t undermine the economy—indeed, we can’t build purchasing power and create stable prosperity without it:
I believe that in these tough economic times, we need solutions that protect workers and support long-term growth and sustainability for American businesses. It does not have to be an either/or scenario. I personally can attest you can be a responsible employer that respects workers’ rights and have a thriving, profitable business accountable to its stakeholders.
News of just how far some employers will go to prevent workers from joining unions made it into the Washington Post, in an op-ed by Cornell labor scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner. Her study, drawing on a random sample of more than 1,000 union elections, found that:
In 34 percent of the elections I studied, companies fired employees for union activity. In 57 percent of elections, employers threatened to shut down all or part of their facilities, and in 47 percent, employers threatened to cut wages and benefits.
In 63 percent of campaigns, supervisors met with workers one on one and interrogated them about their union activity or whether they or others were supporting the union. In 54 percent of the elections, supervisors used these one-on-ones to threaten individual workers.
The bottom line is that there has been a steady decline of workers' rights in the past several decades. Colleagues and I have examined this issue in a series of studies over the past two decades. My new data show that employers are more than twice as likely as they were in the 1990s to use 10 or more tactics -- including threats and firings -- to thwart workers' organizing efforts, and they are more likely to use more punitive and aggressive tactics such as interrogations, discharges and threats of plant closings, while shifting away from softer tactics such as social events, promises of improvement and employee involvement programs.
When such treatment of workers is routine and growing ever more so, how can working people not keep fighting for justice?
