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The nation recently learned that America's largest private employer convened mandatory, closed-door meetings with thousands of its store managers and department heads over the past weeks to "warn" them about the negative consequences if Sen. Barack Obama wins the presidential election. The corporation pointed to Obama's support of legislation called the Employee Free Choice Act, which would put the choice on how to form a union back in employees' hands.

The news of Wal-Mart's actions has set off a firestorm of public outcry as people are reacting to their instinctual gut feeling that it's wrong for a big company to use its muscle to influence its workers' private choices. "I'm not a stupid person," one peeved Missouri Wal-Mart employee said. "They were telling us how to vote."

(ENLARGE)

Richard Ray is president of the Georgia AFL-CIO labor union.

What's ironic about Wal-Mart's electioneering is that the Employee Free Choice Act is designed to combat exactly this kind of unfair corporate bullying. Wal-Mart has long been accustomed to acting like a schoolyard bully toward its employees when they try to exercise their freedom to improve their lives by forming unions. The government has found that the company has illegally threatened and discharged workers, prevented them from reading union literature or talking about their working conditions, and retaliated against union supporters.

It isn't just Wal-Mart. Around the country, companies routinely intimidate, harass, coerce and even fire people who try to form unions, and our nation's labor laws are powerless to stop them. A worker must go through a complicated long-term process in order to file a complaint, and penalties for violations by companies are low.

Three-quarters of companies make workers undergo intimidating one-on-one meetings where they are personally urged by higher-ups to oppose the union, according to Cornell University research, while a quarter of private-sector employers fire at least one worker during a union organizing campaign. By the time employees vote in a National Labor Relations Board-sponsored election, the environment has been so poisoned that free and fair choice isn't an option.

This company-dominated system is exactly what the Employee Free Choice Act is designed to mend. The act would strengthen penalties for companies that coerce or intimidate employees and ensure that workers have a fair chance at winning a contract guaranteeing their wages and benefits. When a majority of workers at a workplace want a union, they can choose to show their support by signing cards — majority sign-up.

Why does all this matter to Georgians? Working families in Georgia, like millions across the country, are being left behind, even as those at the top of the economic ladder are raking in record profits. Wages are falling, health care costs are rising and retirement security is all but disappearing. Millions of good, family-supporting jobs are being shipped overseas.

Employers like Wal-Mart, which pays its sales associates an average of just $8.23 per hour, are a big part of the problem. We learned in 2004 that Wal-Mart's employees were 14 times more likely to use PeachCare for Kids than those of any other employer in the state. Clearly, Wal-Mart is placing an undue burden on Georgia's taxpayers. Leaked internal documents in 2006 showed that close to 60 percent of its workers didn't have the company's health insurance, or any other insurance.

In order to reverse the downhill trend of America's quickly shrinking middle class, we must restore working people's ability to bargain with their employers — employers like Wal-Mart — for better wages and benefits through unions. Today, a union card is still the best ticket to the middle class. People who have a union earn, on average, 30 percent more than workers who don't have a union, according to government statistics, and they are much more likely to have health care and pensions. And when workers joined together in unions bargain with their employers for improvements, the rising tide lifts up the entire workforce.

The Employee Free Choice Act would restore America's workers' freedom to chose to come together to bargain for a better life. That, apparently, is why Wal-Mart has subjected its workers to this latest round of shameful bullying.