Pro & Con: Should Congress make it easier to join unions?

YES: Stronger unions mean better wages, benefits for American workers.

By Amy Traub

The federal stimulus package has created or saved 150,000 jobs, and will produce or retain another 600,000 by summer’s end, according to President Barack Obama. Stimulus dollars will do other things, too: expand health centers, rebuild infrastructure and help communities go green. But the stimulus alone won’t do enough to rebuild the middle class.

That’s because the stimulus was designed to create jobs, not improve job quality — the critical issue of whether jobs can support a middle-class standard of living. For that, we need not only a bailout, but the tools to bail ourselves out.

Among those tools is a stronger recognition of workplace rights, especially the right to organize unions. The Employee Free Choice Act, expected to come to a vote in Congress this summer, would make it easier for working people to organize unions and bargain collectively.

We need it to ensure that the economic recovery doesn’t just include growth for the few but actually creates lasting benefits for working people: increased wages, improved health and pension coverage, more paid time-off and greater work-life balance.

Today the benefits that increased unionization can bring to the entire economy are under attack. But critics who try to scapegoat the UAW for decades of bad decisions by the union’s management that brought down the American auto industry get it backward: good wages and benefits are not a problem the nation needs to overcome, they are what created the American middle class in the first place and will revive it and enable it to thrive in the future.

In the 1950s, more than a third of American workers held a union card. By negotiating for higher wages and better working conditions, unions transformed “bad” jobs on manufacturing assembly lines into today’s “good” jobs, providing the economic mobility that enabled working people to enjoy a middle-class standard of living. Such benefits as workers’ compensation, overtime pay, and, famously, the right to time off during the weekend, were won as the result of union organizing. Today union jobs still offer higher pay and better benefits — including health care, retirement, and paid leave — than non-union positions. And, in industries where union density is high, unions continue to set the standard, lifting wages and improving working conditions even for employees who are not union members. While more progress is needed, contemporary unions are also more diverse and inclusive than they were in the past.

Yet in 2008 unions represented just 7.6 percent of the private sector workforce. Working people’s lack of power in the labor market is a major reason why, when corporate profits were booming, real median incomes stagnated and fewer Americans received health coverage from employers. Labor’s own complacency has contributed to its waning influence. But decades of anti-labor decisions by the National Labor Relations Board played a more significant role, undermining employees’ rights through weak enforcement of labor laws.

Illegal anti-union tactics by employers are now much more pervasive as a result. A new study by Cornell University professor Kate Bronfenbrenner reveals that more than half of employers faced with a union organizing drive illegally threaten to close down their facility if the union wins, while one in three companies illegally fire workers for union activity. Employers regularly engage in surveillance, intimidation and harassment of employees trying to unionize. Today, supporting a union at work poses a significant risk of getting fired.

The Obama administration has endorsed strong policies to improve the quality of working people’s lives: ensuring universal health coverage, raising the minimum wage and changing bankruptcy laws so that businesses cannot easily cast off employee pensions. But working Americans can go beyond the baseline standards set by the government to win even better benefits for themselves if they regain the power to band together and improve their own jobs through unions. In the best American tradition, the right to organize and bargain collectively gives workers a fighting chance to determine their economic fate on their own terms.

Amy Traub is the director of research at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy in New York City, a nonpartisan think tank focused on the middle class.

NO: Power grab is no excuse to undermine basic tenet of democracy.

By Mac Irvin

As an adviser to employers in union election campaigns, I’ve witnessed dozens of these elections across the South. Let me share with you a scene of what happens:

It’s nearing midnight and most employees have worked all day in a manufacturing plant in the sweltering summer heat, not a single eye looking at the clock. A lone government official unfolds each paper ballot and places the ballots face-up in two stacks.

Each time he calls out yes or no, all eyes in the room dart to the paper to verify the vote. Some employees stand on toes, straining to see each ballot. A few employees occasionally turn to gauge the reaction of others. Tensions run high.

The stack of ballots marked no gradually grows larger. Before the final ballots are unfolded, it is evident that the union will lose. The official ends any lingering suspense by announcing the vote tally.

Several groups of employees burst out of the room celebrating with the jubilation of teenagers on the winning side of a football game. Others on the losing side huddle in disbelief as it sinks

in that a majority of their co-workers voted against the union. (I’ve seen it go the other way, too.)

This is a narrative of the purest exercise of democracy: an employee enters a voting booth, pulls a privacy curtain and votes whether to be represented by a labor union. For decades this narrative has played out at tens of thousands of workplaces.

But the secret ballot is under attack. Last year, organized labor poured millions into the campaign treasuries of candidates who pledged to pass the deceptively titled Employee Free Choice Act.

If enacted, this law will take away the right of employees to determine their own future by secret ballot.

Instead, union organizers will be required merely to obtain a majority of employee signatures on cards, a process lacking both the privacy and the decisiveness of the voting booth.

Campaigns to obtain signatures on union cards are rife with coercion and intimidation against employees who refuse to sign. This can be as simple as ostracizing a fellow worker or as menacing as a keyed automobile or damaged tire.

The secrecy of the voting booth assures true free choice. Privacy is so fundamentally a requirement that the government will void any ballot where the voter has signed a name or written anything that might reveal an identity. Official posters assure voters: No one can determine how you have voted.

Proponents of this law contend that the deck is stacked against unions and membership is in decline because unions cannot overcome management opposition during elections.

This is a sham argument. For more than 10 years unions have won a majority of elections conducted, including 67 percent last year.

There is yet another voting privilege EFCA will abolish.

Our system of collective bargaining encourages gradual compromise between parties to reach an agreement; then a contract generally must be approved by a vote of union members.

EFCA would allow government functionaries, after a brief period of bargaining, to step in and conduct binding arbitration to determine wages and working conditions.

Such a government-mandated agreement will strip away the vote to approve contract terms.

Proponents of the law say that discarding the right to vote will shorten the process of employee decision-making. They are willing to sacrifice cherished voting rights on the altar of a streamlined system.

What appears to be the real root of their legislative agenda is that EFCA backers simply do not trust American workers with a vote that will determine their job rights.

American foreign policy champions the right of a secret ballot in democracies across the globe.

Our government should do no less for Americans in the workplace.

Mac Irvin, an Atlanta attorney, practices labor law and has been involved in hundreds of union elections representing employers.