A new report from Human Rights Watch (PDF) lays out just how our broken labor laws fall short of international human rights standards — and how the Employee Free Choice Act will help turn that around:

US labor law currently permits a wide range of employer conduct that interferes with worker organizing. Enforcement delays are endemic, regularly denying aggrieved workers their right to an “effective remedy.” Sanctions for illegal conduct are too feeble to adequately discourage employer law breaking, breaching the international law requirement that penalties be “sufficiently dissuasive” to deter violations.

Unfair union election rules allow employers to engage in one-sided, aggressive anti-union campaigning while denying union advocates a similar chance to respond and banning union organizers from the workplace or even from distributing information on company property. If confronted with clear evidence of employee support for a union, employers can force a formal election and manipulate the often lengthy pre-election period to pound their anti-union drumbeat and, in many cases, violate US labor laws, confident that any penalties will be minimal and long delayed.

Workers who overcome these obstacles and successfully form a union may still be unable to conclude a collective agreement, in large part because weak US labor law provisions fail to meaningfully punish illegal employer bad-faith negotiating or to adequately define good-faith bargaining requirements.

The Employee Free Choice Act, passed by the US House of Representatives in 2007 and likely to be considered by the US Congress again in early 2009, would remedy many of these deficiencies and create a more level playing field for US workers attempting to exercise their right to organize and bargain collectively. The Act would strengthen US labor law enforcement, in part by increasing penalties for violations. It would help streamline union certification and create a more democratic union selection process by requiring employers to recognize union formation based on card check. And it would facilitate the conclusion of initial collective bargaining agreements.

The report breaks the problems with our current laws into three broad categories, and explains how the Employee Free Choice Act would protect workers’ rights in each:

PROBLEM: Penalties for companies that break the law are weak and rarely enforced.

Penalties for breaching US labor law are so minor that employers often treat them as a cost of doing business—a small price to pay for defeating worker organizing efforts. Under US labor law, an employer faces no punitive penalties and few, if any, economic consequences for violating workers’ right to freedom of association. Instead, in most cases, a guilty employer must simply complete a two-step “remediation process”: restore the status quo ante by recreating working conditions prior to the violations; and post a notice conspicuously in the workplace, such as on a lunchroom or kitchen bulletin board, promising to stop and not repeat the unlawful conduct.

EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT SOLUTION: Strengthen enforcement.

The Employee Free Choice Act would strengthen the penalties for unlawful anti-union conduct during organizing drives and first-contract negotiations. The Act would increase the amount due to workers fired, demoted, suspended, or otherwise discriminated against for their organizing activity, increasing the current “make-whole” remedy by requiring payment of “2 times that amount as liquidated damages.” The Act would also institute civil fines, payable to the US government, of up to $20,000 per violation for willful or repeated illegal conduct. In addition, the Act would eliminate the discrepancy between the treatment of workers’ and employers’ alleged serious labor law violations by requiring the NLRB to seek a 10(j) injunction if it reasonably believes that an employer engaged in unlawful anti-union activity that “significantly interferes with, restrains, or coerces employees” in the exercise of their right to organize and bargain collectively as set forth in US law.

PROBLEM: Union election procedures are unfairly tilted towards management’s interests.

US law also allows employers to refuse to recognize a union based on freely signed authorizations by a clear majority of workers explicitly indicating their desire to organize — a “card check” — and demand instead that a union demonstrate majority support through an NLRB election. The period leading up to that election, lasting at least several weeks but often longer, creates an opening for anti-union employers to make aggressive use of the tilted playing field described above and launch distorted anti-union campaigns or engage in unlawful anti-union activity with little prospect of serious legal repercussions.20 Many US employers take full advantage.

EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT SOLUTION: Streamline union certification.

Under the Act, workers could opt to select union representation through card check or an NLRB election, and employers would be compelled to respect that choice. Upon NLRB confirmation that a majority of workers had signed valid union authorizations or “cards,” employers would be required to recognize and bargain collectively with the union, rather than forcing an NLRB vote. As a result, employers would no longer be guaranteed a pre-election period during which to exploit weak US labor laws and practice “to delay or prevent” union formation or otherwise undermine workers’ right to choose freely whether to organize.

(Note how this puts the lie to one of the right wing’s most cherished distortions about the Employee Free Choice Act — that it somehow removes workers’ right to a secret ballot election, should they want one. It does not; it merely shifts the power to decide whether to go with an NLRB election or with majority sign-up to the workers, where it belongs, rather than letting management decide.)

PROBLEM: Corporations don’t bargain in good faith.

Under existing US law, if an employer is proven to have engaged in the common practice of illegal “surface bargaining”—negotiating with no desire to reach an agreement—the remedy required is more bargaining: the employer must post a notice promising to refrain from further bad-faith bargaining and is ordered back to the negotiation table where the cycle of bad-faith bargaining can repeat itself, lasting in some cases for years. Because there are no significant negative repercussions for illegal conduct in this scenario, there is little incentive for intransigent employers to comply with the law. As a result, many workers who face prolonged “surface bargaining” end up abandoning the negotiating process and their union, driven by their employers to surrender their right to freedom of association.

EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT SOLUTION: Facilitate initial collective bargaining agreements.

The Employee Free Choice Act would not attempt to clarify US labor law’s amorphous definition of good-faith bargaining, but it would at least help prevent it from continuing to undermine workers’ rights. The Act would allow workers negotiating their first collective contract to seek mediation after 90 days if the negotiations are not progressing satisfactorily. If mediation failed after 30 days, the dispute would be referred to arbitration, leading to a binding contract. (The parties could mutually agree to extend the initial bargaining and subsequent mediation periods.)

When it comes to respecting human rights, America should be a beacon to the rest of the world, not a laggard. The Employee Free Choice Act can move us a long way closer to an economy where our reality matches our rhetoric.