There’s a new report out from the Economic Policy Institute and American Rights at Work today that makes it crystal clear why America’s workers need the Employee Free Choice Act — now more than ever.
In “No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing”, labor expert and Cornell University professor Kate Bronfenbrenner lays out just how extensive corporate intimidation campaigns against workers who dare to try to join together in unions have become:
For the vast majority of workers who want unions today but do not have them, the right to organize and bargain collectively—free from coercion, intimidation, and retaliation—is at best a promise indefinitely deferred. According to Bronfenbrenner, in NLRB election campaigns, it is standard practice for workers to be subjected by corporations to threats, interrogation, harassment, surveillance, and retaliation for union activity. From the 1999-2003 data:
- 63% interrogate workers in one-on-one meetings with their supervisors about support for the union
- 54% threaten workers in such meetings
- 57% threaten to close the worksite
- 47% threaten to cut wages and benefits
- 34% fire workers
Even when workers succeed at forming a union, 52 percent are still without a contract a year after they win the election, and 37 percent remain without a contract two years after the election.
One especially striking trend the report sheds light on is just how extensive these corporate intimidation campaigns have become. Consider the sheer number of coercive tactics a corporation will throw at workers contemplating joining together today. While Bronfenbrenner found no companies that were deploying more than ten different methods to break their workers’ organizing campaigns in her original 1986-87 study, these latest data find nearly half — 49% — of companies applying more than ten. That’s a staggering increase in the number of times the average worker trying to organize will be pressured to let it drop.
You can see the trend clearly in this chart I made from Bronfenbrenner’s data:
Embed this chart:
What you’re seeing in those numbers and that graphic is how the American Dream dies — as corporate power, increasingly unfettered by law or even custom, is deployed in ever greater concentrations against any worker who tries to reach out for the tools to achieve it. It’s time that power was put back in working peoples’ hands. And that’s why the Employee Free Choice Act is so urgently needed — more so today than ever before.
UPDATE (4:45PM): Do your part to help pass the Employee Free Choice Act — write your Senators and urge them to support this critical legislation today!
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You guys are using the WWE wrestler Kane's likeness without permission, In case you didn't know. Reported.
Posted by BigTreez on June 12, 2009 at 9:35 PM
Posted on June 12, 2009 at 9:35 PM