Great op-ed by Kate Bronfenbrenner (who wrote that report I told you about recently, “No Holds Barred”, that showed just how aggressive corporate campaigns against workers who try to join together in unions have become) in today’s Washington Post explaining her findings and how they illustrate clearly the need for the Employee Free Choice Act:
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.
For the vast majority of workers who want to join unions today, the right to organize and bargain collectively — free from coercion, intimidation and retaliation — is at best a promise indefinitely deferred.