By Louisa Warren
It’s no surprise to anyone that our economy is in shambles. At 8.7 percent, North Carolina’s unemployment rate is the highest in a generation and nearly 400,000 North Carolinians are out of work. Job loss is continuing at staggering rates and our national economy shed almost 600,000 jobs in January.
Couple that with an already disturbing trend of eroding health insurance coverage and pensions at the workplace, rising food costs and our foreclosure crisis, and what we’ve got are a whole lot of working families who are struggling to make ends meet.
With the federal stimulus package having now been passed, we would do well to focus on another, proven strategy for rebuilding the middle class: unions.
Unions are the single best tool for creating an economy that works for everyone. Union workers earn 30 percent more than non-union workers, are 59 percent more likely to have employer-provided health insurance coverage and are four times more likely to have pensions. Then comes the ripple effect of competition: When union workers’ wages and benefits improve, living standards for all workers rise.
In a state like North Carolina where unionization rates hover around 4 percent, it’s not that workers don’t want to join a union. More than half of U.S. workers – nearly 60 million – say they would join a union right now if they could.
But many, including North Carolina workers, can’t join a union just because they want to. Our current company-dominated system allows corporations to block workers from deciding for themselves whether to join a union and bargain for stronger living standards. Through coercion, harassment and even termination, companies repeatedly stymie workers’ efforts to form a union.
In nearly a quarter of private-sector union organizing campaigns, workers are fired. It took 16 years for workers at the Tar Heel, N.C.-based Smithfield hog-processing plant to form a union, and it wasn’t for lack of trying.
Even in cases in which workers successfully form unions, much of the time they remain powerless to actually use the tools that a union affords them and 44 percent of the time they can’t get an initial contract.
Our current labor law system is broken. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRB) was designed to afford employees the right to join (or not join) a union. But the current NLRB elections process vests too much power in the employer and opens the door for routine intimidation. It’s unlike any democratic election held elsewhere in our society. Employers aren’t held accountable to following the NLRB elections rules because the penalties are so lax that companies would rather swallow the insignificant penalty as a cost of doing business. At the elections themselves, companies frequently bully workers to oppose the union or lose their jobs. And that’s just if the employees even get to the point of successfully organizing an election, no small barrier in itself.
The Employee Free Choice Act offers a fix that will level the playing field for employees and employers and, in turn, help rebuild the middle class that we need. The bill, which is currently working its way through the legislative process at the federal level, would restore workers’ choice to form unions and bargain.
Specifically, the Employee Free Choice Act would allow workers to form unions when a majority signs authorization cards, strengthens penalties for companies that coerce or intimidate workers and establishes mediation and binding arbitration when the employer and workers cannot agree on a first contract.
The majority sign-up process is not new and a number of major companies, such as AT&T Wireless and Kaiser Permanente, have long-recognized that it’s a fairer, less disruptive process to determine workers’ will. The Employee Free Choice Act does not eliminate elections; it simply provides workers with another option to express their desire to self-organize.
To reverse the backward trend towards growing inequality, it’s going to take more than an economic stimulus package. We need to more directly address our eroding middle class and restore employees’ choice to form unions and bargain for fair wages and benefits. The Employee Free Choice Act is a critical first step forward towards building a better life for all North Carolinians.
Louisa Warren is a policy advocate with the North Carolina Justice Center
I am concerned about a couple of points, If more than 50% of my coworkers are forced to sign the “card” as they have been in the past, we would not have the right to have a vote on forming a union or even what the contract would say if we did form a union. Another point is unions seem to have been the downfall of some big business, steel, airlines, auto and schools come to mind.