"His freedom to choose"
The Guardian
March 29, 2007
By Sasha Abramsky

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Senior fellow Sasha Abramsky writes about the Employee Free Choice Act as an important pro-union bill.

His freedom to choose
President Bush is expected to veto the Employee Free Choice Act, an important pro-union bill. Well, as the man says, bring it on.

By Sasha Abramsky
March 29, 2007 5:00 PM

Two days ago, the newly-Democratic House of Representatives passed the Employee Free Choice Act. The AFL-CIO, America's version of the TUC, promptly put out a press statement calling it the most important labour-law reform in 70 years. Opponents - a peculiarly unsavoury group of anti-tax, anti-government blowhards, business alliances, and conservative Republican Party figures - immediately denounced the act as a catastrophic infringement on personal liberty.

Yesterday, the Senate held committee hearings on the proposed legislation.

Watching the hearings was a journey back in time. With Ted Kennedy leading the charge, freshly-populist Democratic Senators, freed from the "moderate" shackles of the Bill Clinton era - a period in which Democrats relied heavily on union get-out-the-vote efforts, but did almost nothing beyond flimsy oratory to increase union clout - walked four labour-friendly witnesses through the ins and outs of why it would be a good thing to make it easier for workers to organise. The Republican senators on the committee, now in the minority, practically squirmed in their discomfort.

So what's all the fuss?

Here's the background: in many countries, if a majority of workers in a workplace sign a union card, that's held to be good enough to certify the union within that facility. Not in America. Employers, supported by Chambers of Commerce and a bevy of rightwing politicians, legal scholars and think tanks, have, in recent decades, insisted on a lengthy ballot process after the majority has indicated a willingness to join a union. The whole thing has to be presided over by the National Labour Relations Board, and the ballot itself can take many months to organise and the results months more to certify.

Anti-union spokespeople use the language of civil rights, declaring the secret ballot to be an intrinsic part of the democratic process.
It's a disingenuous argument. Historically, the secret ballot has been (and continues to be) used to protect the powerless - in particular poor African Americans - from being intimidated by the powerful: by landlords, sheriffs' deputies, employers and the like.
But when it comes to unions, the reverse holds true: insistence on a lengthy secret ballot process serves mainly to buy the employers time, during which they can - and frequently do - launch intimidation campaigns against pro-union workers by firing organisers and threatening to shut down the plants should the employees bring in a union. That's held true for Wal-Mart stores and McDonalds franchises that have tried to organise, and it's also held true for small businesses with anti-union owners.

It's part of a package of strategies that have shattered the power of organised labour in many parts of America.

A little over a year ago, I flew to Idaho to report a story on the state's "Right to Work" law for the Nation magazine. Way back when, Idaho used to be one of the more radical spots in the United States, a place where miners and timber men organised into militant unions, a state where some of the most epic labour disputes in American history took place. A hundred years ago, many Idahoans were supporters of the socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs. Others threw their lot in with the anarchists. More recently, however, its politics has been determinedly conservative, and this climate has allowed anti-unionism to flourish.

As you might expect, "Right to Work" is one of those Orwellian titles to a bad law, crafted to deliberately hide the legislation's true impact. Passed in the 1980s, it ended the closed shop, allowing for workers in a unionised workplace to opt out of trade union membership while still being eligible for all the benefits gained by a union contract.

The results were entirely predictable. The first thing that happened was that workers left unions in droves, preferring to gain the benefits of contracts without paying membership dues. The second thing that occurred was that unions no longer had the teeth to demand good contracts - since striking was now almost impossible, given that a large proportion of the workforce was were no longer unionised. Over the following twenty years, Idaho, along with the nearly two-dozen other states that passed similar laws, witnessed a massive decline in workplace conditions, in job security, in wages paid to skilled workers and in benefits - such as health insurance, paid sick leave and pensions - that used to accompany these jobs.

When Right to Work was passed, 22% of Idaho's workforce was unionised. Today, that number is about 9%. Taken as a whole, a similar decline in union membership has occurred across the country, much of it during Bill Clinton's presidency. "We're the places anti-worker rules are brought," Dave Whaley, a union organiser on the outskirts of Boise, the state's largest city, told me. "And if they work they take them to other states and try to ram it down their throats as well."

By the time I visited, Idaho had one of the lowest median wages in the country and its minimum wage was $5.15 an hour, many dollars lower than that of its more union-friendly neighbour states. Not surprisingly, unemployment was low: Idaho had become one of the favored relocation spots for businesses looking for a "flexible", low-wage, de-fanged workforce. (Of course, many of the workers were so poor that they relied on food pantries to put dinner on their tables.)

The Employee Free Choice Act wouldn't end individual states' right to work laws, but it would do away with many other forms of anti-union activity, and, even in right to work states, it would provide more incentives for workers to organise. If the union and employer then can't work out a mutually acceptable first contract, it allows for binding arbitration, thus side-stepping a favoured employer tactic of interminably dragging out contract negotiations. It also significantly raises the financial penalties against companies that violate existing labour law by penalising workers for trying to organise.

For two months now, leading Republicans, including the increasingly-surly vice president, have proclaimed that Bush will veto the Employee Free Choice Act if it passes. Well, it's about to pass... And that's a good thing. For too long, conservatives have relied on the moth-eaten adage that America is a classless society. It wasn't true when Reagan used this platitude to undermine trade unions, and, in Bush's America it most assuredly isn't true today.

So, now that the Democrats have refound their union fangs - and unions, for the first time in a generation, have perhaps found their fangs too - let's see George W Bush wield his veto pen. Let's see him try to proclaim that vulnerable workers, the people who handed his party what he himself called "a thumpin'" in November, are a special interest group. Let's see a president who gained power at least in part through preventing votes being counted argue to the nation that making it easier to organise a trade union and protect wages is a betrayal of democracy. Let the man who made millions of dollars in a sweetheart deal involving his backers buying his baseball team at a ridiculously inflated price argue the act unfairly penalises hardworking businessmen.

One of the few good things about the Bush presidency is the linguistic hostages to fortune the man has left in his wake. As W once said, "Bring it on". In this instance I couldn't agree more. Let's see what happens to Bush's, and the Republicans', already dismal poll numbers if the president really does veto the Employee Free Choice Act.