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What is FAM doing to get EFCA passed? Click here to find out.
The Employee Free Choice Act would allow workers to form a union the same way congregants create a church or neighbors start a community organization: by talking to one another, obtaining signatures indicating a willingness to participate--in short, by organizing themselves. It would also increase penalties for particularly blatant violations of labor law and ensure a first, fair contract for newly unionized workers.
Organizations don't start with an election; they start by organizing.
If you wanted to start a neighborhood watch or other community group, would you start by calling an election? Or would you go door to door, talking to your neighbors and asking them to join? With unions as with any other voluntary organization, elections come after the organization exists.
Labor loves the private ballot; it's nonunion employers who hate it.
Every year union members in this country cast thousands of secret ballots: in local leadership elections, national leadership elections, for and against contracts. The Employee Free Choice Act is trying to give more workers--not fewer--the right to a private ballot.
If anyone's been acting like gangsters, it's the union busters.
Intimidation. Coercion. Fear. These are the weapons used by virulent anti-union companies and the "consultants" they hire to keep employees underpaid, passive and without a voice at work. Workers who try to organize are routinely fired, forced to attend long meetings in which unions are maligned with no opportunity for rebuttal, and pulled into high-pressure "one-on-ones" with supervisors in which they're told the business will close up shop rather than allow a democratic workplace.
The elections they're calling for are neither free nor fair.
Imagine a municipal election where only one side can campaign inside city limits and has the power to throw out of town any voters who voice the "wrong" opinion. That's the situation workers face when they try to organize through the rigged election system.
How would those against EFCA restore the American middle class?
With more dead-end, low-wage jobs? Because that's what we're getting without organized labor, the movement that gave us pensions and the 40-hour week, ended sweatshops and child labor. Or maybe, just maybe, those low-wage employers paying for the ad are more interested in keeping wages low and workers cowed than in what they call, perversely, "workplace democracy"?
What can you do?
CONTACT SENATORS Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe (202-224-3121) and tell them to support the Employee Free Choice Act.
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