EFCA and Layoff City

Cal Professor Harley Shiken's op-ed on the Employee Free Choice Act in today's SacBee is well worth a read.

These days corporations reward their executives with multi-million dollar bonuses while firing their most skilled and experienced workers for cheaper labor. Case in point Circuit City. It is pretty easy for corporations to get away with this "low-wage approach to fattening the bottom line", due to the declining percentage of private-sector workers who are represented by a union. As Prof. Shiken points out, there are many factors for this decline, but one of the keys is "dysfunctional labor law."

Seventy years of amendments, court decisions, administrative rulings and aggressive employers have gutted the original intent of the Wagner Act -- hailed as labor's Magna Carta when it was passed in 1935 -- to give workers the right to choose a union.

The process remains democratic in form but is increasingly authoritarian in content.

The solution is the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would put some teeth behind the existing law, making it more difficult for employers to get away with breaking it. EFCA also adds a new option for employees to express their desire for a union by signing a card.

Critics argue that workers would face intimidation by the union with a majority sign-up. The evidence argues otherwise. A 2002 study commissioned by American Rights at Work found that workers in NLRB elections were twice as likely to complain about managerial coercion as those in majority sign-up campaigns.

Workers will undoubtedly face pressure from both sides in an organizing campaign, but only the employer controls a worker's livelihood and thereby wields the power of intimidation.

"In the main it will be found that a power over a man's support is a power over his will," Alexander Hamilton noted in the Federalist Papers two centuries ago.

Employer actions such as those at Circuit City may give workers reason to think about the benefits of having a union. The Employee Free Choice Act provides them the right to make this choice in a free and informed way.