
{"id":5025,"date":"2009-03-05T11:17:49","date_gmt":"2009-03-05T19:17:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=5025"},"modified":"2009-03-05T11:17:49","modified_gmt":"2009-03-05T19:17:49","slug":"fixing-our-crumbling-economy-employee-free-choice-act-will-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2009\/03\/05\/fixing-our-crumbling-economy-employee-free-choice-act-will-help\/","title":{"rendered":"Fixing our crumbling economy: Employee Free Choice Act will help"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Louisa Warren<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no surprise to anyone that our economy is in shambles. At 8.7 percent, North Carolina\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got are a whole lot of working families who are struggling to make ends meet.<\/p>\n<p>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. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 wages and benefits improve, living standards for all workers rise.<\/p>\n<p>In a state like North Carolina where unionization rates hover around 4 percent, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not that workers don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to join a union. More than half of U.S. workers \u00e2\u20ac\u201c nearly 60 million \u00e2\u20ac\u201c say they would join a union right now if they could.<\/p>\n<p>But many, including North Carolina workers, can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 efforts to form a union.<br \/>\nIn 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t for lack of trying.<br \/>\nEven 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get an initial contract.<\/p>\n<p>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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unlike any democratic election held elsewhere in our society. Employers aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just if the employees even get to the point of successfully organizing an election, no small barrier in itself.<\/p>\n<p>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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 choice to form unions and bargain. <\/p>\n<p>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. <\/p>\n<p>The majority sign-up process is not new and a number of major companies, such as AT&#038;T Wireless and Kaiser Permanente, have long-recognized that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a fairer, less disruptive process to determine workers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 will. The Employee Free Choice Act does not eliminate elections; it simply provides workers with another option to express their desire to self-organize. <\/p>\n<p>To reverse the backward trend towards growing inequality, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to take more than an economic stimulus package. We need to more directly address our eroding middle class and restore employees\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 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.<\/p>\n<p><em>Louisa Warren is a policy advocate with the North Carolina Justice Center<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Louisa Warren It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no surprise to anyone that our economy is in shambles. At 8.7 percent, North Carolina\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5025"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5026,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5025\/revisions\/5026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}