When the new president and Congress take office in January, workers in this country will have their best opportunity in decades to change the federal labor laws and make it easier to organize unions.
Throughout the presidential campaign, Barack Obama repeated his commitment to passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would give workers union recognition and the right to negotiate a contract when a majority of employees sign union cards. In early December an Obama spokesperson reaffirmed the president-elect’s strong support for EFCA.
In March 2007 the House of Representatives passed EFCA by 241-185. But three months later, it failed in the Senate, even though a majority of Senators said they’d vote for it. The reason is that anti-labor Republican filibustered against the bill, a tactic that exists in the rules of the Senate (but not the House) allowing a minority to block a bill from coming to a vote. It takes a vote of three-fifths of the Senate (60 Senators) to end a filibuster; in this case, the vote to stop the filibuster was 51-48, short of what was needed.
That’s a key reason why unions were pushing for a 60-seat Democratic Senate majority in the 2008 election. The election outcome gave the Democrats 58 or 59 seats. (As the UE NEWS went to press, votes in the very close Minnesota Senate race were still being recounted.)
The Democrats also gained more than 20 additional seats in the House, so passage of EFCA there should not be a problem. The real battle will be in the Senate. Unions will attempt to win the votes of several moderate Republican senators, while big business will spend a fortune on a massive propaganda attack aimed at beating EFCA and crushing unions.
‘SECRET BALLOT’ SMOKESCREEN
In the months ahead, you’ll hear the pro-corporate enemies of EFCA accuse its supporters of being anti-democratic and wanting to do away with “secret ballot elections.” They will ignore the fact that dictatorships, past and present, have often conducted “secret ballot elections” that are far from “democratic” because of the high degree of voter intimidation. Anyone who has been through a “representation election” conducted by the National Labor Relations Board knows that the campaign of terror by the employer makes the process invalid as an honest measure of the will of the voters. It’s about as “free and fair” as any “election” conducted under a repressive dictatorship.
UE and other unions have been through innumerable organizing campaigns in which upwards of 60 or 70 percent of the workers eagerly sign cards asking for union representation. But after workers have been browbeaten all day, every day, for several weeks, by a relentless company campaign featuring threats of firings, pay cuts, forced strikes and plant closing, the union that had overwhelming majority support often loses the election.
The union will be calling on UE members to contract your representatives and senators as EFCA moves toward congressional votes. Stay informed on the progress of this bill at the political action page of the UE website, and at American Rights at Work.