Of course corporations want to keep the current procedure in place when it comes to employees’ rights to seek collective bargaining agreements. Corporations have the advantage and they like it that way. Sounds like the fox guarding the hen house.
Do you think the Chamber of Commerce (The Big Company Union) would be spending so much time and money to keep the current system if they didn’t control it?
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Unions are the best route for workers to move up to the middle class. Through collective bargaining, union members make 30 percent more than workers who don’t have a union. Union members are also 50 percent more likely to have employer sponsored health insurance and 67 percent of union members have defined benefit pension plans. Communities with strong unions have higher standards of living.
Sixty million people who don’t currently have unions say they’d join tomorrow, but unfortunately few will ever get a chance to under the current corporate-dominated system.
Companies routinely intimidate, harass, coerce and even fire people who try to form a union and have collective bargaining.
Current law is helpless to stop these corporate practices and penalties are so slight for breaking the law that many corporations simply consider it the cost of doing business. The government found that companies violated the rights of 26,824 workers in 2006 alone.
Especially under these current economic conditions, it is time to stand up for working Americans. It is time to rebuild the American middle class. Call or write your U.S. senators and representatives and ask them to give workers a fair chance by supporting the Employee Free Choice Act in Congress.
Louis Reine is a Baton Rouge native and president of the Louisiana AFL-CIO
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