HR MANAGEMENT

HR Management

HR Management

Introduction

The purpose of this research report is to explain the debate related to the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). The Employee Free Choice Act is a sensible reform that would protect workers' right to join together in unions and make it harder for management to threaten workers seeking to organize a union, but conservatives are waging war against the bill.

The Employee Free Choice Act will restore balance to the union election process by allowing workers the choice to organize a union through a simple majority sign-up process—a system that works well at the small number of workplaces that choose to permit it, raising penalties when the law is violated and promoting productive first contract negotiations with a mediation and arbitration option (Hollinger, 2008).

Discussion

Today, millions of American workers are denied their right to form a union because the process of voting on union formation has been corrupted. Workers that consider forming a union today face an undemocratic system and are frequently intimidated by their employer. A new report by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research finds that in 2007 at least one pro-union worker was fired during 30 percent of union election processes, and pro-union activists faced a more than 20 percent chance of being fired.

The problem isn't just corporations that violate the law. Over the years, our legal system has allowed unfair elections to become the norm (Hollinger, 2000). More than 90 percent of companies legally force workers to attend anti-union meetings that include “one-on-one conversations” with supervisors.

According to research by University of Oregon Professor Gordon Lafer, workers often face pressure from their direct supervisors—the person with the most control over their job—to reveal their private preferences for the union (Shepard, 2008). This takes the “secret” out of the “secret ballot”—the most common conservative mischaracterization of current union organizing rules. Meanwhile pro-union employees are banned from talking about forming a union except while they are on break time and from distributing pro-union information except when they are both on break time and in a break room.

Many corporations focus significant time and energy on fighting union organizing drives; 75 percent hire consultants to run sophisticated union-busting campaigns based on mass psychology and distorting the law, according to Cornell University Professor Kate Bronfenbrenner. Corporations can even make dubious "predictions" (but not "threaten") that unionization will force the company to close its doors.

Corporations have the right to their opinion, but they do not have the right to distort the election process to such a degree that it is a parody of democracy (Snyder, 2001). A democratic election requires that one side does not hold all the power, control all the media, and control the timeline of the election. Yet, that is exactly what many union elections look like today.

Nevertheless, there are still workplaces where workers successfully form a union. The corporate response? Often it's to bargain with the new union in bad faith by using delay tactics and stalling the negotiation of a first contract ...