<The Employee Free Choice Act would restore protections for workers who seek to organize labor unions after long years of calculated, well-financed abuse by anti-union employers.
Even John Palter, the lawyer who called the proposal a "union power grab" in a recent Viewpoints column, concedes that abuse of the current election system occurs and that when unions do manage to gain the right to bargain, some employers stonewall negotiations for years on end.
In fact, the effort to stifle the right of workers to join a union has become a science aimed at intimidating organizers and running out the clock. The employers and union-busters who talk up the virtues of existing secret ballot elections are doing so because they have all the advantages in those elections.
In terms of true democratic function, the current "secret ballot" system that employers extol is really modeled more on the old Soviet Union than on the United States.
Unlike a democratic election, companies that wish to campaign against unionization may, in the run-up to a union election, hold forced one-on-one and group meetings with employees that include hour upon hour of propaganda and veiled or unveiled threats to shut down a business or move it overseas.
Unions, on the other hand, have no right whatsoever to touch base with workers on company property and must do any campaigning in off-hours with no guarantee of reaching workers.
Unlike a democratic election, it has become commonplace for companies to fire the chief organizers in a union campaign. The penalties for doing this were set in the 1950s and can now be viewed as a mere cost of doing business. more......
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-mccasland_24edi.State.Edition1.284c6c5.html
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