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[EdHeisler]

Published on Monday, September 1, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Labor Day 2008: Support Employee Free Choice Act
by Michael Honey

Labor Day 2008 marks a moment of crisis for middle and working-class Americans. Housing, health care, transportation, education and job needs are growing acute in an economy that has been run into a ditch. If you have been paying any attention at all for the last eight years, you know what I'm talking about. Yet 2008 also may be a time of significant change. People are fed up and many are demanding a new direction.

However, really changing the American economy is a long-term project and it revolves around improving the conditions of American workers. Furthermore, whether things get better and incomes go up in the months to come depends a great deal on whether workers are able to organize unions. In a recent opinion survey by Peter D. Hart Associates, 65 percent supported unions while only 25 percent did not. That is no surprise: by one research estimate, unionized workers earn 30% higher wages, are 59% more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, and are 400% more likely to have pensions than their non-union counterparts. Unionized workers have more rights than those without unions, and a union still remains the best anti-poverty program for a wage earner, as Martin Luther King once said.

In many work places, employees simply do not have the freedom to choose. Employers blatantly disregard their First Amendment rights to speak, associate, and organize. The National Labor Relations Board, stacked against unions by the Bush administration, admits that at least a fifth of those who try to join a union get fired instead. The actual percentage is much higher. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch designate the land of the brave and the home of the free as one of the greatest violators of workers rights. American workers are not free.

This summer, federal agents in Smithfield, North Carolina, slowed a campaign to organize a union of African-American, Anglo and Latino packinghouse workers with deportation raids. Across the land, deportations turned into felony proceedings, imprisoning workers and smashing union organizing in the process.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.commondre...ew/2008/09/01-2