Home > Standing Up For Workers’ Rights
by Stewart Acuff
First Published in Foreign Policy in Focus
"The boss said he would sell the company or burn it
down before he would see a union at Sterling." To the
cheers of a responsive Washington, DC audience on
December 10, 2003, Sterling Laundry worker Evelyn
Thomas vowed to continue the battle for the freedom to
form a union at her workplace, in spite of fierce
employer opposition.
Thomas’ tale was just one of the dozens of horror
stories told by workers who rallied on International
Human Rights Day to call attention to the widespread
abuse of the rights of workers. In 90 events in 37
states, tens of thousands of workers and their allies
campaigned to restore the freedom to form a union
guaranteed under American law and international human
rights codes, but sadly eroded in our country today.
In the United States, when private sector workers in
America try to form a union through the National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB) process, they are subjected to
weeks, months, or even years of harassment,
surveillance, subtle and overt intimidation, and
retaliation—including demotions, suspensions, firings,
and sometimes beatings.
When the miners at an American Electric & Power coal
mine in southern Ohio tried to form a union last
winter, 31 were laid off because of the company’s poor
financial performance. Six weeks later—just a week
before the workers were to vote in an NLRB
election—the remaining workers received $1,000 plus
bonuses a week for "good financial performance."
This sort of anti-worker, hypocritical whipsawing is
now typical of American corporations, which frequently
employ legal "consultants" and attorney attack dogs who
go to any length to stop workers trying to organize.
Violations of Human Rights at Home
Three years ago, Human Rights Watch issued a report
documenting the fact that the United States is in
violation of international law and internationally
accepted human rights standards for failing to protect
the rights of American workers to freely form unions.
According to the NLRB, an average of 20,000 American
workers a year are victimized by their employers for
organizing and union activity.
Cornell University scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner has
documented the abuse. According to her research:
* In 90% of unionization efforts, the employer hires a
consultant to frustrate the will of the workers;
* In 70-80% of campaigns, the employer conducts forced
meetings to harangue the workers against the union and,
more insidiously, holds one-on-one supervision
meetings;
* 50% of the time, the employer threatens to close the
worksite; and
* In over one-quarter of all unionization efforts,
activists are fired.
The facts are astounding and frightening, and the
effects on our society of depriving workers of a
fundamental human right are devastating: declining
civic and political activity, steadily eroding
retirement system, an ever-widening wage and income
gap, growing poverty, and a dangerous rightward drift
of our cultural and political life.
Internally, we have to teach union members that there
is an all-out, coordinated assault on their collective
bargaining rights and the right of other workers to
organize. We have to tie that fact to declining union
density which makes it all but impossible to win
advances at the bargaining table or even maintain
current contracts and standards. To begin to achieve
this, we have piloted a member education and
mobilization program in selected cities and unions.
Most importantly, progressives outside the labor
movement have to own this. It may be true that such
progressives will not engage in this current human
rights crisis at the necessary level until they see
more workers in motion, but workers cannot win unless
and until a much broader community demands change. The
single greatest internal threat to the success of
progressive policies and values is the evisceration of
the right to organize. The consequent decline of the
labor’s voice and power will put an end to any dreams
of the struggle for equality and freedom.
The ultimate power of the labor movement is our members
unified and in motion. We exercise that power at the
polls, in civic life, and in disruption. And so to win
back this right, we’ll have to exercise all the
elements of our power.
More and more, political leaders are judged on where
they stand on this question. The labor movement must
use its political weight to create a consensus at every
level of our political life to restore the freedom to
form unions. We must garner majority support for the
Employee Free Choice Act, which ensures that when a
majority of employees in a workplace decide to form a
union, they can do so without the debilitating
obstacles employers now use to block their workers’
free choice.
Ultimately, we cannot win unless the personal crisis
suffered by a worker fired for trying to organize is
turned into a much larger public crisis. The moral
catastrophe of firing an immigrant laundry worker
because she tried to form a union to get health care
for her kids must become a public crisis. Today, that
sort of abuse is business as usual, and we must find
ways to disrupt it.
We spent last summer sitting the Democratic
Presidential candidates down with small groups of
workers so they could hear the horror stories
themselves. Not only have the candidates pledged to
support labor law reform, but where possible and
appropriate, they have agreed to intervene with abusive
employers.
This is a morally compelling struggle that touches
workers all across America in one way or another, and
absolutely affects our entire society.
We will not resolve this human rights crisis in the
coming months. We have no way of knowing how long it
will take, but now is the time for us to increase
greatly the intensity of this work, increase the
resources allocated to this work, and make the
long-term commitment to this fight. For the workers,
for the labor movement, and for the nation, the
consequences of delay, timidity, or hesitation are too
great.
Stewart Acuff is the AFL-CIO’s Organizing Director
(www.afl-cio.org). He wrote this piece for Foreign
Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org), and a longer version
appears in the February 2004 issue of New Labor Forum
(http://qcpages.qc.edu/newlaborforum/).