Employee Free Choice Act
The Employee Free Choice Act is the most important worker's rights legislation being debated in Congress. It's importance to America, to workers, and to you is being misconstrued by a handful of powerful and wealthy lobbyist who would like to see the Unions in America destroyed. They do not value the real importance your contributions have made as an union worker.
Information on this page is taken from the AFL-CIO website, with their permission, to help educate our members on what the Employee Free Choice Act is and what it will do for Americans. Links provided on this page will take you to websites external to your district website but all links are approved by the AFL-CIO.
The Employee Free Choice Act, supported by a bipartisan coalition in Congress, would enable working people to bargain for better benefits, wages and working conditions by restoring workers’ freedom to choose for themselves whether to join a union. It would:
- Remove current obstacles to employees who want collective bargaining.
- Guarantee that workers who can choose collective bargaining are able to achieve a contract.
- Allow employees to form unions by signing cards authorizing union representation.
Today, CEOs get contracts that protect their wages and benefits. But some deny their employees the same opportunity. Although U.S. and international laws are supposed to protect workers' freedom to belong to unions, employers routinely harass, intimidate, coerce and even fire workers struggling to gain a union so they can bargain for better lives. And U.S. labor law is powerless to stop them. Employees are on an uneven playing field from the first moment they begin exploring whether they want to form a union, and the will of the majority often is crushed by brutal management tactics.
Cornell University scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner studied hundreds of organizing campaigns and found that:
- Ninety-two percent of private-sector employers, when faced with employees who want to join together in a union, force employees to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union propaganda; 80 percent require supervisors to attend training sessions on attacking unions; and 78 percent require that supervisors deliver anti-union messages to workers they oversee.
- Seventy-five percent hire outside consultants to run anti-union campaigns, often based on mass psychology and distorting the law.
- Half of employers threaten to shut down partially or totally if employees join together in a union.
- In 25 percent of organizing campaigns, private-sector employers illegally fire workers because they want to form a union.
- Even after workers successfully form a union, in one-third of the instances, employers do not negotiate a contract.
Joining together in a union to bargain for health care, pensions, fair wages and better working conditions is the best opportunity working people have to get ahead.
Today, good jobs are vanishing and health care coverage and retirement security are slipping out of reach. Only 38 percent of the public says their families are getting ahead financially and less than a quarter believes the next generation will be better off.
But workers who belong to unions earn 28 percent more than nonunion workers. They are 52 percent more likely to have employer-provided health coverage and nearly three times more likely to have guaranteed pensions.
All workers should have the freedom to decide for themselves whether to form unions to bargain for a better life.
Read testimony from congressional hearings on the Employee Free Choice Act:
Testimony from 2009
- Dr. Paula Voos, chair, Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations, Rutgers University
- Wade Henderson, president and CEO, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
- Rev. Jim Wallis, president and executive director, Sojourners
- Deb Kelly, worker, Anchorage, Alaska
- Sharon Harrison, worker, Lebanon, Va.
Testimony from 2007
- Ivo Camilo, Blue Diamond Growers worker
- Teresa Joyce, Cingular worker, Communications Workers of America member
- Nancy Schiffer, AFL-CIO
- Keith Ludlum, Smithfield Foods worker
- Gordon Lafer, University of Oregon
- Harley Shaiken, University of California, Berkeley
Find out more!
- Read the
text of the Employee Free Choice Act.
- Download a summary of the bill (PDF).
- Key facts about the Employee Free Choice Act.
- AFL-CIO Executive Council statement on the Employee Free Choice Act.
- Employee Free Choice Act questions and answers.
- Why Does America Need the Employee Free Choice Act? (PDF)
- Get the facts in a one-page flier: Employer Interference—by the Numbers.
- Download the AFL-CIO issue brief, The Silent War: The Assault on Workers’ Freedom to Choose a Union and Bargain Collectively in the United States.
- Learn more about Voice@Work, the campaign to restore all workers’ freedom to form unions.
Majority Sign-Up
- Why majority sign-up? What's wrong with "secret ballot elections"?
- Robert Bruno: A study of majority sign-up in Illinois.
- Out Front with John Sweeney: Management-Controlled Balloting.
- AFL-CIO Now blog: Here’s What NLRB "Elections" Really Mean.
- Elections—NLRB Style.
Organizations in Support of Employee Free Choice
- Read The Employee Free Choice Act: A Human Rights Imperative (2009), by Human Rights Watch (HRW).
- Read the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights report on the Employee Free Choice Act (PDF).
- Economic Policy Institute: Questions and Answers on the Employee Free Choice Act.
- Center for Economic and Policy Research: Dropping the Ax: Illegal Firings During Union Campaigns.
- Center for Economic and Policy Research: The Benefits of Unions.
- Center for American Progress Action Fund: How Not to Form a Union. (video)