Dianne Heeley
Fotomat
Massachusetts
"Management Has the Power"
The biggest reason Dianne Heeley supports the Employee Free Choice Act is that she's seen for herself what happens without it. This legislation would give workers who seek to organize into unions the choice of majority sign-up. If a majority of employees in a workplace signed cards stating that they wanted to be represented by a union, they would get their union.
Currently, companies control how workers organize. The company—not workers—can decide whether to recognize the workers' union with majority sign-up or to force workers into an election process, which companies can easily delay or completely derail. The Employee Free Choice Act will give to workers the choice of how they form their union.
Heeley, of North Reading, Mass., was an area trainer for Fotomat in nearby Woburn when she and nearly all the employees in the district office decided to form a union. "We noticed that there was about 100 percent turnover in management every year. We organized for job security because we thought that if the company would get rid of its own managers on a regular basis, none of us employees had any guarantee of a job."
The workers contacted a local union. It agreed to help them organize and advised them to ask other workers to sign cards stating they wanted a union. "Out of about 30 people," Heeley says, "we had everyone but one sign a card." Yet when the National Labor Relations Board finally held a union representation election for the workers, "we won the election by just one vote."
What eroded the nearly unanimous union support to a one-vote margin was an intimidating campaign by management to stop the union at all costs.
"Management pulled the workers into the office and threatened them," Heeley notes. "A lot of people fell for it. I remember watching them go into the office one by one, and when they came out, they were really scared. They knew I was pro-union, and they wouldn't even make eye contact with me."
Management was aware Heeley had been asking her fellow workers to sign cards for union representation. Heeley's manager confronted her with two "incident reports" claiming she had been insubordinate—and then fired her.
"Those incident reports were completely false," she says. "I was never even in those stores where those incidents were supposed to have happened."
With the union backing her, Heeley took the case to the NLRB, which authorized a complaint for discriminatory discharge. After five months, Heeley was vindicated when the case went to a hearing and, before the NLRB issued a decision, the company suddenly agreed to reinstate Heeley in her job and pay her back wages.
But the company's anti-union tactics won the prize that management coveted the most: The workers never got a contract.
Today, Fotomat has different owners and Heeley works in the union movement as a field representative for the American Federation of Teachers in Massachusetts. She says she learned some powerful lessons from her Fotomat experience.
"It's very difficult to organize a union because management has the power. It's scary. People get fired for organizing unions. There's so many things they can do to prevent you from getting a contract. Management makes threats. They're subtle, but people get it. They have everyone scared to death that they're going to lose their jobs," Heeley says.
She's convinced the Employee Free Choice Act would make a big difference. "The advantage of majority sign-up is that it's instant. There's no wait period, so people would feel safer that we're going to present these cards and the bosses have to recognize us as a union here and now. If we'd had that at Fotomat, we would have had 99 percent of the cards. We would have just walked in, set up a union, had negotiations and had a contract. But that didn't happen."
Heeley concludes, "What I saw at Fotomat was an awakening. It changed my life."
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