Pass the Employee Free Choice Act Now!
November 14, 2006
Washington, D.C.
The top priority for the AFL-CIO continues to be promoting collective bargaining and organizing rights for all American workers. The preamble of the National Labor Relations Act states that its purpose is to promote collective bargaining, not dismantle or restrict collective bargaining rights.
Yet for more than 50 years, most workers in the U.S. have been met with increasing obstacles when they try to exercise their rights to organize and bargain collectively. Neither Congress, nor the judiciary, nor any government agency has actually promoted bargaining rights consistently.
In the current Congress, more than 250 House members and Senators have signed on as sponsors of the Employee Free Choice Act. Passage of this legislation is the AFL-CIO's top priority, but we can't wait and hope:
We must mobilize for this legislation, just as we did to win elections this year. Each union must commit to making the stewards' army a reality as we bring education to every worksite about the collapse of bargaining and organizing rights in the U.S. and promote the Employee Free Choice Act as a key part of our strategy.
We must ask every current co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act, as well as all those supported by unions this year, to sign on as co-sponsors to similar legislation in the new Congress. We also need our elected officials’ help opposing employers that campaign against collective bargaining, and ensuring NLRA coverage to workers who risk being wrongly classified as “supervisors.”
We request that Congress conduct an exhaustive analysis of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) and the decline of collective bargaining rights in the U.S. as a top priority of the House and Senate Labor Committees and the appropriations process in the next Congress. We need to evaluate the effectiveness of the agency and educate our own members and leaders on the increasing failures of the NLRB and the FLRA.
This will be the focus of our December 8-10 Organizing Summit celebrating International Human Rights Day. We call on all our allies to work with us in support of the Employee Free Choice Act and to demonstrate that the decline of collective bargaining in the U.S. is threatening our democracy, particularly our economic democracy.
The U.S. ranks near the bottom for public workers’ organizing and bargaining rights among all the global democracies. We call on the federal government, as well as state legislatures, and Governors to promote bargaining rights at the federal, state, and local levels for public workers and, to the extent possible, those in the private sector.