A basic right
There can be no true democracy without the guarantee of free association

by Sandra Feldman 

If someone told you tomorrow that you were not allowed to join your neighborhood association or a church, synagogue or mosque of your choice or that those organizations were not permitted to function in your community, you'd say, Nonsense! I'm living in a free country-the freest in the world. And you'd be right. Yet something like this happens to tens of millions of Americans every day because they are denied the right to join a union or engage in collective bargaining.

I could overwhelm you with statistics-and horror stories-about what has been going on in the public sector and various private sector industries, but here is the situation in its broadest outlines.

• Our laws deny one-quarter of U.S. workers the right to bargain collectively. Public sector employees in 14 states-approximately 7 million of them-cannot bargain collectively because there are state laws that forbid it. And 25 million workers in various private sector industries are also out of luck. This is especially tough for agricultural and domestic workers and others in low-wage jobs where they are unlikely to have health insurance or a secure pension plan to compensate for a thin paycheck. But a trend toward filling jobs with temporary and contract employees is dramatically increasing the number of workers who, because they are not regular employees at a company, are denied the protection of union membership. These workers run the gamut from janitors to high-tech computer specialists.

• In sectors where unions are legal, companies can put nearly insurmountable obstacles in the way of workers seeking to organize or negotiate a contract. The anti-union campaign is often led by a consultant whose only purpose is to discourage workers by whatever means possible. For instance, by getting known union supporters fired on trumped-up charges. (Such firings take place in one of every four attempts to organize a workplace.) Or by forcing workers to listen to anti-union presentations or attend one-on-one meetings with supervisors who pressure them to vote against the union. Or by predicting that, if workers do vote to certify the union, the company may well have to close and move elsewhere. (This particular type of intimidation takes place in 51 percent of organizing efforts.) Or even by spying on and threatening workers who seem disposed to favor the union. Given management's obvious position of power over its workers, the anti-union strategies are often successful-that's why workers need a union in the first place. And if the union does win the election, members of the new local can face delays that stretch out for years, as management throws up roadblock after roadblock, to put off the time when the first contract is negotiated.

• Laws designed to protect unions and their members are weak and poorly enforced. It's true that we have labor laws, in particular the National Labor Relations Act, that are supposed to level the playing field and protect employees against anti-union pressure. But even the strongest law is only as strong as its enforcement and, the truth is, the NLRA is weak and weakly enforced. A standard penalty for companies that infringe the law is to require them to post a statement admitting to their misbehavior. As for companies that illegally fire employees involved in a union campaign, they are required only to give the employee back pay, minus what he or she may have earned in the meantime. That's hardly a slap on the wrist. The law even permits a company to hire "permanent" replacement workers during a strike, thus effectively inoculating many companies against any job action a local union might try to take against them.

People throughout the world consider America the most fortunate nation on the planet-and it's not hard to see why. It is a place where ordinary citizens from all races and religions can enjoy personal and political freedom and where their hard work can lift them up into prosperity. But too often there is a basic contradiction between our principles and our practice.

We value the right of free association and yet we deny the right to organize, one of the most important forms of free association, to an enormous number of our workers. We value democracy and yet we are dismissive about unions, one of the principal democratic institutions, the one that dictators most fear and the first they take over.

And rightly so. We should remember that it was a union that overthrew the communist dictatorship in Poland, and the free unions of the world, including the AFL-CIO, which played pivotal roles in rebuilding a democratic Europe after World War II and bringing down the Iron Curtain.

There can be no true democracy without the right to free association-which means the right to organize unions. And that goes for the United States as well as the rest of the world.