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This is a quote from Franklin Roosevelt. When confronted with the wishes of his progressive voters, his reply was, “I agree with you, Now go make me do it!” In the coming elections this year, that is what Labor and Progressives are going to do.

The incumbents in Arkansas and Pennsylvania have opposed the Employee Free Choice Act and, in Arkansas, National Health Care. Luckily, there are real progressives willing to take their jobs.  By placing real Democrats in Congress we are attempting to place pressure on the President (you remember, the guy who promised us he would pass the Employee free Choice Act) to do the right thing.

But it appears there are forces amassed against us that don’t want to do the right thing. Offering Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter’s opponent a position in the administration if he would not run, and sending former President Bill Clinton to Arkansas to rage against us to “not be manipulated!” tells me they just don’t get it.

Clinton, we have not forgotten the North American Free Trade Agreement. We know whose side you are on. But we still have some hope for the present administration, and we stand ready to “make them do it!”

Kris Dye
President
USW Local 4959
Spokane, Wash.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Corporate CEOs, union-busting lawyers, and conservative politicians who pander to the rich condemned a National Mediation Board (NMB) Ruling this week.

They complained that the NMB gave railway and airline workers the ability to obtain collective bargaining rights through majority-rule elections. That’s the type of balloting that occurs under universal democratic rules. Everyone qualified to vote is invited to participate, and the outcome is determined by the majority of those who cast ballots.

The anti-worker-rights groups wanted the NMB to retain a different kind of election – one that requires the winner to receive votes from the majority of all of those qualified to participate — essentially, a supermajority.

This is an exciting new development. Up until now CEOs, union-busters, and particularly conservative Republicans, have actively opposed the Employee Free Choice Act, mainly because of a provision they call “card check.” But card check provides exactly what they now say that they want – a determination made by the majority of all of those qualified to participate. So, clearly, since they’re so upset by the end of supermajority rule for airline and railroad workers, they’d be happy if Congress intervened and instituted it for all workers by passing the Employee Free Choice Act.  

For a little over 70 years, the NMB, which governs collective bargaining by airline and railroad workers, mandated supermajorities. When a group of workers, let’s say Delta Airline Flight Attendants, sought the right to collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions, the NMB conducted an election in which it counted those who voted yes as supporting the proposal; those who voted no as opposing, and all those who didn’t vote as opposing.

The NMB arbitrarily placed the non-voters in the “no” ballot box. To win an election, the NMB required collective bargaining supporters to receive votes from a majority of all those eligible – those who voted combined with those whose ballots the NMB inexplicably stuffed in the “no” box after they did not vote.  

Compounding that supermajority obstacle was the NMB practice of permitting employers to determine who was eligible to vote, then excusing them from providing that list to workers seeking collective bargaining. This created an incentive for employers to “accidently” include the names of workers who’d quit or retired — ineligible voters whose inability to cast ballots created automatic “no” votes. Writing about losing an election in 2008, Delta flight attendant Linda Sorenson said airline officials released its list after the balloting. Among other problems, it included the name of a deceased worker. Sorenson wrote:

“The company acknowledged her death, but the NMB – whose . . . chair had been a Northwest (airline) lobbyist – refused to remove her. She became a vote against representation.”

Airline and railroad workers found the supermajority rule confounding in what is supposed to be a democratic system. Writing the NMB to request the rule change, Jamin B. Raskin, a law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, noted that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1937 that a supermajority is not required, partly because established democratic practice is:

“Those who do not participate ‘are presumed to assent to the expressed will of the majority of those voting.’”

The NMB ignored the Supreme Court and continued requiring a supermajority – until Monday. Then it joined the National Labor Relations Board, which complied with the Supreme Court decision and allowed majority-rule elections for the vast majority of U.S. workers whose collective bargaining rights it governs.  

The minute the NMB proposed the change to majority-rule elections last fall, anti-worker-rights groups started pitching a fit. Union-busting law firm Winston & Strawn wrote, for example, that the NMB should not change a rule that had been in effect for nearly 75 years. It contended that elections for workers should be different from elections for political candidates and referendums:

“The change would enable unions to obtain representation simply by winning a majority of votes cast, as opposed to a majority of all employees eligible to vote on the issue . . . Under the proposed new rule, a minority of workers could effectively select a union representative on behalf of a much larger potential bargaining unit.”

Conservative Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia agreed, protesting in a news release that Monday’s decision gave workers the same rights as all others in a democratic system:

“The final rule change, which was issued today, would affect companies under the jurisdiction of the Railway Labor Act by allowing union elections to be decided by only a majority of workers who cast ballots, reducing the number of votes it takes for a union to win.”

The solution to Isakson’s complaint is passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. That legislation would require consent of a majority of eligible workers for the awarding of collective bargaining rights.

Under the Employee Free Choice Act, workers seeking collective bargaining rights would collect signatures among their co-workers. If more than half of all eligible workers signed cards in support, the NLRB or NMB would recognize the workers as having the right to collectively bargain with the employer for the benefit of all of the workers.

This process would guarantee that a majority of all eligible workers supported collective bargaining before it could occur. It is a process that was routinely used to secure collective bargaining rights in the early days of union organizing in this country. It gives anti-worker-rights groups such as Winston & Strawn exactly what they’re demanding – a supermajority.

The process is not an election. But with secret balloting, requiring a supermajority is undemocratic. No one can be compelled to vote in a democratic system. And counting those who don’t vote as supporters of collective bargaining is just as logical as tallying them as unanimously opposed.

The solution provided in the Employee Free Choice Act is elegant and historically valid. It’s great that Isakson and his fellow conservative Republicans in the U.S. Senate now back the supermajority concept that the Employee Free Choice Act achieves through “card check.”

 By Stewart Acuff
Chief of Staff of the Utility Workers Union of America

A front page story in the Jan. 2 issue of the Washington Post gives a damning report on George Bush’s economic policy and what happened to our country during the last decade, the decade of the aughts.

Put succinctly, the decade was a disaster for America’s working families.

• Zero job growth in the last decade when every previous for 60 years had job growth of at least 20 percent.
• Not stagnant but declining income for working and middle class families.
• And declining net worth or family wealth–despite substantial growth in productivity.

You have to hope that Lawrence Summers and the economic team at the White House are reading the Post.

You cannot grow the economy from the top. You must have broadly shared prosperity.

As the Post put it: “Capital was funneled to build mini-mansions in the Sun Belt, many which now sit empty, rather than toward industrial machines or other business investment that might generate economic output and jobs for years to come.”

The prescription for a policy of broadly shared prosperity is clear:

• Pass the Employee Free Choice Act to allow workers to freely form unions and bargain for a fair and greater share of the wealth they create and the productivity they generate.
• Reform health care. Take the system from the grip of insurance companies, create a large public plan to make sure everyone is covered and to compete with the insurance companies–and do not tax the benefits of working families. Force every employer to provide health care for their workers.
• Invest now, immediately in sustainable energy–wind farms, solar farms and small scale solar energy generation. Make sure all elements of new energy generation are produced here with wages that can sustain middle class lifestyles. No more impoverishing our own people. That means wind turbines built here, not in China, erected here by union operations. Power lines and a new electricity grid erected by members of the Utility Workers Union.
• Create a real industrial policy and investment incentives and re-think trade policy to re-create an American manufacturing base so we get back to creating wealth instead of borrowing it.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Norma Rae and Teddy Kennedy are dead.

Well, the woman on whom the 1979 Academy Award winning movie Norma Rae was based – Crystal Lee Sutton – died Sept. 12. Sen. Kennedy died just weeks earlier on Aug. 25.

Brain cancer felled both iconic labor heroes.

It was a hell of a start to the AFL-CIO’s 26^th Constitutional Convention in Pittsburgh this weekend.

Caroline Kennedy stood in for her uncle Monday, telling the delegates she’d promised to speak on his behalf. She asked the delegates to devote themselves to the labor struggles to which Sen. Kennedy had dedicated his life, one of which was the Employee Free Choice Act.

Passage of the act, which would ease union organizing and completing first contracts, would definitely be a cause for celebration by industrial organizations and federations of labor.

Crystal Lee Sutton’s story reinforces why it’s vital Congress pass the act.

At age 17, she began working for a J.P. Stevens textile mill in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., where conditions and pay were poor.

In the early 1970s, labor organizer Eli Zivkovich, moved to Roanoke Rapids and enlisted her help to establish a union at the mill. By then, she was 33, had three children, and was earning $2.65 an hour. To try to convince co-workers to form a union to bargain for improvements, Sutton walked door-to-door and went to work early.

“When I went in the plant with my union pin, you would have thought I had the plague and that is when the trouble started. It was truly different because a woman had never done or dared to do such stuff,” Sutton said in a June, 2008 interview.

A manager fired her when she copied a flyer put up by the mill that claimed black workers would run the union.

Before she left that day, Sutton took a stand that was recounted verbatim in the film, Norma Rae, in which Sally Fields starred.  “I took a piece of cardboard and wrote the word UNION on it in big letters, got up on my work table, and slowly turned it around. The workers started cutting their machines off and giving me the victory sign. All of a sudden the plant was very quiet,” she said.

Police physically removed Sutton from the mill. But the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) won the right to represent the workers. That’s what people remember from the film. A great victory. What they don’t know is that J.P. Stevens officials didn’t sign a labor contract with the union until a decade later.

That’s why the Employee Free Choice Act must pass. Not only do companies threaten, harass and illegally fire workers like Sutton who try to form unions, but even when workers finally do win union representation, corporations wrongly hold up negotiations to deny workers their first labor contract – as J. P. Stevens did.

In that case, the workers won on both counts. They ultimately got a labor contract – a decade later, and in 1977 a court ordered Stevens to pay Sutton back wages and restore her job.  

But in far too many cases, workers win on no counts. They never get to organize because of aggressive and illegal actions used with impunity by corporations that hire union-busting consultants.

That is tragic for America because good union wages were critical to creating and are crucial to sustaining the nation’s middle class.

Teddy Kennedy, a rich man who spent his career legislating for the working man, once said, “I say you spell Kennedy L-A-B-O-R.”

Caroline Kennedy said yesterday, “It is time to make the dreams of Teddy Kennedy’s career a reality.”

She urged the AFL-CIO delegates to do as Dr. Martin Luther King summoned striking sanitation workers in Memphis to do just before his death:

“Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge, to make America what it ought to be.”

For Kennedy, for Sutton, for us all, America ought to have the Employee Free Choice Act.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

This week the minimum wage rose by 70 cents to $7.25 an hour, a beggar’s lot really, but still corporations across America decried it. Good times or bad, somehow Wall Streeters walk away with $700,000 bonuses, you know, on top of their salaries, but a 70-cent minimum wage hike is never affordable.

That’s why America’s workers must seize control of their own fates. President Obama said: “Our destiny is not written for us. It is written by us.” Well, on a sweltering July 11, 1,500 civil rights, human rights and workers rights activists in Little Rock began writing a new destiny for American workers.

That destiny includes the freedom to form and join a union and to collectively bargain for a piece of the wealth they helped create. That destiny includes passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

The 1,500 met in Little Rock because Arkansas is the home state of Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat who turned her back on the Employee Free Choice Act this year, succumbing to pressure from the likes of Wal-Mart, a notoriously anti-union corporation headquartered in the Razorback State. Many Wal-Mart workers will be getting a 70 cent raise this week – thanks to that minimum wage hike.

Rich Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, and I met with Sen. Lincoln a couple of weeks before the rally, and she kept telling us how she had passed legislation to help children and how she really wanted to help families. The best way to help families is to let them help themselves through collective bargaining.

I’ll tell you what I told the 1,500 in Little Rock that day. Write her. Call her. E-mail her. “Tell her the best way to help the children, the best way to help families, the best way to help the seniors, the best way to get to the middle class is for workers to have the right to join a union and bargain collectively for a piece of the pie that they helped to make and for a piece of the wealth they helped to create.”

That is what the Employee Free Choice Act does.

The rally in Little Rock started at Central High School where nine Black youngsters braved violence to desegregate in 1958. Fifty-one years later, we are engaged in another civil rights struggle. And Rev. Wendell Griffin, a Baptist pastor and judge on the Arkansas Court of Appeals, expressed that best.

Rev. Griffin asked the 1,500, “Are we free?”

No one yelled yes.

He repeated, “Are we free?”

Again, no affirmative response.

He explained, when one person is not free, all people are not free. “We are brothers and sisters, and when one worker is not paid fairly, all workers are not paid fairly.”  And, he said, the way for all workers to be paid fairly, is for workers to have the right to organize.

He told the story of his father working, without a union, in a saw mill; how he later got  union representation, a raise, a pension and better working conditions. And, importantly, how that changed his family’s life.

Finally, he told the crowd:  “What my father had is what every worker ought to have in Arkansas.”

Every worker should have the right to join a union, receive a pension and labor in safety.

He noted that the people of Arkansas have given that to Blanche Lincoln – voted to provide her with a government job, good benefits and a pension.

“Now is our time,” he said.

“Employee Free Choice Act Now.”

Watch the Video.

Stewart Acuff

By Stewart Acuff
Special Assistant to the President, AFL-CIO

I was on Fox News last week doing an interview with right-wing talking head Stuart Varney. He began what became a very hostile interview by charging that the labor movement is using Pope Benedict’s Papal Encyclical for political purposes, part of our effort to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

Given, what the Pope wrote, that charge may be the only defense of the Right against the Pope’s clear, unambiguous, and strong language: “Through the combination of social and economic change, trade union organizations experience greater difficulty in carrying out their task of representing the interests of workers, partly because Governments for reasons of economic utility, often limit the freedom or the negotiating capacity of labor unions. Hence traditional networks of solidarity have more and more obstacles to overcome. The repeated calls issued within the Church’s social doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum (60), for the promotion of workers’ associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honored today even more than in the past, as a prompt and far-sighted response to the urgent need for new forms of cooperation at the international level, as well as the local level.”

Sounds like an unambiguous call for the Employee Free Choice Act to me.

Pope Bendict’s Encyclical Letter called “Caritas in Veritae” or “In Charity and Truth” seems to be a guide for the social teachings of the Church in a time of profound global economic change. Certainly, as we’ve shown the Pope is clear about the necessity of unions and workers rights, but he is also critical of the kind of greed and unfettered capitalism that has led the US to yawning inequality and economic crisis:

“Profit is useful if it serves as a means toward an end that provides a sense both of how to produce it and how to make good use of it. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by an improper means and without the common good as its ultimate ends, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty… The world’s wealth is growing in absolute terms, but inequalities are on the increase. In rich countries, new sectors of society are succumbing to poverty, and new forms of poverty are emerging.”

And what does the Pope say about the common good?

“The more we strive to secure a common good corresponding to the real needs of our neighbors, the more effectively we love them. Every Christian is called to practice this charity, in a manner corresponding to his vocation and according to the degree of influences he wields in this polis. This is the institutional path — we might also call it the political path…”

So he is calling for political action based on his words. On politics and market economics the Pope also says: “Economic activity cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic. This needs to be directed towards the pursuit of the common good, for which the political community in particular must also takes responsibility.

Therefore, it must be borne in mind that grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceives as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution.”

I’m neither a Roman Catholic scholar nor a Biblical scholar, but I can read and the Pope’s language is crisp and clear. He has laid out the moral imperative for all of us to engage political action to bend the market towards the common good, to restrain the greed of the markets, to protect workers and collective bargaining rights, to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, and to see that those rights and other aspects of the common good are not sacrificed on the altar of profit for profit’s sake.

Stewart Acuff

By Stewart Acuff
Special Assistant to the President, AFL-CIO

After trillions of dollars in federal spending to lift our economy out of the greatest economic crisis in 75 years, we now know that besides financial deregulation and insatiable greed, the biggest cause of our crisis is 30 years of stagnant and declining wages. We also know that we cannot get out of this economic mess without increasing consumer demand.

Thirty years of stagnant and declining wages are the result of the systematic, intentional, strategic destruction of the freedom of American workers to form unions and bargain collectively. That is why we are working so hard to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

But, corporate America did not erase these freedoms by itself. Radical right wing Republicans like those in Congress and the now disgraced Bush Administration did all they could to destroy collective bargaining.

They removed millions of workers from coverage of any labor laws including graduate workers at universities, misnamed and ill-defined supervisors, some disabled workers, and others.

But, it is in the federal government itself that the Bush Administration really concentrated on destroying collective bargaining. They destroyed collective bargaining for 160,000 workers at the Department of Homeland Security including 40,000 screeners in the Transportation Security Administration. They tried to destroy collective bargaining for almost a million workers in the Department of Defense. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and a coalition of AFL-CIO unions stopped the assault at the Department of Defense.

And AFGE has waged a remarkable creative, strategic and energetic campaign to give TSA workers collective bargaining and organizing freedoms. In the absence of collective bargaining AFGE has organized a union of TSA workers to demand and campaign for collective bargaining rights.

Now AFGE has introduced legislation called the Transportation Security Workforce Enhancement Act (HR 1881) to grant TSA workers the same collective bargaining rights and workforce protections as other federal workers and end TSA’s flawed personnel rules that have denied their workers thousands of dollars in increased wages.

It is critical that the Democratic Congress and the Obama Administration pass HR 1881 and reverse the Bush Administration’s assault on collective bargaining in the federal workforce.

It should be abundantly clear and obvious by now that unions and collective bargaining are not economic culprits but are essential to long term, sustainable economic well being.

Collective bargaining is by far the best, more efficient and cost effective way to increase consumer demand by allowing workers to negotiate a fair share of the fruits of their work and productivity. Collective bargaining is the only way to build, expand, strengthen, and deepen the American middle class. The destruction of collective bargaining freedoms is the reason we all feel the squeeze on the middle class.

And unions are the most effective counterweight to Corporate Power. The thirty years assault on workers and their unions are the major reason that Corporate Power is out of control in America.

The cozy relationship between the Radical Right wing Republican Party and Corporate Power brought us a war in Iraq and billions of dollars to Dick Cheney’s Halliburton Corporation and KBR in sole source military contracts, a deregulated financial services sector, insatiable corporate greed, a corrupt you’re on your own business and government ethos, the destruction of the notion of the common good, our deep, painful economic crisis, and the consequent loss of trillions of dollars of U.S. wealth.

At least in part change we can believe in, means changing where the nation’s wealth and bounty goes.

As 1000 business owners have shown, everyone benefits when working families have more to spend.

Seth Freed Wessler

By Seth Freed Wessler
Researcher at the Applied Research Center

When General Motors filed for bankruptcy on Monday, it left behind a long trail of grievers– twenty-one thousand of them. The loss of these good, union jobs and the many more that will be shed when related businesses close are devastating families and communities. For Black workers, who are highly concentrated in the auto industry, these have long been some of the few reliable jobs that pay living wages, supplying families of color the with the possibility of entering the middle class.

As we now know, high levels of unionization equate with smaller income gaps between people of color and whites. But in the economy we’ve inherited from the last three decades of deregulation and declining union density, people of color are increasingly relegated to low-wage, precarious work that pays too little to support a family. Unless Congress acts now to ensure that work actually pays, these workers will have few options and we’ll only deepen the racial income and wealth divides.

A few months ago, I traveled to Michigan to interview dozens of people for “Race and Recession,” a new report released by the Applied Research Center. I met Leo Shipman, a 24-year-old Black man, who had recently lost his job in an auto parts factory in Detroit. “My biggest worry is my son,” he said about his 3-year-old. “You don’t know how you’re going to feed them. He doesn’t know the bills are running up, but I do.” When I met Shipman, he was on the edge of being evicted from his apartment.

With only a high school education–Shipman’s been trying to enroll in a technical college–securing a living-wage job proves elusive if not impossible. Because he had been underemployed, Shipman had no unemployment check coming in. It’s growing more likely that his only option will be to work a job that makes feeding his son a daily struggle.

As one of the last strongholds of union jobs shrinks, and people like Shipman are cast out, it’s time to confront some tough truths about work in our country. Black workers like Shipman have been hit especially hard by layoffs and closures because their concentration in the auto industry is higher than their overall share of the state’s labor market. In fact, across the labor market, workers of color are overrepresented in occupations with high unemployment rates. These include jobs in the service sector, as well as construction and transportation occupations. The loss of these auto industry jobs strikes a massive blow to the ability of workers, especially Black workers, to earn middle-class incomes, to save enough to pass on to their children and to achieve some financial stability. Indeed, the UAW was one of the first unions to organize Black workers and the implosion of GM further dismantles one of the mainstays of the Black middle class.

The collateral damage of job loss are taking their toll. Sandra Hines, a 55 year old Detroit native who I wrote about last week, lost the home her family owned for 40 years after her sister was laid off from GM and was forced refinance. The family was sold a predatory loan with an adjustable rate and was evicted after payments skyrocketed. As more people lose their jobs, more families will find themselves unable to pay their mortgages and more wealth will be drained. It is now clear that the perils of this situation go beyond these communities. Indeed, as we find in “Race and Recession,” the racially discriminatory predatory lending and foreclosure crisis was a central factor in pushing the economy into this recession.

As a country, we’re reckoning with the fall-out from decades of putting profit above people. As precious union jobs disappear, the time has come to ensure that those who are unemployed–disproportionately people of color–are able to enter employment that actually pays. Congress should immediately pass the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) so that workers can demand fair pay without intimidation. Since UAW now has a major ownership stake in the company, the workers who remain there will be taken care of, but the 21,000 workers who are getting pushed out will be less likely to find jobs with sufficient salaries and benefits, especially as the federal minimum wage increase to $7.25 next month still does not approximate a living wage.

Ultimately, as we recover from this recession, we need to make sure that the jobs we create and the economy we build help those who have been most hurt by the recession, which have disproportionately been families of color. Ensuring that good, sustainable jobs go to communities of color across the country is an essential part of building an inclusive and working economy.

***

Check out arc.org/recession to learn about how racial inequity rigged the economy and how to change the rules.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Randel K. Johnson, vice president of that esteemed group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, recently revealed a corporate-squelched truth in a slip of the tongue.

During a debate on May 15 with Stewart Acuff of the AFL-CIO about the Employee Free Choice Act, Johnson admitted – finally – that the act preserves secret ballot elections for unions. The act would allow workers – rather than employers – to decide whether to form a union by conducting a secret ballot election or by collecting signed membership cards from a majority of workers.

Incredibly, for as much as unearned-bonus-grubbing-CEOs have lied about secret ballots in their relentless campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act, that was not Johnson’s revelation.

No, here’s what he disclosed: If the act passes, he said, “It would be a rare union that would decide to risk a normal secret ballot election.” 

Risk. Interesting word, Mr. Johnson.

The Chamber of Commerce knows there’s a huge risk to secret ballot elections. And the Chamber likes it that way. Employers stack the deck against workers in secret ballot elections. They don’t publicly admit it though. That’s why Johnson’s use of the word “risk” was so surprising.

The Chamber and big corporations like Wal-Mart are intent on defeating the act because it would remove from employers the power to force workers to conduct secret ballot elections.  It would strip from employers that ability to generate risk, to defeat unions, and thus to further shrink wages and the American middle class.

A Cornell University professor, Kate Bronfenbrenner, who has researched labor issues for a quarter century, issued a new study last week that clearly illustrates the risk of secret ballot elections and how employers have labored long and hard to increase that risk in recent years. It’s called, “No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organization.”

Among the tactics she documents employers using in the weeks before the “secret ballot” election to thwart unionization are firing of union organizers, threats to close the plant or cut wages and benefits, and forcing workers to meet one-on-one with supervisors who intimidate and interrogate them to determine whether they support the union.

Bronfenbrenner concluded, “This combination of threats, interrogation, surveillance, and harassment has ensured that there is no such thing as a democratic ‘secret ballot’ in the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) certification election process. The progression of actions the employer has taken can ensure that the employer knows exactly which way every worker plans to vote long before the election takes place.”

Her study showed employers implementing these tactics more frequently than in the past. When she compared organizing campaigns in this five-year period to those in the studies over the previous 20 years, she discovered two disconcerting facts: the cases in which employers used 10 of these threatening techniques in the run-up to elections more than doubled. And employers focused much more on coercive and punitive methods rather than positive procedures such as unscheduled raises and promotions.

Not surprisingly, she also found that as employers exploited harsher tactics and intensified their attacks in the weeks before “secret balloting,” the union was more likely to lose. And, conversely, she found that in campaigns where public sector workers tried organizing and government agencies refrained from coercive and illegal tactics, the union was significantly more likely to win.

If it weren’t so easy for employers to create risk for workers, millions more could get the union protection they want. Surveys show an increasing number of American workers desire a union. In the mid 1990s, it was 40 percent. Now it’s 53 percent. Yet only 12.4 percent of American workers have that protection – and the better wages and benefits that go with it.

Bronfenbrenner addressed this issue in her report: “Our findings suggest that the aspirations for representation are being thwarted by a coercive and punitive climate for organizing that goes unrestrained due to a fundamentally flawed regulatory regime that neither protects their rights nor provides any disincentive for employers to continue disregarding the law.”

She continues: “Unless serious labor law reform with real penalties is enacted, only a fraction of the workers who seek representation under the National Labor Relations Act will be successful.”

That reform is the Employee Free Choice Act, and there’s the point of Johnson’s use of the word risk. The Chamber of Commerce intends to kill the act and leave risk fully on the shoulders of workers. As Bronfenbrenner showed, that would mean fewer will be unionized. Middle class wages and benefits would continue to decline.

It is time for American workers to stop bearing all of the risk. They’re working for less and bailing out the very people who are obstructing their ability to fairly bargain for more.

In October, Bank of America, which has received more than $45 billion in taxpayer bailout money, hosted a conference call with conservatives and business officials, including a representative of AIG, which has received more than $100 billion in taxpayer bailout money, to organize opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act. Then in March, just days after the act was introduced, Citigroup Inc., which got $50 billion in bailout money, hosted a similar conference call, this one led by Glenn Spencer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

During the October call, Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, said he should be on a 350-foot boat in the Mediterranean, but he thought fighting the Employee Free Choice Act was more important because, “This is the demise of a civilization. . . This is how a civilization disappears.”

Yes, the Employee Free Choice Act could contribute ever so slightly to dissipation of a decadent class. Unionization is how the middle class re-emerges. America could do without a few filthy-rich boys lolling on yachts in the Mediterranean. At the heart of America, however, must be a strong and broad middle class.