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Guest Commentary: June 15, 2001
U.S. Workers' Rights to Organize Under Unlawful Attacks
The Honorable Dennis Kucinich
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The right of workers to organize themselves into a union and bargain collectively are fundamental rights protected by various international conventions. Among them is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the first major achievements of the United Nations.
Article 23 of the UDHR states that "everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests." Another is the Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining Convention, adopted in 1949 at the 32nd assembly of the International Labor Organization and ratified by 148 countries. The very first line of this document reads: "Workers shall enjoy adequate protection against acts of anti-union discrimination in respect of their employment."
United States law also codifies these basic labor rights. The National Labor Relations Act, signed in 1935, guarantees employees the right to organize and chose their bargaining representative. The Act also protects employees from retaliation by their employer for exercising their rights under the NLRA. Section 8 of the Act makes it an Unfair Labor Practice for an employer to "interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees" in the exercise of their rights to organize and bargain collectively. Specifically, employers are barred from discharging or otherwise discriminating against an employee because he or she has engaged in union activity or has filed charges or given testimony under the NLRA.
Unfortunately, there remains in this country a large gap between theory, in which these basic rights are protected, and practice, in which these rights scarcely exist. According to Human Rights Watch, "workers' freedom of association is under sustained attack in the United States, and the government is often failing its responsibility under international human rights standards to deter such attacks and protect workers' rights."
The evidence for this is great. Fewer than 40% of all workers who participate in an NLRB election gain coverage under a collective bargaining agreement; this number was over 75% in the early 1950s. Of the successful campaigns to form a union, only 66% result in a first contract for the newly organized workers. Unionization rates in the U.S. are at some of the lowest levels in decades.
Some will argue that this demonstrates that American workers lack interest in unions. But given unions' demonstrated ability to win Americans better wages, better benefits, and better working conditions, this explanation carries little weight. ...
What do certain unscrupulous corporations do to fight unionization? They coerce, intimidate, threaten, and sometimes even abuse workers. They fire workers are seen talking to union representatives, as Up-To-Date Laundry did recently in Baltimore. They hire union-busting lawyers to slander the local union in front of a captive audience of workers, like the Mariott Corporation did in San Francisco. They alert INS officials to the illegal immigrants in their workforce, even though these employers conveniently ignored their workers illegal status when hiring them.
Walmart threatened to shut down its butchering operation and start selling pre-packaged meat in its stores because a mere 11 workers wanted to unionize. A company called NTN Bower tried to undermine a United Auto Workers unionization drive by threatening to move their jobs to Mexico. A leaflet they passed out to workers read, "With the UAW your jobs may go south for more than the winter!"
This last example suggests the impact of trade agreements on U.S. anti-union activity. As Professor Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University has demonstrated, "plant closing threats and plant closings have become an integral part of employer anti-union campaigns," and that these tactics, combined with others, are "extremely effective" in undermining union organizing efforts. Professor Bronfenbrenner specifically cites NAFTA as facilitating this behavior.
All of this should make us wonder: what does the law do to stop these kind of actions? The answer is virtually nothing. The following quote from Human Rights Watch is illustrative: "An employer determined to get rid of a union activist knows that all that awaits, after years of litigation if the employer persists in appeals, is a reinstatement order the worker is likely to decline and a modest back-pay award.
For many employers, it is a small price price to pay to destroy a workers' organizing effort by firing its leaders." If an employer can go so far as to fire worker with near impunity, certainly the law will not be enough to dissuade this employer from other illegal anti-union tactics.
What is needed to end the abuse of these basic human rights in this country is strict enforcement of existing labor law, tougher penalties for labor law violators, the streamling of the NLRB investigative process, and restrictions on the ability of companies to shift their operations to avoid unionization.
More fundamentally, we as Americans must acknowledge that these rights, the right to organize a union and bargain collectively, are indeed basic human rights, to be protected as vigilantly as are the right to worship freely and the right to free speech. Only when we take these core labor rights as seriously as our other fundamental rights will our workers achieve the respect, dignity, and justice they deserve.
Note: This column has been adapted from a speech Rep. Kucinich delivered on the floor of the House, June 15, 2001.
 How to contact Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)
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