Senate is Battleground for Employee Free Choice Act

Washington, D.C.

With a boost from the new Democratic majority, the House passed the Employee Free Choice Act, designed to help level the playing field between workers and managers in organizing and bargaining, on March 1.

The vote was 241-185. Democrats favored it 228-2, while 13 Republicans voted for it and 183 against. Now the fight is on in the Senate, where it's much tougher to win a majority.

"This legislation is critical to restoring workers' rights and power," said IUE-CWA President Jim Clark. "This is a key component to saving America's middle class lifestyle."

Clark urged every single IUE-CWA member to call their senators to ask them to sponsor EFCA.

"Our bargaining strength relies on our ability to keep our industries organized," he explained. "You may have a union, but if the workers in the next plant don't, it can depress area wages and benefits. Organizing power equals bargaining power."

There are two key sections of EFCA that would shift power back to workers who want a union.

The first provision would write into law card-check recognition of unions that achieve a majority of signed and verified National Labor Relations Board cards.

The aim is to give workers a free, unfettered choice by circumventing the firings, intimidation, threats and other anti-worker tactics employers use in NLRB election campaigns.

The other key provision would mandate arbitration in case employers and unions, after recognition, fail to reach a first contract within a set period of time. The arbitrator would write a two-year pact governing both sides.

Witness Earl Hohrein, of Greeley, Colo., a longtime Boilermaker and middle-aged Vietnam veteran, told a Senate subcommittee that he was fired immediately after the Steel Workers won the election at the plant he helped organize there, Front Range Energy.

Hohrein added that "it could be years before I get my job back" due to the company's appeal of the NLRB ruling that it fired him illegally for organizing.

And when Hohrein does get his job back, he'll get back pay: $3,800. "That minimal penalty is not a real deterrent" to Front Range and other labor law-breakers, he said.

Current labor law calls for giving an illegally fired worker his or her job back, plus back pay minus whatever other wages he or she earned while awaiting reinstitution.

EFCA is part of an effort by the new Democratic-run 110th Congress to show it is standing up for working people, new House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said.

"We had 'Six in 06' and all those measures were for working families," he said, referring to the six top-priority bills House Democrats passed in January, including a raise in the minimum wage for the first time in a decade.

"This affects real lives, real people, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers. We're saying to working Americans: 'We'll facilitate the ability to have you organize,'" Hoyer declared.

EFCA's fate is uncertain because Democrats control the Senate only 51-49 and the GOP's business backers have made clear that fighting and killing EFCA is one of their top priorities.

The key tactic is a filibuster Ñ a talkathon that can be shut off only by a three-fifths majority vote.

Anticipating Republican opposition, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he welcomed a fight over EFCA: "If our friends on the other side want to filibuster let 'em. It's time to stand up for working people in this country."