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RIBCO
Articles of Interest
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2006-02-24
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The Price Of Being Pro Union |
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STEWART ACUFF, AFL-CIO ORGANIZING DIRECTOR - In the United States, when private sector workers in America try to form a union through the National Labor Relations Board process, they are subjected to weeks, months or even years of harassment, surveillance, subtle and overt intimidation, and retaliation -- including demotions, suspensions, firings, and sometimes beatings.
When the miners at an American Electric & Power coal mine in southern Ohio tried to form a union last winter, 31 were laid off because of the company's poor financial performance. Six weeks later -- just a week before the workers were to vote in an NLRB election -- the remaining workers received $1,000 plus bonuses a week for "good financial performance." This sort of anti-worker, hypocritical whipsawing is now typical of American corporations, which frequently employ legal "consultants" and attorney attack dogs who go to any length to stop workers trying to organize.
Three years ago, Human Rights Watch issued a report documenting the fact that the United States is in violation of international law and internationally accepted human rights standards for failing to protect the rights of American workers to freely form unions. According to the NLRB, an average of 20,000 American workers a year are victimized by their employers for organizing and union activity. Cornell University scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner has documented the abuse. According to her research:
· In 90% of unionization efforts, the employer hires a consultant to frustrate the will of the workers;
· In 70-80% of campaigns, the employer conducts forced meetings to harangue the workers against the union and, more insidiously, holds one-on-one supervision meetings;
· 50% of the time, the employer threatens to close the work site; and
· In over one-quarter of all unionization efforts, activists are fired.
The effects on our society of depriving workers of a fundamental human right are devastating: declining civic and political activity, steadily eroding retirement system, an ever-widening wage and income gap, growing poverty, and a dangerous rightward drift of our cultural and political life.
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