The Employee Free Choice Act

Those of you who have managed to stop wetting your pants over a Senate bill with one sponsor in the minority party might want to start supporting positive legislation, like The Employee Free Choice Act, introduced into the House Tuesday with 232 co-sponsors. The act would:

.... restore workers’ freedom to choose a union by:

• Establishing stronger penalties for violation of employee rights when workers seek to form a union and during first-contract negotiations.
• Providing mediation and arbitration for first-contract disputes.
• Allowing employees to form unions by signing cards authorizing union representation.

Now, I know many of you have resigned your children to the tender mercies of the invisible hand of Tom Friedman, but restoring the right to organize in the private sector is really the only thing that is going to mitigate the tremendous and growing inequality of income and wealth that the global economy is creating. If you've been involved in trying to organize a union in the past few decades, or know someone who has, you've seen how far the enforcement and implementation of existing laws has tipped in favor of capital. And yes, we need to organize labor globally to bring balance to the global economy, but we can't do that if we don't have strong unions here.

This will probably never become law as long as Bush is in the White House, but it is time to start putting the pressure on, and we'll get this through in 2009.