Nationwide Rallies Demand Freedom to Form Unions

Through town hall meetings, rallies and candlelight vigils, they pledged to educate and mobilize union members; fight employer interference on local organizing campaigns; lobby members of Congress to support improvements to labor law; and keep workers’ rights at the center of the 2004 election efforts.

Dec. 10 commemorates the anniversary of the ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The declaration establishes the right of people in every nation to form unions and negotiate contracts. The U.S. government had recognized that right 13 years earlier with the National Labor Relations Act.

But while workers have the legal right to form unions to negotiate for better benefits, pay, safety standards and working conditions, employers across the country routinely block their efforts with threats, coercion and intimidation. One-quarter of private sector employers fire at least one worker during a campaign to form a union, according to research conducted at Cornell University. The research also found that almost all private-sector employers — 92 percent — who are involved in organizing campaigns, force employees to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union propaganda.

Speaking at a Washington, D.C., rally, Martha Gardon said:

“My co-workers want a union, but they are scared.” Gardon, a parking lot attendant and member of Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Local 27, is helping workers at other garages form a union. “If the law protected us from threats, we’d be able to organize more quickly”, she said.

“There are 45 million workers in our country who say they would join a union in an instant if they could, but they are prevented from doing that by employers and anti-worker elected leaders who have systematically stolen the freedom to organize from workers,” said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, who led thousands of New York City workers and their allies on a march from Wall Street to the New York office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) at Federal Plaza. “This hurts workers and it is hurting our country.”

Silhouettes along the demonstration route profiled some of the 14,000 workers who filed suits with the NLRB in New York state last year, describing how their employers violated their rights.

In other events around the country, workers rallied with AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka and Steelworkers President Leo Gerard at Giant Eagle Supermarket in Pittsburgh in support of grocery workers trying to form a union with USWA. The workers said the company threatens and disciplines them when they refuse to sign anti-union literature. Seven workers said they were fired for trying to form a union.

Minnesota activists gathered at the state capitol, where Wendell Anderson, Swedish consul emeritus and former Minnesota governor, accepted a resolution asking Sweden’s ambassador to the United Nations for help in bringing the United States into compliance with the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights.

Boston union members and allies marched and rallied to support workers at Telecom USA and the Worcester, Mass., manufacturer Saint Gobain Industries. At Telecom USA last summer, 41 workers said they were fired for trying to form a union, while Saint Gobain workers voted nearly two-and-a-half years ago to form a union with UAW, but have been stonewalled since then by their employer during contract negotiations.
“Here in Massachusetts and in thousands of other workplaces across the country, workers are being lied to, harassed, threatened, coerced, followed, disciplined and even fired when they try to exercise their legal right to form a union”, Massachusetts AFL-CIO leaders Robert Haynes and Kathleen Casavant wrote in a Boston Globe opinion column. The newspaper also editorialized in favor of strengthening rights at work.

At the Washington rally, U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) noted: “More and more employers today are illegally threatening, intimidating and firing workers to prevent them from gaining a stronger voice on pay and conditions in the workplace. But the laws are so poorly enforced today that in one-quarter of all union organizing drives, employers fire workers illegally with impunity.

To help protect the freedom to form unions, Kennedy is co-sponsoring the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) with U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.). The proposed legislation, S. 1925 and H.R. 3619, will allow employees to freely choose whether to form unions by signing cards authorizing union representation; provide mediation and arbitration for first contract disputes; and establish stronger penalties for violation of employee rights when workers seek to form a union and during first contract negotiations.

Encouraged by activists who sent more than 50,000 faxes to their elected representatives asking that they co-sponsor the landmark legislation, more than 125 members of the House and Senate are supporting EFCA.