Workers to Highlight Employee Free Choice on Human Rights Day

Workers to Highlight Employee Free Choice on Human Rights Day

by James Parks, Dec 9, 2008

    Last year on International Human Rights Day, workers demanded that the freedom to form unions be restored.      

In hundreds of cities across the nation, workers will mark International Human Rights Day on Dec. 10 with a campaign to educate the public and build momentum to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. International Human Rights Day falls each year on the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes the freedom to form unions. This is the 60th anniversary of the declaration in 1948.

In Boston, representatives from a dozen community and labor organizations will gather to kick off a statewide campaign in support of the legislation, which would give workers a simple one-step process to freely choose a union. It also would strengthen penalties against companies that intimidate employees trying to form unions and provide for mediation and arbitration when employers and workers cannot agree on a first contract.

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker says the Employee Free Choice Act is at the heart of helping to turn around our economy:

We know that whatever else we are able to achieve, we won’t create economic growth that is broadly shared unless we restore the freedom of working people to make their own decision to join a union and bargain with their employers for better wages and benefits for a better future for their children and the next generation