Whenever Claudette Gadsden thinks about how frequently her union must go back to the bargaining table to save hard-won benefits, she gets angry. Every negotiation session means another fight against her employer’s efforts to take away affordable health coverage, job security and protection against forced overtime, Gadsden says. Gadsden, a Verizon customer service representative and member of Communications Workers of America Local 2101 in Baltimore, says union members would be better able to negotiate strong contracts if more workers in the same industry formed unions. “It’s important that all telecom companies are unionized so that we don’t have to go through this, fighting for what should be ours,” she says. “We need strong unions. We need to be able to hold on to our good jobs, our good wages and our voice at work,” Gadsden says.

	A justice army: CWA President Morton Bahr leads delegates at his union’s annual convention to pass a resolution supporting the Voice@Work campaign and has encouraged hundreds of local unions to join the fight.

To restore workers’ freedom to form unions, union activists are revving up a long-term Voice@Work campaign on Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day.

In dozens of cities and towns, thousands of union activists and their allies among national civil rights organizations, community groups, religious congregations and elected officials are rallying, holding hearings and conducting campus teach-ins. And they are introducing state and local legislation to support workers’ rights and to extend collective bargaining rights to all workers. In Portland, Ore., union leaders are mobilizing and training activists to canvass union members at home and educate them about the struggle workers face when trying to form unions. Windy City activists are planning a human rights hearing at Chicago Temple United Methodist Church. And in San Francisco, union members and their allies will hold a rally and candlelight vigil, affixing the name of a fired worker to each candle.

As part of the national campaign, on Nov. 21, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) introduced the Employee Free Choice Act (S. 1925 and H.R. 3619), which will make card-check the standard method by which workers choose to form unions, provide mediation and arbitration for first-contract disputes and establish stronger penalties when employers violate the law. Both the bill and the Voice@Work campaign seek the same goals: to change the system that allows widespread abuses of workers’ rights to persist.

Freedom to form unions is a basic human right

	A violation of human rights: Former U-Haul employee Jorge Garcia says he was fired after trying to win a voice at work.
	The Employer War Nearly all private-sector employers—92 percent—force employees to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union propaganda when workers seek to form a union. Eighty percent require supervisors to attend training sessions on attacking unions. Seventy-eight percent mandate supervisors to deliver anti-union messages to workers they oversee. In 25 percent of organizing campaigns, private-sector employers illegally fire workers because they want to form a union. Source: Cornell University researcher Kate Bronfenbrenner.

But decades later, workers say these ideals too often exist only on paper. In reality, employer abuse of workers’ right to form a union is so extreme “the United States is in violation of international human rights standards for workers,” says Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, which three years ago issued Unfair Advantage, a report detailing how far employers will go to prevent workers from winning a voice on the job.

Jorge Garcia has experienced these violations firsthand. When he was an automobile service employee at U-Haul in Las Vegas, Garcia says he faced racial discrimination and favoritism, low wages and meager benefits. Managers promised raises that never materialized, didn’t promote Latino or Asian workers and treated workers disrespectfully. “They’d only clean the bathrooms when the big bosses would come,” says Garcia. Seeking a voice on the job, Garcia and several co-workers spearheaded a union organizing drive with the Machinists—and the company began holding mandatory anti-union meetings for employees. Yet IAM supporters gathered signatures from 70 percent of the workers indicating they wanted to form a union. Managers fired Garcia and several other union activists three hours after workers filed the petition for union recognition.

Undeterred, a strong majority of the U-Haul workers voted to choose a union in May. Days after the election, the company fired two supervisors who had backed the workers’ efforts. According to unfair labor practice charges filed by the IAM, supervisors were asked by managers to falsify employee records in order to undermine employee support. The company has since fired six more workers and filed objections to the election with the National Labor Relations Board, refusing to respect the decision of its employees to form a union. If this situation goes as hundreds of others every year go, the company will delay the workers’ choice of a union for years with appeals. In fact, one-third of the time, workers who vote for a union are never able to negotiate a first contract.

Voice@Work workshop: The secret war exposed

The majority of the public—including union members—is unaware how frequently employers engage in intimidation, harassment, delays and firings such as Garcia and his co-workers experienced. Only 44 percent of the public knows employers generally oppose workers’ efforts to form unions when elections are held, according to a February 2003 poll by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the AFL-CIO—even though nearly all employers mount anti-union campaigns. Union members are only slightly more aware of the problem (50 percent are aware employers generally oppose workers when union elections are held).

Thousands of union members are broadening their awareness about why workers want unions and what happens when they try to form them by taking part in an interactive workshop, developed by the AFL-CIO, The George Meany Center for Labor Studies–The National Labor College and researchers at Cornell University, that highlights the employer war against workers and the reasons workers need unions. Central labor councils, state federations and affiliate unions are using the Voice@Work Member Mobilization Workshop, a self-contained PowerPoint presentation, this fall as part of a national campaign to restore the freedom to form unions.

AFGE Local 476 shop steward Fareed Abdullah, among the first participants in the new workshop, was stunned to learn of the ferocity of employers’ anti-worker tactics. “That was totally shocking,” says Abdullah, a program analyst for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C. “That’s something that would have happened during the Prohibition Era” in the 1920s, he says. Then he reaches even further back in time: “It’s prehistoric.”

Abdullah plans to invite members of his local union to join in the workshop and is spreading the word about it among shop stewards at other federal agencies. In preparation for Dec. 10 activities, many unions, including CWA and Graphic Communications, convened union members from dozens of local unions to experience it as well. “There’s a lack of understanding of the role unions play in our lives,” says Abdullah. The workshop and campaign, he says, helped open his eyes to the impact unions have on improving workers’ lives. “I’m excited about it,” he says. @

The Campaign Is On!     On the Hill: Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass., right) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif., far left), announce the Employee Free Choice Act with Regena Phillips (left) and Joanna Kempner, who have experienced firsthand employer interference in their efforts to form a union. For the first time in more than six decades, Congressional leaders have joined with the union movement to champion historic legislation to enable U.S. workers to join unions and negotiate first contracts without employer harassment. On Nov. 21, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) introduced the Employee Free Choice Act (S. 1925 and H.R. 3619). The act 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. The Employee Free Choice Act, also backed by three Republican House members, “is a real bill of rights for workers,” says Kennedy. “Too many workers who want to be members of a union are unable to do so. Too often, employers discourage it any way they can.” Joanna Kempner says that if the Employee Free Choice Act were law, she’d have her union by now. Struggling to make ends meet on low pay, unable to afford health insurance and carrying heavy teaching workloads, Kempner and the majority of graduate employees at the University of Pennsylvania signed union authorization cards two years ago. But administrators refused to honor the workers’ desires a voice on the job and ran an anti-union campaign leading up to a union election in February. Because of the university’s appeals and delays, the ballots have not yet been counted. “With this law, things would be different,” says Kempner, a sociology graduate student active with the effort to form a union with AFT. “It shouldn’t be this hard” to get a union, she says. Working families are calling their U.S. senators at 202-224-3121 and U.S. representatives at 202-225-3121, urging them to co-sponsor the Employee Free Choice Act. For more information, visit www.aflcio.org/voiceatwork.