The freedom to join a union is recognized internationally as a fundamental human right, deeply rooted in international and U.S. law, like other basic freedoms such as freedom of religion and the right to work free from discrimination based on race, gender or age. The freedom to join a union is an important aspect of the freedom of association, which the United Nations recognized as a human right in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But when workers try to form or join a union in the United States today, employers nearly always violate workers’ fundamental human rights with tactics designed to suppress the freedom to organize, according to an August 2000 report by Human Rights Watch, Unfair Advantage. “Many workers who try to form and join trade unions to bargain with their employers are spied on, harassed, pressured, threatened, suspended, fired, deported or otherwise victimized in reprisal for their exercise of the right to freedom of association,” the report says. The report points to the “culture of near-impunity” that pervades U.S. labor law and practice and notes “Human rights cannot flourish where workers’ rights are not enforced.”

Human Rights Watch report finds employer interference in U.S. workplaces.

• Firing or otherwise discriminating against a worker for trying to form a union is illegal but commonplace in the United States.
• Almost without limits, employers can legally force workers to attend closeddoor meetings against the union on work time.
• Under U.S. law, employers have refined methods of legally “predicting”—as distinct from unlawfully threatening—workplace closures, firings, wage and benefit cuts and other dire consequences if workers form and join a union.
• There are long delays—often taking years—in the National Labor Relations Board and court procedures.
• Even after workers form a union and bargaining begins, some employers continue to thwart workers’ choice by bargaining in bad faith—going through the motions of meeting with the workers and making proposals and counterproposals without any intention of reaching an agreement.
• Millions of workers in the United States are not covered by laws that are supposed to protect the right to organize and bargain collectively, such as some temporary and contractual workers.
• Employers use subcontracting arrangements and temporary employment agencies to avoid any obligation to recognize workers’ rights of organization and collective bargaining.
  

Source: For a copy of the full report, go to www.hrw.org/campaigns/uslabor.