Even though Johanna Moon and her co-workers at Trump Plaza casino voted overwhelmingly to form a union with the UAW and prevailed against a company challenge to the vote, management refused to bargain a contract. So the workers filed an action with the National Labor Relations Board, which ordered Trump to negotiate. But the corporation continues to delay, and two years after forming a union, the workers still have no contract.
With the Employee Free Choice Act, a proposed bill to level the playing field for workers seeking to form unions, Moon and her co-workers would have a contract long before now.
Moon has worked at Trump Plaza for 25 years. She started as a cashier and held various positions until she became a casino dealer 16 years ago. She has raised two children and has five grandchildren.
Over the course of her career at Trump Plaza, Moon has always sought to improve her workplace and help her co-workers. Yet over the years, she has become increasingly frustrated by the obvious disparity in compensation between casino executives and her co-workers. While Donald Trump, the chairman and largest shareholder in Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc., which owns the Trump Plaza, made $32 million in 2007, Moon and her co-workers were living paycheck to paycheck, some of them without health insurance coverage.
To address these disparities and bargain for basic workplace safety standards and pension and health care benefits, Moon and her fellow dealers formed a union with the UAW. By a 2-1 margin, the workers chose to form their union in hopes of bargaining for a better future.
“We have got to be union," Moon said recently, because “the company isn’t going to give us anything, and they don’t want us to get anything, either.”
In spite of the overwhelming victory, Trump has refused to accept the will of Moon and her co-workers. The company filed objections to the election, which were eventually thrown out by the NLRB, delaying union certification for more than a year. Even then, Trump refused to bargain with the union.
The workers were forced to file unfair labor practice charges against the company to get managers to the bargaining table. But despite an NLRB order to recognize and bargain with the union, the workers still have not gotten a first contract.
It has been two years since workers at Trump Plaza formed their union. Moon knows the delaying tactics used by the company to keep from bargaining a contract with the workers would not have been available if the Employee Free Choice Act were law.
“We need the Employee Free Choice Act," Moon says. "All workers need the Employee Free Choice Act. It’s not fair as it is now. Something’s got to change.”
Greedy CEOs and anti-union front groups are working overtime to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act. Support the Employee Free Choice Act.
