City Newspaper Archives - 3/2007
LABOR: Let workers choose unions
Published on Mar 13, 2007
Sixty million workers say they would join a union if they could. Labor laws, dating back to the 1930s, are skewed in favor of employers. As a result, good jobs are vanishing, and family health-care coverage and retirement security are slipping out of the reach of the middle class. Only 38 percent of the public says their families are getting ahead financially, and less than a quarter believes the next generation will be better off.
The current system for forming unions and bargaining is broken. Every day, corporations deny employees the freedom to decide for themselves whether to form unions to bargain for a better life.
Anti-worker corporations routinely intimidate, harass, coerce, and even fire people who try to organize unions - to the point that 23,000 American workers are illegally fired every year for trying to form a union at work.
The system has to be changed to give all working people the freedom to make their own choice about whether to have a union and bargain for better wages and benefits. If the law is changed to allow more workers to make their own decision without management coercion, more of America's workers will be able to ensure fair treatment on the job and improve their standards of living.
Chris Hollfelder, Noel Drive, Rochester(Hollfelder is president of Sheet Metal Workers Local 46.)
