Employee Free Choice Act

Madam Speaker, House Resolution 203 provides for consideration of H.R. 800, the Employee Free Choice Act, under a structured rule with 1 hour of general debate equally divided and controlled by the chairman and the ranking minority member of the Committee on Education and Labor.

Madam Speaker, I am so honored to be here to talk about this rule and this bill. There is no fear quite like the fear of losing your job. It is paralyzing, because to fear for your job is to fear for your family, for their well-being and for your ability to provide for them. I know this fear because I have seen it on the faces of the people who help to make our world turn, the workers who struggle every day to do the jobs we could not live without.

Before I was elected to Congress, I had the honor to serve as an attorney representing many of those workers. And Madam Speaker, when you work as a labor lawyer, unfortunately, often you see people with that fear in their eyes. They come to you because their jobs are being threatened, or worse, because they have been wrongfully terminated because they were attempting to organize a union or promote union activity to improve their lives and the lives of their coworkers.

But it doesn't have to be this way. In this country, employees who actively promote union organizing have a 1-in-5 chance of getting fired for their activities. Every 23 minutes, a United States worker is retaliated against for their support of a union.

In 1958, about 1,000 workers received back-pay awards because their employers violated labor organizing laws. In 2005, over 31,000 workers received backpay awards.

It is a common tactic of those who oppose workers' rights to cast those who support them as relics of another era. They speak of unions as entities that were necessary remedies for abuses of a different time, and then they point to the dwindling union membership as evidence that organizing is no longer needed.

But smaller union rolls are a symptom of a larger disease, not evidence of a cure. The quality of life we know in this Nation was built on the back of the American labor movement. More than half of the United States workforce says they would join a union right now if they could, yet only 12 percent of them are in one.

Less people are joining labor unions, not because less people want to be a part of them; less people are joining labor unions because far too often irresponsible employers have perfected coercive tactics to fight their creation. Imagine if tomorrow you are taken into a room with your supervisor who sits you down and tells you, if you support organizing a union and the union wins, your business will close down. And then your boss tells you, if the union doesn't win, you will be fired anyway.

The situation is not hypothetical. Research shows us that these threats and intimidation tactics are used to inhibit union organization. It sure may be illegal to fire an employee for voting in support of a union, but it is done anyway. And as things stand today, there are no real repercussions for doing so, because there are no fines or civil penalties for breaking the law.

Let me tell you about a journeyman welder from Northeast Ohio and what he and his family have endured, all because he and others where he worked tried to form a union. His name is Dave, and the company he worked for was intent on keeping the union out. And as you will learn, the company was willing to go to extraordinary and egregious lengths to do it.

So what happened to Dave? Since he began his efforts to help organize, he has been relegated to picking up cigarette butts at company headquarters instead of plying his skill in the field in an attempt to humiliate him.

He has been singled out at captive audience meetings with verbal abuse by his employer that was so bad that Dave feared it would get violent. He has had supervisors make physically threatening remarks to him while he was in inherently vulnerable positions working in the field. And in a particularly reprehensible action, Dave's wife has been targeted for harassment that escalated to such a point that she was hospitalized, all to keep the union out.

There is one thing that is clear, these tactics work. They are effective in suppressing the creation of unions, but they are not acceptable and they must stop.

The Employee Free Choice Act establishes real penalties for employee intimidation by increasing the back-pay award when a worker is fired or illegally discriminated against. It also provides for civil penalties for willful or repeated violations. It will act as a disincentive for such egregious behavior.

Furthermore, this legislation allows employees to unionize when a majority of workers sign cards in support of organizing, and forces the NLRB to recognize that union as a bargaining entity without giving the employer the opportunity to unilaterally veto that decision and demand an election that offers an opportunity for coercion and manipulation.

This bill also continues to give employees the choice to form a union through a traditional secret ballot election as current law does.

Now, let's be clear. It does not eliminate the opportunity for employees to have a secret ballot election. It simply eliminates the opportunity for an employer to require an election by secret ballot after employees have already voted for union representation through their chosen route of card check.

Another important aspect of this bill is that it requires the NLRB to step in and stop illegal behavior when it is happening.

And finally, and equally important, this legislation provides a path towards binding arbitration for first contracts. Right now, in 34 percent of cases a first contract is not reached, they are dragged out with the hopes of employees giving up and disbanding the union.

This law pushes both sides to bargain in good faith. And that is really where we should be going; a world where both employers and employees approach the table with an intention to make a good faith attempt to come to an agreement. The old paradigms do not need to exist as they once did. I have witnessed partnerships between giants of industry and the workers on the line that have enabled businesses to thrive.

Lessons can be learned from situations where employers have respected their employees' stated desire to form a union through the majority card signing method. Companies like Kaiser Permanente and Cingular. Veering away from anti-union tactics, these employers have focused on and enjoyed success working with their employees, not against them.

Cingular has not stood in the way of its employees forming unions, and the model they have committed to has not stopped them from becoming the Nation's top cell phone carrier.

It doesn't have to be an either/or process, but it does have to be a fair process. And that is what this bill will accomplish.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.