Five Reasons to Support EFCA
The Employee Free Choice Act will enable working people to bargain for better benefits, wages and working conditions by restoring workers’ freedom to choose for themselves whether to join a union. EFCA does three things:
- Strengthens penalties against companies that illegally coerce or intimidate employees in an effort to prevent them from forming a union;
- Brings in a neutral third party to settle a contract when a company and a newly certified union cannot agree on a contract after three months;
- Lets employees decide how to express their choice to organize, either by balloting or by majority sign-up, meaning that if a majority of the employees sign union-authorization cards, validated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a company must recognize the union.
1) Stop Employer intimidation of workers
Corporations routinely intimidate, harass, coerce and fire people who try to organize unions—and today’s labor law is powerless to stop them. Every day, corporations deny working people the freedom to make their own choice about whether to have a union:
2) Level the playing field in union elections
The current system is not like any democratic election held anywhere else in our society. Employers have turned the NLRB election process into management-controlled balloting—the employer has all the power, controls the information workers can receive and routinely poisons the process by intimidating, harassing, coercing and firing people who try to organize unions.
3) Majority sign-up is fair and effective
When a majority of employees votes to form a union by signing authorization cards, and those authorization cards are validated by the federal government, the employer will be legally required to recognize and bargain with the workers’ union.
Majority sign-up is not a new approach. For years, some responsible employers such as Cingular Wireless have taken a position of allowing employees to choose, by majority decision, whether to have a union. Those companies have found that majority sign-up is an effective way to allow workers the freedom to make their own decision—and it results in less hostility and polarization in the workplace than the failed NLRB process election process.
4) EFCA gives workers a choice to have NLRB “Secret Ballot” elections
If one-third of workers want to have an NLRB election at their workplace, they can still ask the federal government to hold an election. EFCA does not eliminate “secret ballot” elections. It simply gives workers another option—majority sign-up.
5) Majority sign-up means less pressure
Academic studies show that workers who organize under majority sign-up feel less pressure from co-workers to support the union than workers who organize under the NLRB election process. Workers who vote by majority sign-up also report far less pressure or coercion from management to oppose the union than workers who go through NLRB elections.