Bill Fletcher on EFCA

In the Black Commentator:

The announcement of efforts to pass the Employee Free Choice Act—legislation to make it easier for workers to join or form unions—was accompanied by the announcement of efforts on the part of corporate America to derail it even before it entered Congress. Now that the legislation is in Congress, the battle lines have been drawn. But corporate America has been handling this situation in a very sly way. They are framing their opposition to EFCA in terms of their allegedly protecting the right of workers to a secret ballot election to choose a union....

In order for it to pass, millions of people need to be mobilized to realize that EFCA is not about building the union-as-institution, but about expanding democracy and advancing a process that has historically proven to be a mechanism to raise the living standards of working class people. That is the significant challenge that faces organized labor and its allies, but it is a challenge that must be addressed if the fight for EFCA is to be understood by the people of this country as a fight that they must themselves enter.

Bill Fletcher, Jr., is co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. ey