Note: The following was pulled from KSworkbeat.org, the Website of the Wichita / Hutchinson Labor Federation which is maintained by Stuart Elliott. The article itself was written by Kevin Myles, whos is the president of the Wichita NAACP.
The EFCA is a bi-partisan bill, introduced in 2008 in the House by Rep. George Miller with 233 co-sponsors, and introduced in the Senate by Senator Ted Kennedy and 46 co-sponsors, which would allow workers to form Unions through majority sign-up, help employees secure labor contracts with their employers in a reasonable amount of time through negotiation, mediation, or binding arbitration, and toughen penalties against employers who violate workers rights.
The bill passed the House by a 241-185 margin but was stalled in the Senate by a cloture motion where it sat alongside the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the Employment non-Discrimination Act, the Student Loan Sunshine Act, and a hundred other acts and resolutions that have no scheduled hearings. It has been re-introduced in the new Congress with strong support not only from the labor movement, but from progressives and the the civil rights community.
The NAACP supports the Employee Free Choice Act. We recognize that union workers currently earn 26% more in median weekly wages than non-union workers; unionized women earn 31% more than their non-union counterparts, and black union workers earn 29% more than non-union African Americans. Furthermore, 75% of union workers have health benefits, compared to 49% of non-union workers. 69% of union workers have short-term disability coverage, compared to 30% of their non-union counterparts. Finally, 82% of union workers get life insurance, compared with 51% of non-union workers.
The impact of unions – ensuring that all working Americans are treated well and share in the prosperity – cannot be overstated. Despite the continuing strength and advocacy power of unions, however, some employers continue to treat workers poorly, not paying them a fair wage or providing them with necessary benefits: the purchasing power of workers’ wages is 5% below where it stood 30 years ago. CEO pay has continued to rise and is currently more than 1,000 times the earnings of the average worker. The richest 13,000 US families have nearly as much income as the poorest 200 million combined. And some employers continue to fight the legitimate organization of unions. 70% of American employers in manufacturing threaten to close the plant if workers choose a union. Furthermore, in the 1950’s, when 30% of workers belonged to unions, only a few hundred workers suffered retaliation for trying to organize a union; in 1969, the number or workers suffering retaliation was just over 6,000 and by the 1990’s more than 20,000 workers each year were victims of discrimination when they tried to organize a union.
