Huffington Post: Romney, Chamber PR Blitz Ignores New Study Showing Unions Don't Coerce Workers

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-levine/romney-chamber-pr-blitz-i_b_208932.html

Posted: May 29, 2009 06:41 AM

Those veteran champions of workers' rights, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and the Chamber of Commerce, unleashed new attacks this week on the Employee Free Choice Act. They aim to discredit the bill as a death-blow to the economy and workplace democracy while the Chamber ad derides any talk of compromise from new Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter, who opposed the bill as written and now faces a likely Democratic primary challenge.

But in making their case, these pro-business attack dogs have to ignore a powerful new study debunking a central myth of opponents of the pro-union legislation: that it would somehow create a wave of union intimidation. The multi-university study, led by Richard Bruno of the University of Illinois, found that in four states permitting majority sign-up, in over 1,000 campaigns involving 34,000 new union members in the public sector, there wasn't a single confirmed case of either union or employer intimidation.

In fact of course, in the private sector, it's employers who have ramped up their terrorizing of workers who seek to form a union, as shown in the recent "No Holds Barred" report by Cornell labor scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner, which found , for instance, that half of bosses in union campaigns threaten workers in one-on-one "sweat sessions" and a third fire employees.

But it's the majority sign-up provision, dubbed by is opponents as "card check," that has been a primary target for supposedly threatening worker's rights and making them vulnerable to intimidation. (One anti-union group even features a former Sopranos actor playing a union thug in its ads.)

Yet hidden away in plain sight in America is the one part of the economy where workers are free to join unions without intimidation from employers, and they are permitted to use the majority sign-up provision that's been proposed by the Employee Free Choice Act -- and so demonized by Big Business interests. Where is this idyllic land, where rights long granted to European workers and ignored here at home are so freely available? It's in the public sector -- whether they're firemen or nurses -- the difference in union representation shows what a difference organizing rights can make.

Contrary to fashionable conservative arguments that declines in union representation are due largely to globalization and a new post-industrial economy, the stark differences between the public and private sector tell a far different story. Overall, 12.4 percent of U.S. workers are represented by unions. As American Rights at Work has pointed out:


Studies have shown that if workers' preferences were to be realized, as many as 58% would have union representation. Yet this low unionization rate obscures a striking imbalance: In the public sector, where workers' right to a union faces fewer impediments, almost 37% of workers belong to unions, but in the private sector, where workers' face rising resistance from employers, less than 8% of workers are represented by unions.

FULL story at link.