Welcome to Alaskans for Free Choice

WELCOME!…

…to Alaskans for Free Choice, a website devoted to providing Alaskans information on the Employee Free Choice Act.  Find out what the Employee Free Choice Act is all about and learn how it works right here.  Follow breaking news and read other related articles.  Check out our links to additional resources as well as our important pages for even more extensive coverage.

WHAT THE EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT IS ALL ABOUT

The Employee Free Choice Act is an important legislative proposal that would remove barriers to union representation and collective bargaining.  It will help workers to form unions, and guarantee that new unions gain contracts.  The Employee Free Choice Act will also strengthen penalties against employers that violate workers’ rights.

New Five Year Study Shows Employer’s Anti-Union Behavior Intensitifes

Rise in Firings, Intimidation Show Need for Employee Free Choice Act

(Washington, May 20) — A new study by renowned labor expert and Cornell University professor Kate Bronfenbrenner reveals that private sector employer opposition to workers’ efforts to form unions has intensified and become more punitive than in the past. Employers are more than twice as likely to use 10 or more tactics – including threats of and actual firings – in their campaigns to thwart workers’ organizing efforts. Today’s anti-union activities include a greater focus than in the past on more coercive and punitive tactics designed to intensely monitor and punish union activity.

The Have and Have Nots

How American Labor Law Denies a Quarter of the Workforce Collective Bargaining Rights

The right to organize and bargain collectively under the protection of law is the bedrock upon which workers are able to form or join a labor union. American labor law has not kept pace with the changing nature and face of the modern workplace and increasingly excludes more and more workers from this legal protection. Increasing numbers of employees have a supervisory aspect or capacity of their work. More and more immigrants join the workforce, especially in the agricultural sector, and more people have been classified as independent contractors, whether by choice or by an employer’s decision. As these changes take place, American labor law denies these workers their legally-protected right to form unions and collectively bargain by either defining workers as not employees or by expressly excluding them.

Town Hall:

Advancing the Middle Class

Disappearing pensions                                 
Costly health insurance
Stagnating wages                                            
Worthless 401 k

Is the middle class in danger?

Can our country survive if we fail to advance the middle class? 

What are the barriers to advancing the middle class in Alaska?

Come discuss these issues and more at our Town Hall

July 27^th 6:30-8:00pm

Anchorage Senior Center

1300 E 19^th Ave

Panelist Include

Dr. James Ellsworth President, Anchorage NAACP

Dr. Larry Weiss Executive Director, Alaska Center for Public Policy

Rep. Chris Tuck Alaska Legislature and member of IBEW 1547

Sponsored by the Alaska Center for Public Policy and the Alaska AFL-CIO
www.acpp.info

Research Shows Union Jobs Are Safer

Here in Alaska and elsewhere union agreements often have sections in them that extend or at least reinforce job safety and health protections for workers.  In addition, these agreements frequently outline structured ways that labor and management can address potential safety and health issues so that they are mitigated before they kill or injure a worker.  Consequently, it is logical to assume that, all other factors being equal, a union workplace is likely to be safer than a nonunion work setting, but is there any hard evidence of this.  It turns out that there is. 

Op-ed: Rebuilding a Good Jobs Economy

by Annette Berhardt & Christine Owens

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has finally been signed into law, and a full menu of implementation work is on the table. Even this milestone achievement, however, won’t be enough to support the full agenda for working families. Jump-starting our economy is critical, but this alone will not solve the deep crisis of inequality that has been building in this country for decades.

Long before this recession set in, working families were already struggling to survive in a brave new world of stagnant wages, disappearing benefits and little job security. Government has retreated from intervention in all things economic, and it’s our workers who bear the costs. Americans are more productive than ever, but a shrinking share of corporate profits is going to their wages. They are working harder and for longer hours, but their upward mobility is stunted.

And every day, millions of workers clean our hotel rooms, serve our food, ring up our sales, care for our grandparents and in general keep our economy running–but for low wages, anemic benefits and a dead-end career. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, eight of the top ten occupations projected to generate the most jobs by 2016 are low-wage jobs in the service sector.

This is the biggest unspoken challenge for our recovery: low-wage jobs have become a key growth engine of our economy. Policies focused only on job growth will simply put us back on the path toward greater inequality. If we truly want to rebuild a good jobs economy–to “create jobs that sustain families and sustain dreams,” as President Obama recently put it–we have to act now to lay down the institutional and regulatory framework.

How Unions Can Help Restore the Middle Class

On March 10, 2009 Dr. Paula B. Voos testified before the Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions during a hearing entitled “Rebuilding Economic Security: Empowering Workers to Restore the Middle Class.”  Voos, a a professor in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University, presented findings on the benefits of unions for the middle class and the economy overall.  Highlights of the research introduced include that unions typically:

• Raise the wages of the employees they represent
• Reduce income inequality in the wider society by reducing inequality not only within and between represented firms, but also across entire industries as nonunion employers increase compensation to discourage unionization, all of which strengthens the middle class (Card, Lemieux, and Riddell 2007).
• Increase the retention of skilled employees, enhancing human capital and productivity in both the firm and the economy as a whole (Freeman and Medoff 1984; Bennett and Kaufman 2007)

According to Voos’s testimony, “The most important reason to improve the ability of employees to organize into unions is that such membership is a fundamental right in democratic societies, related to freedom of association and the right of all human beings to band together to improve their lives. For that reason alone, I would urge you to pass legislation to make real in the U.S. once again the promise of the National Labor Relations Act.”

Voos draws a clear connection between the decline of the middle class and unions with the current economic crisis, and explains why passage of the Employee Free Choice Act will play a vital role in helping the U.S. economy recover, achieve stability, and thrive in the highly competitive global market.  For the complete text of her testimony, visit the Alaskans for Free Choice related studies page.

Guest Blog: Sam Rhodes

Juneau, Alaska–In efforts to make our voices heard by Alaska legislators on the Employee Free Choice Act and public employee pension reform, 130 ASEA/AFSCME Local 52 members converged on the capital for an educational conference highlighted by lobbying and an exciting rally. The event took place over two days, February 18th and 19th.

Prior to meeting legislators in person to lobby, Local 52 members received in-depth information on the voting records and tendencies of legislators whose votes we need for passage of the proposed measures under consideration.

Next, our members met with their legislators in personal one-on-one meetings to add their personal touches to the context of the Employee Free Choice Act and Alaska legislation in the forms of HB 30 and SB 54. The latter measures seek to return public employees to a defined benefit [retirement plan] from the present defined contribution (401k). The defined benefit was erased and replaced with the defined contribution by the Alaska Legislature in 1995 as a cost-saving mechanism, resulting in miniscule savings since its enactment.

The event included an all-union rally on the capitol steps where over 350 Alaska unionists turned out to remind the Alaska legislature that if talking fails to get our voices heard, we don’t mind yelling a little.

Leading Economists Declare Support for the Employee Free Choice Act

Although its collapse has dominated recent media coverage, the financial sector is not the only segment of the U.S. economy running into serious trouble. The institutions that govern the labor market have also failed, producing the unusual and unhealthy situation in which hourly compensation for American workers has stagnated even as their productivity soared.

Indeed, from 2000 to 2007, the income of the median working-age household fell by $2,000- an unprecedented decline. In that time, virtually all of the nation’s economic growth went to a small number of wealthy Americans. An important reason for the shift from broadly-shared prosperity to growing inequality is the erosion of workers’ ability to form unions and bargain collectively.

A natural response of workers unable to improve their economic situation is to form unions to negotiate a fair share of the economy, and that desire is borne out by recent surveys.  Millions of American workers – more than half of non-managers – have said they want a union at their work place.

AFL-CIO Advances Employee Free Choice Battle With New Poll

AFL-CIO Advances Employee Free Choice Battle With New Poll

Posted using ShareThis

Anti-Union Front Groups Promote Distorted “Save Our Secret Ballots” Initiative Campaigns

With a new administration in Washington, D.C. promising to enact federal labor law reform for the first time in generations, corporations are plowing money into the states in an attempt to undermine workers rights there. Calling itself the “Save Our Secret Ballot” (SOSB) coalition, this corporate effort is looking to amend the state constitutions of Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, Nevada and Utah to block workers from choosing majority sign-up rules to form unions — a clear attempt to thwart implementation of the proposed Employee Free Choice Act which if enacted would give employees the choice of traditional elections run by the federal government or signing authorization cards by a majority of employees.

The SOSB seems to be a project of the conservative, Arizona-based Goldwater Institute and the national Heritage Foundation (whose representative chairs the SOSB national advisory board).  The SOSB joins a national network of corporate-funded, anti-worker organizations that are seeking to erode labor rights and the freedom to form unions at the federal, state and local level.  (See here for more on the corporate-funded Anti-Union Network).

Ignoring Worker Choice under Employee Free Choice Act:  While the rhetoric of the campaign is to protect workers’ right to use a secret ballot in union organizing campaigns, they deliberately ignore the reality that under the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, workers would still have the right to use a secret ballot and would only use majority sign-up rules if a majority of workers chose the option.  What would change under the Employee Free Choice Act is that EMPLOYERS could no longer force a prolonged union election campaign — where it’s documented that workers are fired and intimidated — when a majority of workers would prefer a simpler and less intimidating process.

Whether the state ballot initiatives would be legal under federal labor law is unclear.  What is clear though is that the goal of the campaign is to promote the corporate lie that the Employee Free Choice Act would undermine workers’ freedom to use or not use secret ballots.

Along with publicly debunking the lies of the SOSB corporate front groups, progressive leaders should push to have their states approve resolutions, such as Wisconsin State Senate Resolution 7 in support of federal passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

This post, written by Nathan Newman, has been provided by a statewide dispatch courtesy of Progressive States Network.