By Laureen Lazarovici

What Happens When Workers Try to Form Unions?

Although most workers have the legal right to form unions, nearly all private-sector employers launch ruthless anti-union campaigns, using both legal and illegal tactics to thwart workers’ right to choose a voice on the job.

• Fully 92 percent of private-sector employers force workers to attend meetings where bosses argue against the union. Employers can legally force workers to attend these meetings. Workers who refuse to go can be fired—legally.
• More than three-quarters of private-sector employers force workers to sit in one-on-one meetings with their supervisors to “change their minds” on unions.
• One-quarter of private-sector employers illegally fire workers involved in union activity.
• Today’s labor laws allow employers to “predict” (although not “threaten”) that a workplace will shut down if workers vote for the union, often scaring and intimidating workers out of exercising their freedom to choose a union.
• Our nation’s labor laws are enforced so feebly employers routinely get away with breaking them.
• When employers are punished, the penalties are too weak to deter other unscrupulous employers from breaking the law.
• Fully 32 million workers in the United States—including independent contractors, first-line supervisors, some government workers and agricultural workers—have no right to collectively bargain under the law at all, according to a September 2002 report from the General Accounting Office.

Smithfield: Quashed a Union Election with Police

When you smell the aroma of sizzling bacon, chances are the pork came from Smithfield Foods. With a multiacre packing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., Smithfield is the nation’s largest pork producer. Laboring amid bloody hog carcasses for low wages in sometimes-unsafe conditions, the 5,000 workers at Smithfield began coming together to form a union in 1993 with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 204.

To quash their efforts, Smithfield took union-busting to a ruthless new low. LaTasha Peterson, who worked in Smithfield’s sanitation department, was paid to spy on her co-workers. “I earned twice as much money campaigning against the union, and I didn’t have to do any work,” Peterson said at a news conference preceding a U.S. Senate hearing in June 2002. “I know what I did was wrong. I have union representation at my [new] job now, and I can see it’s better to have a union at work.”

Smithfield supervisor Sherri ­Buffkin (pictured) was ordered to fire union supporters. “I’d come home from work crying, and my daughter would ask, ‘Mommy, who did you have to fire today?’” Buffkin testified at the Senate hearing. Buffkin herself lost her job when she refused to lie to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). “I don’t regret standing up for the truth, because now I can look my daughter square in the eye,” she said.

The fear and intimidation campaign climaxed the day of the August 1997 union election. “When workers arrived at the plant on the morning of the vote, they were met by Bladen County deputy sheriffs in riot gear,” a New York Times article recounts. After the votes were counted, a melee ensued, with managers blaming union supporters for throwing the first punch. An NLRB administrative law judge ruled in December 2000 that Smithfield conspired with law enforcement officers to instigate violence at the vote count.

In June, UFCW kicked off a Witness: Justice @ Smithfield campaign in Atlanta to shine a light on Smithfield’s lawbreaking and alert retailers and consumers to the company’s human rights abuses against Smithfield workers seeking a voice on the job.

“This is a moral issue—a civil rights issue—for the entire American union movement,” AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson said at a June rally to launch the campaign at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta. “We’re going to fight for what we know that every Smithfield worker deserves: the freedom to choose a union.”

Cintas: Following Workers to the Restroom

A workday at the Cintas Corp. involves sorting and hanging dirty uniforms in a hot laundry for a meager paycheck and inadequate benefits. For immigrants, the debilitating working conditions also can be compounded by loutish treatment from haughty supervisors. In February, laundry workers at Cintas—the nation’s largest uniform rental and laundry company with more than 350 facilities in the United States and Canada—began organizing with UNITE for a voice on the job, while delivery drivers started organizing with the Teamsters. And consistent with its past behavior, the company’s anti-union attacks began.

More than 100 unfair labor practice charges filed with the National Labor Relations Board in the United States and provincial government agencies in Canada against Cintas by UNITE spell out Cintas’s tactics against workers’ organizing efforts. They include hiring security guards to patrol the plants’ parking lots, instructing supervisors to follow workers into the restroom to ensure they won’t talk about the union, one-on-one interrogations of pro-union workers, illegal threats to close facilities and hints immigrant workers would lose their jobs.

Workers at the Cintas Chicago plant say managers single out union supporters and overload them with work—creating a pretext to discipline or fire them if they can’t keep up. Even activists’ family members are not immune from the company’s harassment. Josefina Casarubias (pictured) says a manager fired her father on the spot when he didn’t finish an impossibly huge work assignment. When her father tried to talk to his daughter—who also was his ride to and from work—about finding a way to get home, the manager threatened to call the police if he did not leave the premises immediately. Casarubias says immigrant workers are especially vulnerable to the company’s tactics: “Many people are very scared.”

The workers are standing up for a voice on the job by joining together with members of other unions to persuade companies to review their uniform-rental contracts with Cintas. They are holding spirited and attention-grabbing rallies in major cities.

“Cintas bullies, harasses, intimidates and terminates workers who want to join unions,” says UNITE President Bruce Raynor, “and we will not stop until we bring those workers the improvement and protections that come only with a union contract.”

Chinese Daily News: Interrogations in the Middle of the Night

For many in southern California’s vibrant Asian and Pacific Islander immigrant community, the Mandarin-language Chinese Daily News is a vital link to news and events in Asia and to issues important to newcomers to the United States. Reporters and editorial workers at the newspaper take pride in filling this important niche.

But when the company told employees in the fall of 2000 their wages would be frozen and they were required to sign a form acknowledging they were at-will employees who could be fired at any time, the workers joined together to fight this unfair treatment. Within a month, 95 percent of the 152 employees indicated their support to form a union with The Newspaper Guild/CWA.

Management launched a fierce anti-union campaign, hiring a union-busting consultant and giving him an office at the newspaper. Managers then began holding captive-audience meetings and interrogating workers one on one, even in the middle of the night—comparing the union to Chinese dictator Mao Tse-Tung. Most of the workers are immigrants from Taiwan and other Asian countries, some with limited English-language skills. The company stopped helping workers get green cards and other visas allowing them to work legally in the United States.

Despite these pressures, the workers voted for the union in March 2001. But since then, Chinese Daily News managers have tied up the vote in lengthy National Labor Relations Board proceedings. The workers have built support from elected officials in southern California, including state Assembly member Judy Chu (D), who represents the Monterey Park neighborhood where the newspaper is located. But the company still refuses to honor workers’ desire for a voice on the job.

Reporter and union activist Lynne Wang (pictured) says she tries to bolster her fellow workers’ aspirations for a voice on the job by teaching them the words to their adopted country’s national anthem, especially, “Does that star-spangled banner yet wave/o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”
Says Wang: “I tell them if you are not brave, you are not free.”

American Electric Power: Fired Skilled Workers

In the rural towns along the Ohio–Pennsylvania border, there aren’t many opportunities for jobs that pay a decent wage. But coal mining at American Electric Power Co. (AEP) is an exception. Gregg Pepperling (pictured), who comes from a long line of coal miners, worked at the company for six years—until he was fired in November after joining a union organizing effort.

A wage that pays the bills is critical, but so is survival after retirement—and AEP offered no pension, prompting workers to seek a voice at work. “You could work there until you were 65 and have nothing,” he says. “My dad is 55, and he isn’t going to get a pension.”

After workers began attending union informational gatherings held by the Mine Workers, management instigated anti-union meetings—and made attendance mandatory. Pepperling says he brushed off the company’s negative rhetoric about unions. “But I think it scared those younger guys.”

Managers then fired 34 of the most experienced miners—who also happened to be the most pro-union group. “They told me I wasn’t ‘flexible’ enough, even though I did every job in the mine except one,” Pepperling says. To receive their severance pay, the fired workers say they were pressured by managers to waive their rights to pursue complaints against the company. “One guy’s wife had cancer, and he had to pay his health insurance deductible,” says Pepperling. “They backed people into a corner.”

The firings were not about increasing “flexibility,” says Pepperling, but rather about the company’s desire to intimidate workers. “The message was, ‘Hey, look what we did to these guys. That’s what we’ll do to you, too.’ ” The fired miners protested the mass firings, wearing duct tape over their mouths to symbolize AEP’s silencing of the workers’ voice on the job. Religious, environmental and community allies held a Workers’ Rights Board hearing in December and called on the company to rehire the miners and end its anti-union campaign.

The unjustly fired workers are still not back in the mines.

The Union Difference

Freedom to Form a Union

	Connections count: Linking union members to nonunion workers means victory, says UFCW President Doug Dority.

Stories of employer intimidation and coercion provide a glimpse into the results of employers’ relentless attacks against workers’ right to form a union. The results when workers prevail are much different.

Workers and their allies fight courageously to form unions because they know joining together and bargaining with their employer is the only way they can win what millions of union members already have: the wages, benefits and respect they deserve.

For home care worker Rosie Byers, having a union means time to spend with her family. Ronnie Pruitt, a construction worker, earns nearly twice as much money now that he has a union. And Fernando Villanueva’s wife and children no longer have to share a small apartment with another family.

In February, the AFL-CIO Executive Council passed a resolution to “launch an unprecedented, unified campaign to…radically change the climate for organizing,” by educating, engaging and mobilizing millions of union members and people of conscience. Union activists are spreading the word about the difference a union contract makes.

“When union members connect with nonunion workers, we win elections,” says Douglas Dority, president of United Food and Commercial Workers and chair of the AFL-CIO Executive Council’s Committee on Organizing. “When union members connect with politicians, we’ll change the law and get real protections.”

	Union Difference by the Numbers
	Union workers earn higher wages and get more benefits than workers who don’t have a voice on the job with a union.
	Union workers’ median weekly earnings $740 Nonunion workers’ median weekly earnings $587 Union wage advantage 26% Union women’s median weekly earnings $667 Nonunion women’s median weekly earnings $510 Union wage advantage for women 31% African American union workers’ median weekly earnings $615 African American nonunion workers’ median weekly earnings $477 Union wage advantage for African Americans 29% Latino union workers’ median weekly earnings $623 Latino nonunion workers’ median weekly earnings $408 Union wage advantage for Latinos 53% Union workers who get health benefits 75% Nonunion workers who get health benefits 49% Union health benefits advantage 26 percentage points Union workers with guaranteed (defined-benefit) pension 69% Nonunion workers with guaranteed (defined-benefit) pension 14% Union pension advantage 55 percentage points
	Sources: U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Earnings, January 2003; Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employee Benefits in Private Industry, 2000.

Rosie Byers: Time for Her Family

Rosie Byers (pictured) became a home care worker because she likes helping people—but like most California home care workers, she was paid the minimum wage with no benefits, which meant a constant struggle to raise her family. Today, thousands of home care workers across the county such as Byers have decent wages, health benefits and a voice on the job because they belong to a union. In California, SEIU and AFSCME worked together to pass state and local legislation enabling home care workers, paid with public funds, to win a voice on the job.

“Before the union, it was minimum wage and no benefits, period,” says Byers, an SEIU Local 250 member. “If we had not organized, we would still be making minimum wage. I raised two children while I was in the union. I could spend vacation with my kids. I wouldn’t have been able to do that. Most of us now have paid vacation.”

In addition to good wages, benefits, paid vacations and sick time, Byers says being an active union member gives her a voice in her community and her government. Before coming together in a union, “home care workers were
not recognized,” says Byers. “No one thought we were important.”

Byers and her colleagues hold rallies and lobby elected officials, winning a raise recently from the city and county of San Francisco even amid tight budgets. “When politicians run, we do voter registration drives and try to put people in office who understand our issues,” says Byers.

Byers also finds time to help other home care workers in California form unions. “It is important to always be organizing, because you build strength and unity.”

Ronnie Pruitt: Earning Double the Money

For more than 10 years, Ronnie Pruitt (pictured) worked nonunion construction jobs in Kansas City, Mo., and considered his $17-an-hour wage “good money.”

When it came time eight years ago for Pruitt to leave the company he worked for, he called a Sheet Metal Workers Local 2 representative he had met on a construction site. Two days later, he was at work on a union job, making $30 an hour. A few days after that, he got his first paycheck and was stunned at the difference.

“My butt was pretty sore after I was done kicking myself,” says Pruitt, wondering why it had taken him so long to figure out that joining a union could improve his life. Joining Local 2, says Pruitt, “is the best move I ever made.”

In addition to better wages, he now has more job security and fully paid family health insurance. “On wages, there’s no comparison,” says Pruitt, who recently moved into a new house with his family. “It makes life a whole lot easier.” Following a big pay cut at their nonunion construction jobs, two of Pruitt’s brothers also joined unions.

Pruitt appreciates the sense of solidarity he has with other members of his union. “People take care of one another. The union members care about their brothers and sisters,” he says. “When you’re with the union, you are not out there by yourself.”

Fernando Villanueva: A Home for His Family

The workers at the American Racing wheel manufacturing plant in Rancho Dominguez, Calif., are members of Machinists Local 1910—and they know the difference having a union makes in their lives. As union members, they get decent wages, health insurance, paid vacations and a fair hiring and promotion process. But many friends and relatives of the 360 IAM members at American Racing work at a nearby nonunion wheel plant—where they have none of those benefits.

“People can see the big difference,” says Fernando Villanueva (pictured), a test lab technician who was active in the 1990 union organizing at the plant and now is chief shop steward and recording secretary of his local.

Villanueva says before workers formed their union, salaries were crushingly low (he started at the plant making minimum wage), raises and promotions were given based on who was friends with supervisors and workers had no recourse when they were fired unfairly. “We decided we had to be organized,” says Villanueva.

Today, the workers have fairness on the job. “The company respects our rights and seniority,” says Villanueva. “The company has to post a position and give everyone the opportunity to apply.”

Having a union has made a big difference for Villanueva’s family. Before he earned union wages, Villanueva, his wife and children shared a small apartment with another family. Today, they own their own home. Before they were union members, workers received one week paid vacation no matter how long they worked at the plant. Now, because the union contract recognizes the value of seniority, Villanueva gets four weeks off. He goes to Mexico to see his parents and brothers every December.

“My priorities,” says Villanueva, “are clothes for my family, food and a house. I can pay for my own house. Now I’m living the way I like. I’m happy because I have my union.”

Take Action

When nurses at Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington, Vt., wanted a voice on the job with AFT, they reached out to community allies who helped them win their union election and a strong first contract. Asbestos-removal workers in New Jersey and Wisconsin work with safety and immigrants rights advocates to win improvements on the job with the Laborers. Key coalition partners in these and other similar victories are area union members who are committed to building the union movement by helping more workers form unions in the face of employer opposition. Here are some things union members can do:

• Present the AFL-CIO’s new Freedom to Choose a Union workshop at meetings to educate and mobilize union members. Contract Kim Keller, director of Voice@Work member education and mobilization, at 202-637-5102 or kkeller@aflcio.org for workshop materials.
• Help workers organize by offering to help make house visits and phone calls and distribute leaflets.
• Write letters, make phone calls and sign petitions to employers threatening or retaliating against employees. Urge employers to remain neutral and abide by fair ground rules.
• If workers are striking for recognition or for a first contract, honor their strike and join them on the picket line.
• Write a letter to workers encouraging them to freely exercise their right to organize and telling them about the benefits of unions you've experienced.
• Agree to be featured in literature distributed to nonunion workers.
• Use e-mail as an effective way to inform and engage members and constituents about current worker organizing efforts.
• Make announcements at other union meetings and ask members to sign up onto a central labor council listserv to keep informed about solidarity rallies and upcoming events.
• Help workers who are forming unions by reaching out to community and religious groups.
• Attend rallies, press conferences, town hall meetings, public hearings, prayer services and other events.
• Offer to assist local fact-finding delegations or work with the local workers' rights board.

• Respect on the job;
• Better wages and benefits;
• More flexibility for work and family needs;
• A counterbalance to the unchecked power of employers;
• A voice in improving the quality of their products and services.

How do people form a union?
When workers decide they want to come together to improve their jobs, they work with a union to help them form their own local chapter. After a majority of workers shows they want a union, employers sometimes honor the workers’ choice. Often, the workers must ask the government (through the National Labor Relations Board) to hold an election. If the workers win their union, they negotiate a contract with the employer that spells out each party’s rights and responsibilities in the workplace.

Does the law protect workers joining unions?
It’s supposed to—but too often it doesn’t. Under the law, employers are not allowed to discriminate against or fire workers for choosing to join a union. For example, it’s illegal for employers to threaten to shut down their businesses, fire employees or take away benefits if workers form a union. However, employers routinely violate these laws, and the penalties are weak or nonexistent.

What kinds of workers are forming unions today?
A wider range of people than ever before, including many women and immigrants, is joining unions: doctors, nurses, poultry workers, graduate employees, home health care aides, wireless communications workers, auto parts workers and engineers, to name a few.

How do unions help working families today?
Through unions, workers win better wages, benefits and a voice on the job—and good union jobs mean stronger communities. Union workers earn 26 percent more than nonunion workers and are more likely to receive health care and pension benefits than those without a union. In 2002, median weekly earnings for full-time union wage and salary workers were $740, compared with $587 for their nonunion counterparts. Unions lead the fight today for better lives for working people, such as through expanded family and medical leave, improved safety and health protections and fair-trade agreements that lift the standard of living for workers all over the world.

What have unions accomplished for all workers?
Unions have made life better for all of America’s workers by helping to pass laws ending child labor, establishing the eight-hour day, protecting workers’ safety and health and helping create Social Security, unemployment insurance and the minimum wage. Unions are continuing the fight today to improve life for all working families in America.

What challenges do workers face today when they want to form unions?
Today, millions of workers want to join unions. The wisest employers understand when workers form unions, their companies also benefit. But most employers fight workers’ efforts for a stronger voice at the workplace by intimidating, harassing and threatening them. In response, workers are reaching out to their communities for help exercising their freedom to improve their lives.

Online for a Voice@Work

Check out the following websites for more information about workers' rights:

• The AFL-CIO's webpage on how and why people join unions.
• The National Workrights Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving workplace human rights.
• Uneasy Terrain: The Impact of Capital Mobility on Workers, Wages and Union Organizing, by Cornell University scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner.
• Unfair Advantage: Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States Under International Human Rights Standards, a report from Human Rights Watch.