America’s working people are struggling to make ends meet, and our middle class is disappearing. The best opportunity working men

and women have to get ahead is by uniting with co-workers to bargain with their employers for better wages and benefits.

But the current labor law system is broken. Corporations routinely intimidate, harass, coerce and even fire people who try to organize

unions—and today’s labor law is powerless to stop them. Every day, employers deny working people the freedom to make their own

choice about whether to have a union:

It does three things to level the playing field for employees and employers:

1  Strengthens penalties for companies that illegally coerce or intimidate employees

in an effort to prevent them from forming a union;

2  Brings in a neutral third party to settle a contract when a company and a newly

certified union cannot agree on a contract after three months;

3  Establishes majority sign-up, meaning that if a majority of the employees sign union authorization cards, validated by the

National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a company must recognize the union.

The National Labor Relations Act states: “Employees shall have to the right to self organization to form, join, or assist labor

organizations…” It was designed to protect employee choice on whether to form unions, but it has been turned upside down.

The current system is not like any democratic election held anywhere else in our society. Employers have turned the NLRB election

process into management-controlled balloting—the employer has all the power, controls the information workers can receive and

routinely poisons the process by intimidating, harassing, coercing and even firing people who try to organize unions. On top of that,

the law’s penalties are so insignificant that many companies treat them as just another cost of doing business. By the time employees

vote in an NLRB election, if they can get to that point, a free and fair choice isn’t an option. Even in the voting location, workers do not

have a free choice after being browbeaten by supervisors to oppose the union or being told they may lose their jobs and livelihoods if

they vote for the union.

When a majority of employees votes to form a union by signing authorization cards, and those authorization cards are validated by the

federal government, the employer will be legally required to recognize and bargain with the workers’ union.

Majority sign-up is not a new approach. For years, some responsible employers such as Cingular Wireless have taken a position of

allowing employees to choose, by majority decision, whether to have a union. Those companies have found that majority sign-up is

an effective way to allow workers the freedom to make their own decision—and it results in less hostility and polarization in the

workplace than the failed NLRB process.

No. If one-third of workers want to have an NLRB election at their workplace, they can still ask the federal government to hold

an election. The Employee Free Choice Act simply gives them another option—majority sign-up.

“Elections” may sound like the most democratic approach, but the NLRB process is nothing like any democratic elections in our

society—presidential elections, for example—because one side has all the power. The employer controls the voters’ paychecks and

livelihood, has unlimited access to speak against the union in the workplace while restricting pro-union speech and has the

freedom to intimidate and coerce the voters.

No. Employers are still free to express their opinion about the union as long as they do not threaten or intimidate workers.

No. In fact, academic studies show that workers who organize under majority sign-up feel less pressure from co-workers to support

the union than workers who organize under the NLRB election process. Workers who vote by majority sign-up also report far less

pressure or coercion from management to oppose the union than workers who go through NLRB elections

In addition, it is illegal for anyone to coerce employees to sign a union authorization card. Any person who breaks the law will

be subject to penalties under the Employee Free Choice Act.

This law is about restoring to working people the freedom to improve their lives through unions. More than half of people who don’t

have a union say they would join one tomorrow if given the chance. After all, people who have unions earn 30 percent more than

people without unions and are much more likely to have health care and pensions. With a free choice to join unions, working people

can bargain for better wages, health care and pensions to build a better life for their families. With the economic pressures on working

people today, the freedom to pursue their dreams is crucially important.

The Employee Free Choice Act has the support of hundreds of members of Congress of both parties, academics and historians,

civil and human rights organizations such as the NAACP and Human Rights Watch, most major faith denominations and 69

percent of the American public. (For a detailed list of supporters, visit www.EmployeeFreeChoiceAct.org.)

Corporate front groups are waging a major campaign to stop the Employee Free Choice Act. They do not want workers to have the

freedom to choose for themselves whether to bargain through unions for better wages, benefits and working conditions. The antiunion

network includes discredited groups like the Center for Union Facts, led by lobbyist Richard Berman, who is infamous for

fighting against drunk driving laws and consumer and health protections, and the National Right to Work Committee and

Foundation, the country’s oldest organization dedicated exclusively to destroying unions.

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