Current Labor Law Betrays Our Democratic Values

http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/speakout/db.cfm

Current Labor Law Betrays Our Democratic Values



By David Bonior
Chairman, American Rights at Work

Danette Chavez, a single mom who cleaned Austin’s federal buildings to provide for herself and her daughter, was fired earlier this year. She wasn’t let go for poor work performance. Instead, her employer illegally terminated her because she wanted to form a union to improve working conditions and compensation at City Wide janitorial.

What happened to Danette is an outrage, a betrayal of basic American values, but it’s hardly an isolated incident. Which is why so many of us are joining the call to honor International Human Rights Day, Dec. 10, and the week leading up to it, with actions in support of workers’ rights.

At American Rights at Work, a nationwide organization working for the freedom of workers to organize unions and bargain contracts, we look at the government’s own numbers: Each year in America an average of 23,000 employees like Danette Chavez are illegally fired or penalized for attempting to exercise their democratic right to form a union. Despite international human rights standards and U.S. laws that prohibit employers from intimidating, coercing or firing employees for union activity, it happens every day and most Americans are not informed of this outrage. It is disgraceful we have this kind of lawlessness in the American workplace.

It’s illegal to outright fire workers but so much of the vicious anti-union activity that workers face is perfectly legal—legal but absolutely wrong. In the U.S. legal system, it is legal for employers to intimidate workers in one-on-one meetings. It’s legal to delay and delay and play games with workers’ free choice. The U.S. legal system excludes more than 30 million workers from any legal protection for the right to organize or bargain contracts—temporary workers, day laborers, farm workers, domestic workers—and the list is growing as the Bush NLRB excludes more workers from legal protection. The law says, “Freedom of association at work? Not for you.”

The action the union movement and its allies are taking this month to honor workers’ rights as human rights has never been more important to our families and our world. As human beings, we all have the right to be treated fairly, to freely associate, to participate in the decisions that affect our lives, to work under conditions that don’t cause bodily harm and to expect that a fair day’s work will be compensated with a fair day’s pay.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted unanimously by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948, clearly states that “everyone has the right to form and join trade unions for the protection of his interests.” Without the enforcement of these rights, working mothers and fathers face the impossible choice of standing up for themselves or enduring unfair working conditions in order to keep their jobs.


FULL article at link.