The Employee Free Choice Act

The Bill In Brief

The recently-passed legislation that affects our nation's labor laws is either a superbly crafted bill that is the greatest step forward since the 1973 Family and Medical Leave Act, or a piece of partisan crap that is a cheap repayment to unions. The number of political debates and catfights that have already been launched over the bill marks it as one of the most hotly-contested legislative endeavors of the new Congress. But beyond the rhetoric, this bill could well have major implications in the very near future for workers.

The premise of the bill is to overhaul collective bargaining as an institution in America. Currently, about 12% of American workers are represented by unions and even the die-hard strongholds of union activity (such as the Las Vegas casino employees) are starting to fall away from the fold. The reason for the decline has been widely attributed to disinterest, negative information spread about unions, or in some cases, powerful firms that are hired to come in and squash unionization movements (called "union busting" in the argot). The bill has been put forward as a means of making such tactics illegal where they are not already so, or of enforcing the laws, giving teeth where there were none. But the bill does several other things. While it purports to widen the number of topics that management can arbitrarily lay down the law upon, strident critics of the law claims that the areas thus delineated have been management's prerogative for years. Indeed, claim detractors of the bill, the list is actually somewhat shorter than the list commonly employed by management in union shops.

There are some other provisions as well: management has to negotiate on first contracts, the list of emergency workers cannot exceed 20% of the workforce, and so on. Most experts agree that the bill in general favors unions, but equally, most note that the provisos of the bill mean nothing if there is no collective bargaining agreement in force. Management does not have to bargain if there is no union representative.