Legal Scholars: Employee Free Choice Consistent with International Standards

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/03/20/legal-scholars-employee-free-choice-consistent-with-international-standards/

by Seth Michaels, Mar 20, 2009



As the Employee Free Choice Act builds momentum to passage, opponents of the workers’ freedom to form unions are getting desperate in their attempts to mislead and distort this critical bill.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has joined with the U.S. Council for International Business (USCIB) for its latest spin against the freedom to form unions. The two groups are promoting a paper written by Stefan Jan Marculewicz, a management-side attorney, asserting the Employee Free Choice Act would violate the standards of the International Labor Organization (ILO). Unsurprisingly, an examination of this claim by experts shows the argument is false.

Lance Compa, a law lecturer at Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, says Marculewicz’s arguments mischaracterize ILO laws and apply them irrelevantly. In particular, it’s flatly wrong to say, as the Marculewicz paper does, that majority sign-up—legal in the United States and commonplace in nations around the world—is somehow outside of ILO standards.

Indeed, in most countries of the world, a version of card-check (i.e., workers joining the union by signing cards, signing petitions, attending assemblies or otherwise signaling their desire for representation) is the method by which previously unrepresented workers come to the bargaining table with their employers.

John Logan, research director for the University of California-Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, calls the claims made in the Marculewicz paper “laughable.” He says management control of the process for forming unions means that the United States isn’t living up to ILO standards now.

In a series of decisions over the past decade, the ILO’s Committee on Freedom of Association has consistently expressed concern over the failure of the National Labor Relations Act to adequately protect American workers’ right to choose a union and engage in collective bargaining.

FULL story at link.