Workers need a fair chance to hear from union representatives about the benefits of unionization, including the ways in which unions help strengthen health and safety protections at the workplace. Currently, employers are able to deliver their anti-union messages at the workplace and on work time, because the employer controls the workplace and directs how work time is spent. Nine out of 10 employers require workers to attend captive-audience meetings during organizing campaigns Bronfenbrenner Workers have only a limited ability to hear from union supporters at the workplace, and their access has been further curtailed by the Trump NLRB, which has restricted the ability of workers and organizers to organize at their workplace McNicholas et al.
This imbalance undermines the ability of workers to organize together. The law should be amended to require employers to grant reasonable access to union organizers, off-duty employees, and off-duty contractor employees to nonworking areas to talk with workers on their nonworking time.
In addition, workers who have not yet organized a union should be able to designate a union representative as their representative during an OSHA inspection and related proceedings. The COVID crisis shows that workers with union representation have fared better than nonunion workers in terms of advocating for safety equipment and protocols.
Workers should not have to go through the formal NLRB election process to gain the benefit of union advocacy and expertise when it comes to their health and safety on the job.
Specifically, employers should be required to recognize and bargain with a union if a majority of workers indicate their support for the union as their representative. The law should not allow employers to determine whether workers have a formal election—that choice should be left up to workers, not the employer. This method of forming unions has been recognized and used by employers in the United States for decades. In addition, the NLRB should be directed to allow electronic voting in representation elections.
Electronic voting has been used by the National Mediation Board for years, and it should be allowed and encouraged—particularly given the health risks associated with large gatherings Muller Employers try to gerrymander the bargaining unit by adding workers they think will vote against the union or removing those who support representation.
Similarly, workers should be able to designate a multi-employer bargaining arrangement, and their proposed arrangement should be certified unless the employer can make a compelling case as to why its participation in a multi-employer bargaining unit is unworkable Rhinehart and McNicholas At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, essential workers in health care, food service, warehouses, grocery stores, meatpacking plants, and other settings raised concerns about the risk of workplace exposure to COVID and the lack of personal protective equipment and other safety protections.
Too often, these workers were fired or faced other retaliation for raising these concerns Hiltzik ; Kruzel ; Davenport, Bhattarai, and McGregor In other places, workers were called back to work at workplaces that did not have sufficient health and safety protections and were faced with the prospect of working at an unsafe job and risking contracting a deadly disease, or refusing to work and risking losing their unemployment benefits.
Workers should not be faced with choosing between their health and their livelihood. The law must be strengthened to explicitly protect workers who refuse to perform hazardous work from being fired or retaliated against. These protections exist to some extent now under the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the NLRA, but the protections are weak and the enforcement is up to the government agency. And because strikes have shown themselves to be effective and often necessary to force action on safety and health, states should be required to provide unemployment insurance for strikers Block and Sachs The NLRA should be amended to expand coverage to agricultural, domestic, and student workers so these workers can form unions and fight for health and safety protections on the job.
Workers who have spoken out about the lack of protections at grocery stores have been raising issues of importance to both workers and consumers who shop at these stores. Workers who have been raising concerns about a lack of protective equipment in health care settings have been concerned about their own safety and also that of patients and family members visiting patients.
Meatpacking workers who have raised concerns about a lack of protections at their plants have raised issues that are also of concern to their communities, because workers who contract COVID on the job carry the disease home with them to their communities. Similarly, when workers speak out about corporate practices—such as the Google workers who petitioned their employer about contracting with ICE, or employees urging stronger action by Google on climate change Wong —they are using their voice as workers to try to bring about better corporate practices.
Workers form unions because they want to bargain with their employers and reach agreement about issues that matter to them—issues like health and safety, wages, protections against sexual harassment, and dignity on the job. The PRO Act establishes an important mediation and arbitration process for ensuring that newly organized workers reach a first agreement. Relatedly, workers should not need to start from scratch when bargaining a contract with a newly organized employer.
Where a union has a significant presence at an employer, in an industry, or in a geographic area, the law should provide a process for the union to extend the contract standards for wages and benefits that the union has achieved through bargaining with these employers to newly organized groups.
The PRO Act establishes a mediation and arbitration process for achieving initial collective bargaining agreements for newly organized workers. That process should default to the contract standards the union has been able to achieve with other employers in the industry or area, or such higher standards as the union demonstrates are appropriate Rhinehart and McNicholas Health and safety is consistently cited as one of the most important issues to working people, and the COVID crisis has only elevated its importance.
Unions routinely bargain with employers over health and safety protections, and collective bargaining gives workers a stronger voice for addressing these critical issues than they would have individually. This artificially narrows the joint-employer inquiry and excludes an issue of extreme importance to working people Becker and Berner Legislation should make clear that health and safety is an essential term of employment.
Starting in the mids, Black workers began to be more likely to be in unions and to have a larger union premium than white workers. Further, these numbers are not seasonally adjusted. The other unemployment rates listed in this paragraph, and the overall unemployment rate, peaked in April.
Essential workers in this data set include workers in food and agriculture; emergency services; transportation, warehouse, and delivery; industrial, commercial, residential facilities and services; health care; government and community-based services; communications and IT; financial sector; energy sector; water and wastewater management; chemical sector; and critical manufacturing.
See Table 3 in McNicholas and Poydock a. Front-line industries in this data set include grocery, convenience, and drugstore workers; public transit workers; trucking, warehouse, and postal service workers; building cleaning service workers; health care workers; and child care and social services workers.
The United Food and Commercial Workers secured increased pay and benefits for workers in more than a dozen meatpacking and food-processing companies. As of July , all stores had eliminated premium pay for front-line workers. The United Auto Workers persuaded General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler to shut down operations for two weeks to slow the spread of the virus, and they negotiated with the companies to provide all workers with protective gear, including masks.
See UAW and Engdahl The Communications Workers of America secured additional paid sick and family leave for unionized Verizon workers. The agreement includes 26 weeks of paid sick leave for individuals diagnosed with COVID and eight weeks of paid leave for those caring for an individual medically diagnosed with COVID See CWA The Teamsters reached an agreement with DHL Express that relaxes rules pertaining to vacation use by workers for the shipping company if shipping volumes drop.
See Teamsters In this analysis, the unionized public-sector workforce 7. So, for example, education and health services workers who work in the public sector are included in this tally, not in the private-sector education and health services industries tallies. Specifically, we report the coefficient on union status from a regression of the log of the hourly wage on union status and a quintic polynomial in age used as a measure of experience , and dummies for race and ethnicity, education, citizenship, major industry, major occupation, state, and year.
We exclude observations with imputed wages because the imputation process does not take union status into account and therefore biases the union premium toward zero.
This analysis does not account for nonwage benefits. Federal law gives federal employees the right to unionize and bargain. As Kochan et al. Workers who are locked out by their employers should also be eligible for unemployment benefits.
See Block and Sachs The state of Virginia recently adopted emergency regulations to protect workers from COVID exposure, including provisions banning retaliation against workers for raising safety concerns to the public.
Becker, Craig, and Nicole Berner. Law , April 20, Berkowitz, Deborah, and Paul K. National Employment Law Project, April Bhattarai, Abha. Biasi, Barbara, and Heather Sarsons. June Bivens, Josh. Bivens, Josh, and David Cooper. Economic Policy Institute, August Block, Sharon, and Ben Sachs. Bronfenbrenner, Kate. May Last updated September 24, ; accessed July An Update to the Economic Outlook: to Data supplement [ Excel ].
Accessed July Cotiaux, Neil. Dingel, Jonathan I. Current Population Survey Extracts, Version 1. Eidelson, Josh. Engdahl, Lora. Farber, Henry S. Fawaz, Sahid. Accessed August 13, Fortin, Nicole M. Gordon, Brian. What Happens Now? Gould, Elise. Economic Policy Institute, August 7, Gould, Elise, and Heidi Shierholz. Roosevelt Institute, June Hiltzik, Michael. Ivanova, Irina. Jagannathan, Meera. Jamieson, Dave. Kaplan, Ezra, and Jo Ling Kent. Kochan, Thomas A. Kimball, Duanyi Yang, and Erin L.
Kruzel, John. Lafer, Gordon, and Lola Loustaunau. Suppression techniques often include targeting pro-union employees for discipline and dismissal. In recent years, retail giants Target and Home Depot had their slick anti-union videos leaked on social media, providing insight into how much money and effort employers are willing to pour into such initiatives.
Read more: Despite Foodora ruling, app-based workers face uphill union battle. Despite these aggressive union avoidance tactics, public opinion polls indicate that, if given the choice, many non-union workers would opt to unionize. Organizing small workplaces is generally cost-prohibitive for unions and rarely results in broader bargaining power for workers in a particular sector.
The lack of union supply, labour relations power dynamics and the union avoidance strategies of employers all work together to dissuade workers from exercising their right to unionize.
Those reforms have made it more difficult for workers to exercise their legal right to unionize and easier for employers to interfere in union-organizing campaigns. Governments could certainly change labour laws to facilitate unionization and crack down on employers engaging in union avoidance activities. Given growing levels of social and economic inequality in the wake of the COVID pandemic, the need to facilitate unionization is more urgent than ever.
Let your employees hear your side of the story so that they can make an educated decision about how bringing a union into the workplace will affect them. The bottom line is that if you communicate openly and honestly with employees and your workplace is truly one that fosters good employee relations with fair and consistent policies and practices, employees should find little value in union representation.
You may be trying to access this site from a secured browser on the server. Please enable scripts and reload this page. Reuse Permissions. Page Content. Strategies that help discourage union acceptance are: Fair and consistent policies and practices.
Open door management policies. Competitive pay and benefits. Employee trust and recognition. The acronym TIPS can help remind employers not to: T hreaten—never threaten to retaliate against employees by terminating them or reducing pay or benefits. I nterrogate—do not interrogate employees about their activities or activities of co-workers.
P romise—do not promise anything to employees, such as promotions or benefits, in exchange for not supporting the union. Labor Relations Employee Relations. You have successfully saved this page as a bookmark.
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