[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 8]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 10903-10904]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



     EXPRESSING CONCERN OVER THE STATE OF LABOR RIGHTS IN THE U.S.

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. DENNIS J. KUCINICH

                                of ohio

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, June 14, 2001

  Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, the right of workers to organize 
themselves into a union and bargain collectively are fundamental rights 
protected by various international conventions. Among them is the 
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the first major 
achievements of the United Nations. Article 23 of the UDHR states that 
``everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the 
protection of his interests.'' Another is the Right to Organize and 
Collective Bargaining Convention, adopted in 1949 at the 32nd assembly 
of the International Labor Organization and ratified by 148 countries. 
The very first line of this document reads: ``Workers shall enjoy 
adequate protection against acts of anti-union discrimination in 
respect of their employment.''
  United States law also codifies these basic labor rights. The 
National Labor Relations Act, signed in 1935, guarantees employees the 
right to organize and chose their bargaining representative. The Act 
also protects employees from retaliation by their employer for 
exercising their rights under the NLRA. Section 8 of the Act makes it 
an Unfair Labor Practice for an employer to ``interfere with, restrain, 
or coerce employees'' in the exercise of their rights to organize and 
bargain collectively. Specifically, employers are barred from 
discharging or otherwise discriminating against an employee because he 
or she has engaged in union activity or has filed charges or given 
testimony under the NLRA.
  Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, there remains in this country a large gap 
between theory, in which these basic rights are protected, and 
practice, in which these rights scarcely exist. According to Human 
Rights Watch, ``workers' freedom of association is under sustained 
attack in the United States, and the government is often failing its 
responsibility under international human rights standards to deter such 
attacks and protect workers' rights.'' The evidence for this is great. 
Fewer than 40% of all workers who participate in an NLRB election gain 
coverage under a collective bargaining agreement; this number was over 
75% in the early 1950s. Of the successful campaigns to form a union, 
only 66% result in a first contract for the newly organized workers. 
Unionization rates in the U.S. are at some of the lowest levels in 
decades.
  Some will argue that this demonstrates that American workers lack 
interest in unions. But given unions' demonstrated ability to win 
Americans better wages, better benefits, and better working conditions, 
this explanation carries little weight. The real reasons American 
workers are unable to fully exercise their basic rights are three: 
First, certain employers will utilize any means, legal or otherwise, to 
prevent their workers from forming a union. Second, in current form 
American labor law provides little resource to those whose rights are 
violated, and imposes little penalty on those who choose to ignore the 
law. And third, international trade agreements make it easy for 
employers to escape their legal responsibility to honor workers' rights 
by taking their operations elsewhere in the world.
  What do certain unscrupulous corporations do to fight unionization? 
They coerce, intimidate, threaten, and sometimes even abuse workers. 
They fire workers are seen talking to union representatives, as Up-To-
Date Laundry did recently in Baltimore. They hire union-busting lawyers 
to slander the local union in front of a captive audience of workers, 
like the Mariott Corporation did in San Francisco. They alert INS 
officials to the illegal immigrants in their workforce, even though 
these employers conveniently ignored their workers illegal status when 
hiring them.
  Walmart threatened to shut down its butchering operation and start 
selling pre-packaged meat in its stores because a mere 11 workers 
wanted to unionize. A company called NTN Bower tried to undermine a 
United Auto Workers unionization drive by threatening to move their 
jobs to Mexico. A leaflet they passed out to workers read, ``With the 
UAW your jobs may go south for more than the winter!''
  This last example suggests the impact of trade agreements on U.S. 
anti-union activity. As Professor Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell 
University has demonstrated, ``plant closing threats and plant closings 
have become an integral part of employer anti-union campaigns,'' and 
that these tactics, combined with others, are ``extremely effective'' 
in undermining union organizing efforts. Professor Bronfenbrenner 
specifically cites NAFTA as facilitating this behavior.
  All of this should make us wonder: what does the law do to stop these 
kind of actions? The answer is virtually nothing. The following quote 
from Human Rights Watch is illustrative: ``An employer determined to 
get rid of a union activist knows that all that awaits, after years of 
litigation if the employer persists in appeals, is a reinstatement 
order the worker is likely to decline and a modest back-pay award. For 
many employers, it is a small price price to pay to destroy a workers' 
organizing effort by firing its leaders.'' If an employer can go so far 
as to fire worker with near impunity, certainly the law will not be 
enough to dissuade this employer from other illegal anti-union tactics.
  What is needed to end the abuse of these basic human rights in this 
country is strict enforcement of existing labor law, tougher penalties 
for labor law violators, the streamling of

[[Page 10904]]

the NLRB investigative process, and restrictions on the ability of 
companies to shift their operations to avoid unionization. More 
fundamentally, we as Americans must acknowledge that these rights, the 
right to organize a union and bargain collectively, are indeed basic 
human rights, to be protected as vigilantly as are the right to worship 
freely and the right to free speech. Only when we take these core labor 
rights as seriously as our other fundamental rights will our workers 
achieve the respect, dignity, and justice they deserve.

                          ____________________