Have you been fired or harassed or threatened for voicing support or trying to organize a union?

[Selatius]

Poll question: Have you been fired or harassed or threatened for voicing support or trying to organize a union?

I'm watching the House debate on the Employee Free Choice Bill right now, and I wanted to know if you have been fired or harassed or threatened by your employer for trying to form a union or voicing support in favor of those trying to form a union.

[ms liberty]

1. mr liberty has been threatened/harassed...

not by the company itself, but by 'employees' (read brown-nosing suck-ups) who didn't support a union. He had co-workers who were fired "for other reasons" during that time, and it was clearly due to their support of unions. We're not very worker friendly here in NC, unfortunately. This was on a previous job, that he's been laid off from for several years now. Many people at his current job would like to ogranize, although it's not been discussed as a group, but it's not really gotten off the ground or anything as yet. His company's nation/worldwide, and there are more efforts in other states I think.

[Selatius]

2. This is what I find frustrating.

If you caused an honest accident on a job and they know you're trying to unionize fellow workers, you're fired due to something like "lack of competency." Another example is coming in one or two minutes late and being fired, while other workers who may have done the same thing get a warning. There was a lady on the House floor who had a story of where one of the workers in her district cut open his finger on the machinery, and he was in favor of unionizing, and the management staff used that to cook up an excuse to fire him because he was a union activist.

They can use all kinds of coercive tactics like one-to-one meetings, holding workers captive in anti-union meetings, vague threats of loss of jobs due to closure, and so on and so forth, and the sad part is the NLRB is either unwilling or unable to clamp down on these thuggish tactics.

The simple fact is the Republicans have been in power for 12 years, and they have used every year to gut the labor relations infrastructure in the country so that employers have the upper hand. Hell, they've had the upper hand since the Taft-Hartley Act.

I'm down here in Mississippi, and the two big reason for the lack of unions here is due to "right-to-work" laws and weak enforcement of regulations by the NLRB against illegal employer anti-union tactics. They use everything to put the fear of the boss into honest people who simply want a decent paycheck and good benefits to live out their modest dreams.

[ms liberty]

4. Yeah, we're in NC...

which is an 'employment at will' state, although there's little practical difference from a 'right to work' state. Your examples are very similar to things that happened to mr liberty's co-workers at his former job.

We can blame a lot of the misinformation about unions - and a lot of other things - on Ronnie Raygun.

[ComerPerro]

3. Not directly, but I've refused to help organize for fear of being fired

[moondust]

5. I've seen it happen.

Didn't affect me personally but...nurses at the top 25 medical center where I worked in the 90s voted to unionize with a national union. They really needed it to stop mandatory overtime and being overloaded with patients, etc. Management went so far as to bring in a professional union busting hit squad to try to squash it before the vote. Union won the vote. I hated working there and fairly soon thereafter quit the place.