Watch Mary Beth Maxwell Discuss Employee Free Choice on C-SPAN

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/01/07/watch-mary-beth-maxwell-discuss-employee-free-choice-on-c-span/

by Seth Michaels, Jan 7, 2009

On Friday, Mary Beth Maxwell, executive director of American Rights at Work, appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” for a great interview about the importance of quickly passing the Employee Free Choice Act.

In the half-hour interview, Maxwell described our badly broken system for forming unions, how it has undermined workers’ bargaining power and the economy, and how the Employee Free Choice Act will restore workers’ freedom to form unions without corporate harassment and intimidation, allowing them to bargain for a better life. Maxwell took questions from viewers around the country and cut through the misconceptions about the Employee Free Choice Act.

http://www.c-span.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-A-13915

In response to the barrage of attacks from corporate anti-worker front groups, Maxwell said the groups’ arguments are:

simply not true, and spending millions of dollars in misleading attack ads, saying it over and over and over again, doesn’t make it true.

Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act falsely claim the bill would do away with secret ballots or open the door to coercion by unions. Neither of these claims has merit. The Employee Free Choice Act will allow workers (rather than bosses) to choose whether to form unions, either through majority sign-up or the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election process.

And claims of union intimidation are far from credible. According to AFL-CIO Associate General Counsel Nancy Schiffer, a study of NLRB decisions found only 42 cases of union fraud or coercion over more than six decades since the NLRB was established. Compared with the nearly 27,000 instances of company violations of workers’ rights in 2006 alone, it’s clear that corporate anti-union scaremongering is a ploy to disguise the anti-worker agenda.

Maxwell dissected the corporate disinformation campaign and outlined the intimidation, harassment and delay that are pervasive in our company-dominated system. The anti-worker campaign, Maxwell says, is fundamentally about trying to keep workers from being able to exercise the freedom to bargain for a better life.

FULL story at link.

[Sherman A1]

1. Thanks Steve for posting this one,

I have to write up an LTTE on a editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch today on the "no more secret ballot" issue.

This is just what I needed...


:bounce: :thumbsup: