Fight Fear with Facts

Millions of Americans are growing angrier by the day as bonuses are being paid to financial sector executives who are soaking up government bailouts—even after they nearly brought down our entire economic system.

But the stench of their audacity wafts even wider. Some big banks—like Citibank and Bank of America, which survive only upon the largesse of taxes paid by hard-working Americans, are putting another thumb in our collective eye by using our money to spread lies about the Employee Free Choice Act and our unions.

We say enough to the spectacle of the same greedy executives who refuse to give up bonuses even as their companies fail—because they say they are “covered by contracts”—standing in the way of a bill that would make it easier for hard-working Americans to join unions and win their own collective bargaining agreements.

As union members, we will not succeed in defending our own hard-won gains if they continue to thwart the aspirations of workers who want to join organized labor.

The battle over this bill in Congress is coming at the same time as an extensive and sharp national discussion over what kind of economy we want to build.

The IBEW has a critical role to play in this national debate. That’s why we have circulated a DVD to all locals in the Brotherhood with ammunition to overcome the hypocritical rhetoric and talk some common sense to millions of working Americans, and through them, to members of Congress who will vote on the bill.

Within every local of our union are men and women who have the ability to eloquently counter the misinformation about the Employee Free Choice Act through personal visits with their legislators, talk radio, letters to the newspaper, the Internet or face-to-face with co-workers and members of our communities. This effort is the next step in the growing grassroots political mobilization that helped to elect the Obama-Biden ticket last November, a movement to restore fairness to American workers.

Fairness is, after all, is what our labor movement is about. There is no better time for this fight and there is no better group of bad guys than the corporate leaders and their supporters who helped get our nation into this mess.

The last issue of The Electrical Worker discussed several of the myths about the Employee Free Choice Act that are spread by employers, like the charge that majority sign-up  would be “undemocratic” by denying workers the right to decide whether they want union representation through a secret ballot election. The employers are now shifting to other arguments, and we need to respond.

“You see what power is—holding someone else’s fear in your hand and showing it to them,” says novelist Amy Tan. And that’s just what the powerful opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act are attempting to do.

With unions representing only 12 percent of all American workers, the millions who have no direct experience with unions are vulnerable to expensive advertisements to “show them their fears.”

A group called the Alliance to Save Main Street Jobs has funded a study to scare workers who already are unemployed or facing possible job losses by claiming that increasing union density will result in higher unemployment. The study predicts that every three percentage points gained in union membership through majority sign-up and mandatory arbitration will increase the unemployment rate by 1 percentage point and decrease job creation by 1.5 million jobs.

Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, says the study amounts to “crackpot economics.” Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, says that—if the study were true—Canada, where the unionization rate is 20 percentage points higher than in the U.S., would have a higher unemployment rate. Yet Canada’s unemployment rate is lower.

It should be no surprise that the Alliance to Save Main Street Jobs includes the Associated Builders and Contractors, the principal anti-union employer’s association in the construction industry. We’ve never been afraid to challenge ABC on the political front, and we need to do that now more than ever.

If the fear tactics leveled at average Americans don’t sink in, our adversaries are already zeroing in on members of Congress who are said to be on the fence concerning the Employee Free Choice Act.  The Coalition for a Democratic Workplace—comprising more than 500 anti-union organizations and associations—is running ads telling Senators Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), Arlen Spector (R-Pa.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Michael Bennett (D-Colo.) that it’s time to line up with big business and leave the working folks behind on Employee Free Choice.

Will working Americans and our political representatives embrace our dreams for a fairer nation, or will we turn away and surrender to fear spread by those who benefit from injustice and economic privilege? This is the defining question of the early 21st century for labor. Don’t sit on the sidelines at this historic moment.