This just in: Working while black still does not pay very well. But there is a way to regain bargaining power.
While the economic progress of African Americans has improved over the past three decades, we still have not achieved full equal opportunity in American economic life. The facts speak for themselves.
Black family income is at an all-time high, but is still only 60 percent that of the average family in America. African American workers are also less likely than whites to have employer-provided health insurance and pension plans. According to the U. S. Department of Labor, only 44 percent of African American male workers have any pension coverage at all, compared with 58 percent of white men. Needless to say, the fight for equality at the workplace for people of color is far from over. This glaring gap hurts not only the individual worker, but whole families and communities as they are never able to reach their full earning potential.
For decades, unions have helped women and people of color bridge the wage gap. Through the power of collective bargaining, union workers have been able win access to health insurance and other benefits for themselves and their families. In fact, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, African American workers who belong to unions earn 36 percent more than their nonunion counterparts and are more likely to have employer-provided health coverage and pensions.
Unfortunately, union representation has declined for the country as a whole and unionization rates for African Americans have fallen more quickly than for the rest of the workforce. Part of the reason for the decline in unionization rates among African Americans is undoubtedly related to the decline of U. S. manufacturing, where people of color have been able to get good union jobs. The overall decline in manufacturing, however, is only part of the problem.
Most people in America don’t know that labor law in this country has been so twisted that it is now virtually impossible for workers to form a union without running the risk of employer harassment and even termination. Seventy years of labor law amendments, court decisions and a ballooning multimillion-dollar unionbusting industry have effectively robbed workers of their constitutional and human right to choose whether to form a union to bargain for improved working conditions.
What do employers do ? According to Cornell University professor Kate Bronfenbrenner, who studied union election campaigns held in 1998 and 1999, 78 percent forced supervisors to meet one-onone with the people they supervised and urged them to vote no to unionization. In over half of the worker campaigns, employers threatened that the workplace would close if workers unionized, and 14 percent used electronic spying equipment on their workers. Worse yet, a new study by the independent Center for Economic Policy Research found that 1 in 5 union activists is likely to be fired when trying to form a union.
There is a new bill before Congress that would make it more difficult for employers to interfere in their employees’ efforts to organize for a better life. Approved by the House in March, the Employee Free Choice Act would give working people back their freedom to form and join unions by stiffening penalties on employers who violate the law.
The bill restores balance to the system of forming unions and bargaining by giving workers, not bosses, the option of deciding how they will choose whether to form a union, either through ballot elections or majority sign-up, a process that enables people to form unions when a majority of employees indicate in writing they want one.
Sadly, the debate on this worker rights bill is being hijacked by sound-bite arguments from the all-powerful business lobby, which falsely claims that the bill will eliminate union elections. The bill doesn’t eliminate anything. It simply gives workers another choice to form unions when a majority signs authorization cards. Such procedures have been in place since 1935, but today the choice is up to the boss. It should be up to workers.
Simply put, a union contract gives some power to working people in circumstances where they otherwise have relatively little control. Employers don’t like that. It’s time we let workers control their own destinies, without interference from greedy corporations that care more about their bottom lines than their employees. Last month, the Center for American Progress issued a comprehensive antipoverty report, compiling some of the most sensible ideas on poverty reduction. One of their key recommendations for reducing poverty is enacting the Employee Free Choice Act. For the sake of all workers struggling to gain a toehold into the middle class, I sincerely hope our senators take heed.
—–––––•–––––—Dale Charles is president of the Arkansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
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