WASHINGTON (PAI) – Linda Merfeld is a nurse, and a union activist. And in a way, she’s lucky: She hasn’t been fired yet. The Employee Free Choice Act could protect her, and others like her, from that fate.   But Merfeld, a Service Employees member who led the union drive at Finley Hospital in Dubuque, Iowa, is the exception to the rule: Last year, 31,000 workers were summarily and illegally fired for trying to organize unions at their workplaces.  

Now, with a new Democratic-run 110th Congress and pro-worker allies in key posts in the House, organized labor has launched a determined campaign to change all that, with the Feb. 5 re-introduction of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).  

The bill, H.R. 800, has 232 House co-sponsors, more than a majority. That includes seven Republicans, so far. EFCA would help level the playing field between workers and their bosses in organizing and bargaining. Senate Labor Committee Chairman Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) introduced it there.  

Leveling the playing field to let workers choose to join unions “is a basic and fundamental human right and a basic and fundamental civil right,” lead House sponsor, Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.), told a kickoff press conference on Feb. 6. One Labor subcommittee held the first EFCA hearing on Feb. 8.  

But even more importantly, both lawmakers and union leaders said, EFCA would be a first step towards restoring and reviving the U.S. middle class.  

“America isn’t working the way it should for working families…The best opportunity for working men and women to get ahead economically is by coming together with their co-workers to bargain with their employer for a better life – through a union,” AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney said then.  

“Yet far too few people ever get that chance. The current system for forming unions and bargaining is broken….EFCA is common-sense legislation that will help restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain with their employers,” Sweeney declared.  

“The freedom to join a union is an essential pillar of the American dram, along with a paycheck that supports a family, affordable health care and a secure retirement,” added Change to Win Secretary-Treasurer Edgar Romney. Yet “every 23 minutes, a worker is fired, intimidated, coerced or retaliated against, simply for supporting a union.”  

EFCA certainly would have helped Merfeld and her fellow nurses in Dubuque. They voted for SEIU in Dec. 2003, but did not win a first contract with the hospital for 18 months, she told Press Associates Union News Service afterwards. And then it was only a 1-year pact “and we had to threaten a strike to get it,” she said.  

Hospital managers instituted anti-union meetings, intimidation and harassment. The meetings took nurses away from their patients in an understaffed hospital. Since July 2006, the nurses have worked without a contract, she told PAI. “It’s very difficult. At times, it can be a hostile work environment. I think the hospital is even changing nurse-patient ratios for the worse – just to get us to give up,” Merfeld explained. Last year, she told the press conference, the hospital fired a 30-year nurse who had a perfect record, because the nurse spoke up about patient care.  

EFCA, if passed, would force some changes in such hostile conditions. It would outlaw mandatory anti-union meetings that employers now legally can force workers to come to, under threat of discipline. And if the two sides could not reach a first contract within 90 days, the dispute would go to arbitration. If that had been required in Dubuque, she said, “the issue would have been resolved” and the pact would have been over a year.  

Most importantly, EFCA would write into law current rules that permit “card check” recognition of unions on the job – cases where unions convince a majority of workers to sign union authorization cards.  Right now, Miller explained, card check exists, but only if the employer agrees to recognize the union after it achieves a majority.  

Otherwise, added Miller, workers must go through the torturous National Labor Relations Board elections process, opening themselves to bosses’ harassment, intimidation, threats, retaliation, firings and plant and company closure forecasts.  

All those anti-worker moves are illegal under labor law, but fines are so small and penalties are so light that companies ignore them. So EFCA, in addition to its other provisions, increases the fines and makes it easier for unions to get court orders against such anti-worker conduct. Such tougher penalties would have helped Bill Lawhorn, a former forklift driver who took the lead in organizing for the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers at his plant, the Consolidated Biscuit Co., in Ohio.  

The workers got a huge majority of cards, Lawhorn said, but Consolidated, which had subjected them to “a lot of abuse” on the shop floor, got rough. He described harassment, threats of “we’ll close the plant if you form a union,” warnings workers would lose benefits and pay, and, finally, a personal threat from a supervisor that Lawhorn would be fired.  

After the anti-union drive – which, due to the company’s campaign, BCTGM lost – he was canned the next day. Four and a half years later, even after the NLRB ruled for him and against Consolidated, Lawhorn still awaits the meager back pay he is owed, delayed by company appeals. EFCA would increase the money he’d get for being illegally fired.  

Jose Guardado, a UFCW Local 271 member who led organizing at the Nebraska Beef meatpacking plant in Omaha, was also fired, some years after the drive ended. “I thought laws protected workers who wanted to form a union. I was wrong,” he said in Spanish, through a translator. “I found when employers break the law, abuse workers and silence our voices, no one does anything to stop them.” At NBP, after 900 workers signed cards, abuse included deportation threats against Hispanic-named workers.  

Reintroduction of EFCA drew strong support from a top civil rights group and from other union leaders, since it is organized labor’s top legislative cause both this year and for the foreseeable future. Kennedy said that “Americans know” the economy “is working for Wall Street, not for Main Street,” and EFCA would help it work for them.  

Since 1973, “We’ve seen increased productivity. Has a fair share of that been passed on to workers? No. We’ve seen increased profits? Has a fair share of that been passed on to workers? No,” the senator added.   “The idea behind EFCA is simple,” said Teamsters President James Hoffa. “Most any American can join a group – a church group, the PTA, or the National Rifle Association – by signing a card and paying dues. With EFCA, if a majority at a workplace wants to build a union, they sign cards and the employer recognizes their wishes,” he added.  

“The current system is broken,” Hoffa’s statement continued. “Workers, after expressing their desire to form a union, usually endure nasty, bruising, and lawyer-dominated elections, as the employer fights to block its employees' choice…Not only is a process that allows such intimidation outrageous, it's anti-American.” EFCA, he said, will let workers “build a union if they desire one” and ensure their “freedom to unite at work to bargain for better wages, benefits and working conditions.”  

EFCA “will put some teeth back into our labor laws, because right now management can run roughshod over the rights of workers” with the NLRB’s blessing, said AFSCME President Gerald McEntee in another statement. “Until Congress acts, the right to join a union exists primarily on paper.” Added AFT President Ed McElroy: “Millions of workers want to form a union but are denied this fundamental right due to employer harassment and intimidation. EFCA would remedy this injustice.”  

But EFCA faces strong opposition from business and the Bush government. In a forecast of that, Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao issued a snide one-sentence response: “A worker’s right to a secret ballot is an intrinsic right to our democracy that should not be legislated away at the behest of special interest groups.”

--This article originally appeared at International Labor Communications Association.