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U.S. Labor Laws Need Teeth, Workers tell Congress

June 21, 2002

A stream of workers, labor leaders and human rights activists told the Senate Labor Committee Thursday that workers need tougher labor laws to combat businesses increasingly emboldened to threaten, fire and harass workers attempting to organize.

Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) opened the hearing by citing a study that concluded that 25 percent of employers fire workers during organizing campaign.

"Workers in the United States should have their fundamental rights protected," Sen. Kennedy said in the first Capitol Hill hearing on workers rights to organize since the 1980s. "American workers deserve far better. Indeed, American democracy deserves far better."

Workers testimony illustrated time and again that the National Labor Relations Board, the agency charged with enforcing the 1947 act that endowed workers with the right to organize, is not well enough equipped to protect workers in an age where employers resort to extreme lengths, including violence and other illegal acts of intimidation, to keep unions out.

Eric Vizier of New Orleans described his efforts to organize fellow mariners employed by Guidry Brothers, an offshore towing company operating in the Gulf of Mexico.
 

"They fired four captains for their union support, including myself," said Vizier, a member of the Offshore Mariners United, formed by several maritime unions. "The owners interrogated the mariners about their views on unions, they spied on us, they harassed us, they threatened to blackball union supporters in the industry, they told us theyd shut down the company if the union came in and punish all the union supporters first. A Guidry owner walked into a restaurant where he know there would be union staff, broke a bottle, held up the jagged edge and said he would use it to cut the throats of union organizers."

The NLRB found that Vizier was illegally fired for union activity and they found more than 20 other instances of unfair labor practices by the company. Vizier turned down a cash settlement to hold out for a bargaining order the NLRB never issued. He remains out of work.

"It shouldnt be this hard to form a union," Vizier said.

Senator Paul Wellstone (D-Minnesota) said common legal practices like captive audience meetings, bad faith bargaining and extended delays in holding elections all stem from weak labor law.

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch said in the 1950s, the number of workers who suffered reprisals for exercising the freedom of right to association was in the hundreds. By the 1990s more than 20,000 workers each year were victims of discrimination serious enough to issue a "back-pay" or other remedial order. But, he said the budget and staff have not kept pace with this growing need. "There is an unfair playing field tilting sharply against the right to join a union," he said.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said union-busting companies catering to businesses to prevent union organization are among the fastest growing industries in the country.
 

"Those of us who talk to workers like those here today on a regular basis have known for some time about the growing and scandalous corporate abuse of power," Sweeney said. "When these kinds of tactics succeed they destroy not just the chances of workers for a better life, they tear at the moral and economic fiber of our national community."

More from the AFL-CIO Web site.

See Videos of hearings.