1,000 Scholars and Academics Support Employee Free Choice
By Seth Michaels, AFL-CIO
America’s top scholars of economics, history, law and the social sciences have announced their strong support of the Employee Free Choice Act.
More than 1,000 professors and scholars have signed on to a letter to Congress saying quick passage of the Employee Free Choice Act is critical to workers and the economy.
These scholars are putting their support for the Employee Free Choice Act and workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain into action by speaking out in public through symposia, teach-ins, public rallies and letters to elected officials and the media, from Colorado to Indiana to Wisconsin to Nebraska.
The academics who support Employee Free Choice are a diverse group, spanning a range of disciplines, and include Nobel Prize-winning economists, historians and business school professors. Authored by historian David Brody, the letter addresses the need for the Employee Free Choice Act from this broad array of fields of study. These scholars, Brody says, know what the freedom to form unions and bargain means for individual workers, communities, workplace democracy, the economy and human rights. As the scholars say in the letter:
[W]e understand the importance of a strong, independent and democratic labor movement as a counterweight against excessive corporate power and a bulwark of social inclusion and political participation.
These scholars represent yet another critical addition to the broad coalition in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. At this critical time for workers, the lessons of history, economics and the social sciences point to the need for workers to have the freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life. The time is now.
Sign up for the OV Daily Newsletter
OV Social
Very sad that so many scholars believe that the secret ballot is not important. Yes more unions will provide for more political particpation by providing hard earned worker's dues to politicians (of one party of course). Unions have trouble organizing because they rarely represent worker's interest. This just reconfirms how out of touch academia elitists are with the real world.
Call me a cynic, but I have always thought,
That which can be abused, will
That which cannot be abused, will--learn how.
I support Unions, I have been in my time a member in good standing of the CWA, the UAW and the IBEW.
I have walked picket lines, I have gotten off work, when I myself was not on strike and driven strikers of other Locals to and from their lines and walked those lines with them.
That said I hold the concept of the Secret Ballot to be sacred.
I want never to know that workers will have joing a union explained to them while someone holds a card in front of them and guides their hands to sign it,
So I don't hold much credence in what some Ivory Tower, Academics, who probably never spent a day in their lives in the real working world think
They don't know bupkiss about my world and what it is like,
I am from Kentucky we hold on to grudges til the die of old age, then have them stuff and mounted