The TUC has prepared a briefing for UK trade unionists on what you can do to help. This is vital stuff as the union-busters whose activities EFCA will hopefully help curtail are the same charmers who’ve popped up here in the UK.

As part of our efforts to support US unions the TUC and a number of leading academics have issued a ‘call for support’ and we are hoping to sign up as many UK and UK based academics as possible. John Kelly, Ed Heery, Jane Holgate, Gregor Gall, Kim Moody and John Logan have already signed up – please help us sign up many, many more!

You can read the ‘call for support’ – and how to sign up – here. please pass this message on to any academics you think will want to show their support for the right to organise in the US.

***update*** Over the weekend 75 academics signed up to the ‘call for support’ – lets build on this brilliant support! Please make sure you forward on to anyone you think may wish to sign up!

The TUC has joined the campaign for the Employee Free Choice Act in the USA. Brendan Barber has written to the Prime Minister and to the US Embassy, and he’s written an article you could put on your website or union publication.  MPs have put down an Early Day Motion in Parliament, urging their colleagues in Congress to do the right thing.

US workers have lost out big time over the last thirty years, and they need the collective strength to get better pay, better pensions and better health care, and to end discrimination. They need the basic human rights set out in ILO core labour conventions 87 and 98 (which the USA, along with China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, has failed to ratify).

We will be advising unions about raising this with employers who also operate in the USA through the Union Professionals site, and pension fund trustees will be advised what they can do too. In the US, academics, artists, churches and many more have joined the campaign. Against them are shadowy business organisations behind which household name companies are hiding.

The campaign needs just a handful more Senators and it will succeed in making the USA a fairer place for working people.

Actor Martin Sheen - who played President Bartlet – has recorded a radio spot campaigning for EFCA, paid for by ”Catholics for Working Families”. And he,  Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff (who played Josh Lyman and Toby Ziegler respectively in The West Wing), launched an AFL-CIO campaign in March called Faces of the Employee Free Choice Act, uniting ordinary working people with famous faces.

The TUC General Council agreed in April to do whatever we can to support US unions in their campaign to see EFCA enacted, and we’ll be looking at famous UK faces to back up their American counterparts. Now, who is the UK equivalent of President Bartlet – Harriet Jones MP out of Dr Who?

Krugman’s article is mostly about what President Obama needs to do to save the US economy, but he’s very clear about the need for workers to have the freedom to join a union, and it’s a very persuasive argument, because one of the root causes of the current climate was sub-prime housing loans. Workers needed those loans but couldn’t pay them back. Because they weren’t earning enough. Similarly, in the UK, low wages have led to massive amounts of personal debt over the last generation – just ask your parents how much THEY had to borrow to buy houses and essential goods!

Here are some quotes from Krugman’s article picked out for me by Seth Michaels (hat tip) at the AFLCIO blog:

…you can do a lot to enhance workers’ rights. One is to start laying the groundwork to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it much harder for employers to intimidate workers who want to join a union…the legislation will enable America to take a huge step toward recapturing the middle-class society we’ve lost.

…one important factor was the rise of organized labor: Union membership tripled between 1935 and 1945. Unions not only negotiated better wages for their own members, they also enhanced the bargaining power of workers throughout the economy. At the time, conservatives warned that wage gains would have disastrous economic effects—that the rise of unions would cripple employment and economic growth. But in fact, the Great Compression was followed by the great postwar boom, which doubled American living standards over the course of a generation.

Send a personalised one to your friends in the States here.

The above is an extract from a speech given by John McCain at a rally in Virginia as reported here in the Washington Post.  Anyone familiar with the practice of union busters in US recognition ballots will know that this is very disingenuous and that by the time many workers get to vote in labor elections, they’ve usually endured a pretty heavy campaign of intimidation and scare tactics. 

The following were the findings of a study of union organising campaigns by Cornell University;

• Ninety-two percent of private-sector employers, when faced with employees who want to join together in a union, force employees to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union propaganda; 80 percent require supervisors to attend training sessions on attacking unions; and 78 percent require that supervisors deliver anti-union messages to workers they oversee.
• Seventy-five percent hire outside consultants to run anti-union campaigns, often based on mass psychology and distorting the law.
• Half of employers threaten to shut down partially or totally if employees join together in a union.
• In 25 percent of organizing campaigns, private-sector employers illegally fire workers because they want to form a union.
• Even after workers successfully form a union, in one-third of the instances, employers do not negotiate a contract.

You can find out more why secret ballots in the context of labor elections don’t work - here.