The freedom to join a union is internationally recognized as a fundamental human right.  It is an important aspect of our freedom of association, guaranteed in our Constitution’s First Amendment, and as recognized in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  But when workers try to form or join a union in the United States today, employers too often violate their fundamental human rights with tactics designed to suppress the freedom to organize.

That’s why the AFL-CIO has declared June Voice@Work Month. 

In a kind of advance celebration of this declaration, some 1,200 employees at Spokane’s Sacred Heart Medical Center voted to join Local 1001 of the United Food and Commercial Workers late last month. Several workers were quoted as saying the reason they supported the union was because they sought respect and a voice in staffing issues. “It’s time the administration treated us with the same respect we show the patients,” said 20-year employee Audrey Hill.

Another 550 technical and service workers at Puyallup’s Good Samaritan Hospital voted on May 15 to join the Service Employees District 1199NW.

But those two recent votes were the exception. Too often attempts to organize and join a union are delayed, denied or otherwise thwarted.

Some 30 million workers say they want to join a union but only about 12 million belong to one. Why the discrepancy? Personally, I think employers intimidate workers and frighten them with vague threats. Sometimes it’s a hint that if the union wins, the company will close the plant and move it to Mexico. Sometimes it’s more overt. A recent survey by Cornell University scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner found that in workplaces with undocumented workers, employers threaten to call the Immigration and Naturalization Service in more than half of all union organizing drives.

Under our country’s labor laws, workers are supposed to be free to form or join a union, and employers are not allowed to discriminate against or fire workers for choosing to join a union. It’s actually illegal for employers to threaten to shut down their businesses or lay off workers if workers form a union. But the law hasn’t exactly been a deterrent. In 1998, the National Labor Relations Board ordered U.S. employers to give back pay to nearly 24,000 workers who were discriminated against because of their union activity. In fact, a 2000 study by Bronfenbrenner found that 25% of employers illegally fire at least one worker during a union organizing campaign. 

What really frightens me is a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on March 27 that said immigrant workers don’t have the same fundamental human rights as the rest of us.

In the case, the National Labor Relations Board ordered Hoffman Plastic, Inc. of California to pay back wages to four workers who were laid off because of their support for the United Rubber Workers union. The company appealed the NLRB order arguing that it should not be obligated to pay any back wages because they should never have hired the workers in the first place because they were undocumented. In what I consider the most outrageous anti-worker decision of the past decade, the Court agreed with the company. 

In other words, if you are an undocumented worker in this country, the U.S. Supreme Court says you have no rights in the workplace! The court has issued an invitation to exploit them. One can predict that companies will argue that they shouldn’t have to pay minimum wages, provide minimum workplace safety standards, much less obey basic labor laws, if they hire undocumented workers. 

This outrageous development makes the AFL-CIO's Voice@Work campaign even more timely.  

We need to remind everyone that our own laws and international standards hold that workers have a fundamental right to form and join a union. We will need to challenge the Court’s Hoffman decision in order to protect that right. With the Court’s decision, a license to create an underclass has been issued, and as we have seen so often in the past, when one group is exploited, it acts to hold down the wage and benefit standards for everyone else.

Rick Bender is President of the Washington State Labor Council, the largest labor organization in the state.

Check out the Voice@Work "Street Heat" actions planned in Seattle in June.
Get more information about the AFL-CIO Voice@Work Month.