The following op-ed by David Freiboth, Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the M.L. King County Labor Council, appears in the current edition of the Puget Sound Business Journal:

It is generally believed that employees of American companies have the right to join unions. While that may be what the law says, it isn't the reality.

Loopholes in the federal statute originally intended to give employees protection from employer coercion and intimidation when trying to organize a union have been used by businesses to effectively deny employees their right.

That's why the Employee Free Choice Act, currently in Congress, is so important to America.

Since 2000, about one in five employees identified as actively working to organize a union were fired for their efforts, according to a recent study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Another study, by Cornell University Professor Kate Bronfenbrenner, found that 78 percent of private-sector employers, in response to employees expressing their right to join a union, required supervisors to meet one-on-one with employees, effectively coercing them to vote against unionization.

Even after employees risk their livelihoods to certify union representation, all employees involved are usually faced with a very aggressive, professional effort to prevent them from gaining a first collective bargaining agreement. Such employer campaigns against first contracts are successful 30 percent of the time, resulting in a de facto denial of employees' right to join a union.

It wasn't supposed to be this way.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was a response to the uncertainties of the market-driven economy that were largely responsible for the global economic devastation brought on by the Great Depression of the 1930s. The New Deal's three Rs -- Relief, Recovery and Reform -- were the federal government's attempt to tame the great volatility of the unregulated economy. While many of these reforms are very much accepted as the balance necessary to prevent the social damage of heavy depression cycles, at the time the reaction by business to the level of government economic intervention was almost universally negative.

One of Roosevelt's "private sector" solutions to ensure that working people were protected from these devastating economic swings was a federal act that leveled the playing field between workers organizing themselves into labor unions and employers.

The National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act) of 1935 protected the right of workers to engage in organized union activities. The Wagner Act was not only intended to protect workers but it also sought to channel the effects of labor disputes into an environment that would minimize the sometimes bloody and extremely disruptive conflicts that employers and employees found themselves in prior to 1935.

Roosevelt often used to remark to business naysayers that to not provide for a private sector, market-based method of worker empowerment was to risk the violent social upheavals being witnessed at the time in Europe. It was, in effect, Roosevelt's attempt to find a private-sector solution that would blunt the growing notion that the market-based American economy could not address the gap between the haves and the working class have-nots.

While there are many ways to debate and analyze the transformation of the relatively poor, pre-World War II working class into the economically vital postwar American middle class, it is generally agreed that the rise of a strong labor movement was one of the key components in transforming workers into consumers.

The economic vitality of that important economic factor has been threatened since union membership peaked in the mid-1950s. Recently the economic strength of the American middle class has started to erode. The recovery from our last recession cycle has seen, for the first time in postwar record-keeping, a stagnation of middle class wage growth. Job creation has centered in areas that have accelerated the gap between the haves and the have-nots. It has gotten to the point where fewer than one in four Americans feel the next generation will be better off than the current one, according to a survey by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, of Washington, D.C.

The Employee Free Choice Act, approved in March in a bipartisan effort by the U.S. House of Representatives, is an effort to protect the interests of the middle class by restoring the Wagner Act's original intent: to ensure an employee's right to join a union.

The current reality is that employers who oppose unions have the power to leverage and control the decisions in the union certification process administrated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). A truly free and fair NLRB certification election is typically not a realistic option under current conditions. By the time a vote is actually cast (often months after the desire to be represented is filed with the NLRB due to legal employer delaying tactics), the environment has been so poisoned by hired professional specialists skilled at directing barely legal coercion campaigns that many employees who originally expressed support for unionization are intimidated into voting against representation.

It is routine for identified unionization supporters to be fired on trumped-up "for cause" reasons. Penalties for clear violations are painfully weak and very slow to be issued, usually occurring long after unionization efforts have been defeated.

The Employee Free Choice Act would impose penalties when anti-union employers threaten employees' choice to seek union representation. It would bring in an outside mediator to settle first contract disputes when the employer and employees find themselves deadlocked after months and months of negotiations. And it would establish "majority sign-up," which secures union representation at a company if a majority of the employees indicate in writing that they want a union.

A key element of this effort, majority sign-up, is not a new approach. For years, responsible employers such as Cingular Wireless have protected employees' right to join unions by recognizing that majority sign-up is an effective way to gauge employees' free choice. Employers who truly believe in their employees' right to join unions have found that majority sign-up produces less hostility and polarization in the workplace and results in an avoidance of the loss of productivity present in the current failed NLRB process.

Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act will attempt to undermine the need for such an historic revision to American labor law, not unlike those who attempted to derail New Deal reforms. History tells us, however, that it is in our social and economic best interest to ensure that an employee truly has the right to join unions, and enjoy the prosperity that comes with it.

Labor and its allies will work overtime to gain passage of the Employee Free Choice Act -- an investment in an economically strong American middle class.

DAVID FREIBOTH is executive secretary/treasurer of the M.L. King County Labor Council.