What do women want?
A raise – and a break

20,000 answer Working Woman survey

When the AFL-CIO asked women about their jobs in its 2008 “Ask a working woman” survey, it got an earful. About 20,000 people responded between May and June.

By keltickelton, Flickr

The women say they spend more time at work than ever. They talk more to their coworkers than their family members or friends and they have almost no free time. More than two out of three say they have to work during their breaks or have no breaks. After juggling work and family responsibilities, nearly half have less than an hour a day to themselves. Yet they are still desperately in need of money.

When asked what they’d do if they had more free time, half said they’d work a second job. That’s more than the 43% who said they’d spend more time with family. One in five would spend more time with friends, exercise or sleep.

Paychecks not paying enough

When asked to choose what would make their lives “substantially easier,” more than half – 53% -- picked a 10% raise. Almost three out of four (72%) said that if they had a choice between a job that paid better or one that was more fun, they’d choose the one with higher pay.

Why is money so important?

Airport worker in S.C.

By Esthr, Flickr

Women are trying to escape the debt that two out of three say is more than they’d expected to get into, partly because six out of 10 are making less than they expected. They end up using high-interest credit cards to pay for purchases big and small. One in five (18%) say it will take them more than two years to pay off their credit card debt , and six percent say they’ll never be able to.

To make matters worse, many women believe their chances to get better jobs are limited simply because they are women. Nearly half say they know or believe that men are being paid more than women. (The eye-popping facts just uncovered by The Department for Professional Employees seem to confirm those feelings.) Two-thirds believe that being male, younger or more attractive would increase their chances of promotion.

What about the families?

Families are ever-more dependent on the wages of women. Four out of five women surveyed say “having children hurts their career and prospects in the job market,” yet men suffer no such problem from having children. A majority of respondents have some form of paid sick leave, but women tend to use their sick days, vacation or other paid leave to care for sick children, parents or other family members.

“Prices for everything have soared out of control while wages stagnate,” wrote one woman. "We shouldn’t have to sacrifice personal and family time for money."

What's the solution?

Working women say they want gains for women as a class. Four out of five respondents identify with the goals and ideals of feminism, and 43 percent feel strongly about it. They are not just idly hoping for change: Nine out of ten say they voted in the last election, and most  back efforts to encourage voting by women.

The AFL-CIO and Working America, which put survey results on its web site, are making sure politicians get the message.

Free discussion guide on Strategies for Promoting Women's Leadership

Want to talk about provocative strategies to advance women in unions? Here's a great aid to make leading the discussion fun and easy, no matter what your background.

This Discussion Guide was inspired by the Berger-Marks funded report: I Knew I Could Do This Work: Seven Strategies that Promote Women’s Activism and Leadership in Unions? Written by Michigan State University's Michelle Kaminski, the Guide is designed to help any educator or unionist lead a workshop for union activists in a small group setting. People will not only get valuable ideas, but also talk about how they can carry them out in their unions.

To get your copy

Click the links below, and then either print or save to your computer:

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Working mothers outside the Senate with a petition and resumes for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)

Photo courtesy MomsUnited.com via PAI Photo Service

Outraged Moms deliver resumes to McCain

After he suggested that women just aren't qualified

Taken from report by Moms Rising

When Senator John McCain didn’t bother to vote to keep the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act alive, we weren't the only ones offended. McCain had claimed that what women need to get ahead is not a law for fair treatment, but more education and training .(See quote).

That excuse didn’t sit well with union women and a group called “Moms Rising.” A group of “Moms” brushed up their resumes and on June 17, with cameras from four major TV stations in tow, they delivered protest petitions with 29,000 names and a stack of 1,500 resumes to Senator McCain’s office.

“McCain's staff looked completely dumbstruck when we strode into their offices wearing banners and carrying resumes," said one participant. "We politely told them that we understood the Senator was away, but that we wanted to leave him some resumes from extremely qualified women because we were extremely disappointed by his comments on the Fair Pay Act and we'd like him to reconsider his position.”

The Fair Pay Act McCain helped kill (for now) would have overturned an outrageous U.S. Supreme decision. The Court said a woman who discovered that for decades she was being paid less than men with the same job couldn’t win justice because she hadn’t sued during her first 180 days on the job.

For proof that “education and training” aren't enough to unlock the door to success for women, read on:

Women earn more college & master’s diplomas than men

Yet still shut out of many jobs, get smaller paychecks

New fact sheet from AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees

Want the "vital statistics" on where women stand in the working world today – especially when it comes to professional and high-paying jobs? Here are highlights (and lowlights) from the latest DPE Fact Sheet.

Women have surged ahead in academic achievement

• They've been earning more bachelor’s degrees than men for 25 years and have been earning more master’s degrees than men for even longer – since 1981.
• This year women are also expected to earn more than half of the first professional degrees awarded. That’s a long march up from the 2.6% they got in 1961. Women also got half of all doctoral degrees in 2008 (48.7% to be exact), nearly five times their 10.7% share of the nation’s doctoral degrees back in 1961.
• 44% of law school students are now women – a proportion that has skyrocketed to 12 times what it was in 1963. Almost half of all medical students are also women – 49% – compared to 6% in 1960-61.

So what jobs do women get for these huge academic advances?

Union teachers can earn more than twice what non-union teachers get

James Parks blog, aflcio.org

While women continue to dominate traditionally female professions like nursing and teaching, they are also moving into other fields. About half of all pharmacists and technical writers are now women, and one in three chemists is a women, three times the proportion of twenty years ago. One out of three lawyers and three out of ten doctors and surgeons are also women.

But women are have not been welcomed into other key professions. When is the last time you saw a women in the cockpit of an airplane? Last year fewer than one out of 20 aircraft pilots and flight engineers were women. Fewer than 1 in 12 electrical and electronics engineers are women, and just one out of eight civil engineers is female.

What about acting? While you might see glamorous women movie stars plastered across magazine covers, the fact is that women don’t get much more than a third of all Screen Actors’ Guild TV and theater roles (37%). Once they’re over 40, the situation gets much bleaker for women than for men. Huge pay gaps haven’t been erased.

Women still paid much less than men

Despite the remarkable progress in education, the U.S. still has the third biggest gap between what women and men are paid, among 19 developed countries.

• In weekly pay, the typical American woman makes just 80 cents for every dollar a male worker makes. In yearly earnings it’s worse, partly because men get bigger bonuses – a full-time woman worker got just under 77 cents for every dollar a man got in 2004. The gap is even worse for African-American and Hispanic women.
• Even when they work in the same profession, women are often paid less than men. Female doctors and surgeons earn a whopping 41% less than their male counterparts, Female college and university teachers make 25% less than their male colleagues, and women lawyers get 23% less.
  
• While experience on the job may play some role in the difference, it can’t explain away the fact that women are paid less in every occupational category, even in fields where they've outnumbered men for decades.

In 2005, the typical woman with a professional degree got $65,941, while a professional man earned over $100,000. That’s not very different from the pay gap for high school grads – the typical woman with a high school diploma got 34% less than a guy with the same education in 2005.

The cost of this inequality in paychecks is huge

On average, the families of working women lose out on $9,575 each year and over time, this adds up. It costs U.S. working families $200 billion a year. Wage and benefit differences also penalize retired women, who get less in pensions and Social Security. Only three out of ten women 65 and older got any kind of pension or annuity in 2005, and those who did typically got just $6,420.

And it hurts children, especially since more than one in four kids now lives in a single-parent home. The U.S. also has less government support for children and working parents than other countries.

Women in unions do much better

Union women are paid 33% more each week than non-union women. Among preschool and kindergarten teachers, where the vast majority are women, union members earn well over twice as much as non-union teachers. For elementary and middle school teachers, the union wage advantage is 59.4%.

For both men and women, workers who belong to a union are also more likely to have benefits like health and pension plans, and to get paid holidays and vacations, and life and disability insurance.

Is it any wonder that 44 out of every 100 union members are now women?

High Court kills California neutrality law for organizing

Taken from PAI article by Mark Gruenberg

Eight years ago California passed a neutrality law that  barred employers from spending state money to fight union drives. But that law was killed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which claimed that it ran afoul of the National Labor Relations Act and that it infringes upon employers’ free speech rights. 

Defending the 7-2 ruling, Justice John Paul Stevens said the law was struck down because it wasn’t neutral, in that it exempted some activities and expenses related to promoting unionization, such as letting union reps enter the workplace .

Courts limits on union power go beyond the law

Stevens said that even though the NLRA (the law creating the National Labor Relations Board) is silent on whether states can pass laws protecting union rights, courts previously ruled that states can’t regulate activity covered by the NLRA. The courts have carved out what he called  a “Machinists preemption,” which he claims forbids both the NLRB and states from regulating conduct that Congress intended “to be unregulated because it was left to be controlled by the free play of economic forces.”  Stevens asserted that the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which was passed by a Republican Congress over President Truman’s veto to restrict certain union activities, “struck a balance."

That’s absurd, retorted California AFL-CIO Executive Secretary-Treasurer Art Pulaski.  “Congress never intended to force the states to allow taxpayer dollars to be used to fight workers trying to have a union. The notion that Congress did this without saying it, as the court majority found, seems ridiculous.  The fundamental right to join unions exists only on paper.”

The lawsuit was brought by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, joined by the Bush regime’s National Labor Relations Board. The California law never took effect.

State has to subsidize union-busting?

In his dissent Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that the law never kept companies from using their own money to fight union organizing. “It simply says to those employers: ‘Do not do so on our dime.'”

Conservatives claim to be for states' rights when it suits them, but when states honor workers' rights, it's a whole 'nother story.

5,000 University of California researchers get UAW

Taken from James Parks blog on aflcio.org

From UAW Local 2865 web site

More than 3,000 researchers at the University of California (UC) have signed union cards  That means a strong majority of  5,000 researchers want the Postdoctoral Researchers Organize/UAW (PRO/UAW) to represent them in collective bargaining. These workers have a doctorate or equivalent degree and not only do basic research, usually working in a lab for five years, but also publish scholarly articles and write grant proposals, all of which help bring hundreds of millions in grants and contracts to the university each year.  

“These workers make significant contributions to biomedical and other scientific advances, and deserve the same voice that other workers have,” said UAW Secretary-Treasurer Elizabeth Bunn

As soon as the state Public Employment Relations Board certifies the union victory, the workers can begin negotiating a contract with the university. The key issues include wages, child care and improved maternity benefits, the union says.  

Years earlier the UAW had fought a long, hard battle to get the California university system to recognize the union rights of the 12,000 teaching assistants, tutors and other academic student employees at UC campuses across California. They now belong to UAW Local 2865 and ratified their first system-wide contract by a 93-percent margin back in 2000. This latest victory is built on their achievements.  

Pay federal workers for medical time off for family, says Congress

Taken from PAI information

Colleen Kelley, Treasury Employees president, lobbied for paid family leave

Photo courtesy NTEU via PAI

Some 2.7 million federal workers could get 4-8 weeks of paid time off when they have a baby or their family has a medical emergency.  That's what the House of Representatives voted for in June, by 278-46; it's now up to the Senate and Administration to follow through and make the bill law.

 The National Treasury Employees Union and the American Federation of Government Employees led the fight for the bill. And a group of mothers organized by Moms Rising  joined in, delivering to Congress 16,966 emails urging it to act.

Right now the law guarantees most workers 12 weeks off for medical family needs, but many  worker can’t afford to take the time, since they'd be doing without paychecks. Those who do take the time “must cobble together accrued annual and sick leave if they want to receive a paycheck,” pointed out the lead sponsor, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.)

Meanwhile back in the White House, President Bush’s Labor Department is working on rules to make it tougher to take unpaid leaves.

California, New  Jersey and Washington state have led the way in supporting families with  paid family leave laws that cover private sector workers.

Who's responsible for readers' comments on a union blog?

Not the union, say federal courts. But...

Includes information from Union Voice

These days it's not hard to publish a web blog that invites readers  to comment. Blogger.com is one of the first sites to make blogging easy, and WordPress is a popular alternative for adding blogs to your site. That's what columnist Walter Mossberg uses on his "All things digital" web site.

But can you be sued for what readers say?

Not successfully, to judge by recent court decisions. In a ruling this March, a Federal appeals court said the popular Craigslist online ad board was not liable for “roommates wanted” ads that included discriminatory requirements (Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Inc. vs. Craigslist, 2006). Then in June a Federal court in Virginia found that the site ConsumerAffairs.com was not liable for disparaging comments about businesses from readers.  In both cases, the courts held that the users are responsible for the comments they post, and not the site on which they are posted.

There are other reasons to be cautious

But  there’s still good reason to limit comments that can be posted on a union web site. If you create a public site that shows all reader comments, your union could end up publicly linked with creeps who demean women, are racist or take advantage of your openness. Without some control over quality and access, you could offer managers or anti-union crusaders who claim to be members a great forum to trash the union and its leaders.

The sites most open to comments tend to be those that discuss technical issues, or shopping.

Have guidelines, will enforce

If you want to welcome visitor input, the first step is to publish guidelines to be followed by anyone who wants to post. That means someone has to be available to review comments. (And you might have to check out the real identities of some posters.)

The AFL-CIO promises to "review, but not edit" reader comments on its blogs, but they must follow guidelines that include "no attacks that identify individuals, companies, unions or other organizations" and "no spam, flaming, flooding, advertisements or solicitations," among other things. See full guidelines.

UAW’s ‘I am the Union' organizing site says: ‘Tell Us Your Story’

The Slayline family submitted this picture to the 'I am the Union' site to thank the union for its support after Shane Slayline passed away.

The UAW launched an exciting "I am the Union" site that invites any “member, family member, friend or supporter” of the union to submit comments, pictures, podcasts and videos  through  a form that’s headlined, “Tell us your story.”

The form makes it clear that they’re looking for positive stories on “why you became a member, or what you or your local is doing in the community to make a difference.” And only those are published.

The site uses rating software to push the most popular stories to the top of the web pages. In a top-rated recent posting, for example, David Bergen tells how his local union helped him and his family after his infant daughter Zoe was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and how he used his negotiated benefits following a plant closing to build a foundation to help others.

Other ways to enforce guidelines

• Only allow registered users to post comments. That would also help you ban serial trouble-makers, by taking away their right to register.
• Allow private discussions among specific communities, but not general postings to the site. That's how Barack Obama's campaign web site handles user input. It invites visitors to “log in and post for your community not for Obama.”
  

Progressive groups everywhere are struggling with this issue, as they try to find the right balance between using the wonderful interactivity of the web to engage with supporters and potential allies, and making sure their openness to dialog isn't abused.

Wal-Mart caught cheating workers more than 2 million times

And that’s just in Minnesota

Taken from PAI article by Barb Kucera, in Workday Minnesota, & WINS

In what may be a world record, Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, broke labor law more than 2 million times by denying workers their breaks and forcing them to work "off the clock" for no pay, a Minnesota judge ruled. Judge Robert King ordered the monster retailer to pay wronged workers $6.5 million in back pay covering a 6-year period.

For Wal-Mart $6.5 million may be a drop in the bucket, but a flood could be coming in October. That’s when a jury will set civil penalties and punitive damages for willfully violating the law that could go as high as $2 billion.

King's ruling culminated a 7-year legal battle by four former Wal-Mart workers who filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 56,000 people who had worked at Minnesota Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores between Sept. 11, 1998, and Jan. 31, 2004.

It’s not just the prices that are cheap

This ruling echoes judgments against Wal-Mart in other states like California – where Wal-Mart had to pay $172 million for depriving nearly 116,000 hourly workers of their meal breaks – and Colorado, Pennsylvania and Oregon,. The company's 2006 annual report admitted that Wal-Mart faced 57 wage-and-hour lawsuits nationwide.

"There was just too much work to do and never enough time to do it," said Nancy Braun, one of the four plaintiffs. Wal-Mart knew very well its employees were not getting the breaks they were owed, said the judge. The company keeps voluminous records on a computer bigger than the one in the Pentagon, and workers used the company's own records against it. Minnesota law requires every employer to give workers "a sufficient time" to eat a meal.

What's next – a union?

The United Food and Commercial Workers, which has been trying for years to organize Wal-Mart, hailed the ruling. Wal-Mart's disregard for the law is part of a pattern that includes union-busting, employment discrimination and child labor infractions, UFCW Local 879 said. Even when they got paid, workers were averaging less than $10 an hour.

"While we are pleased the judge ruled in favor of the workers, we are sure Wal-Mart's behavior will continue until the workers have a voice at work," UCFW asserted.

Steelworkers push organizing around the globe

AFL-CIO honors first democratic Firestone union in Liberia

This year the new union leaders representing 4,000 Firestone workers in war-torn Liberia finally got Firestone to bargain with them at one of the world’s largest rubber plantations. The new leaders had won the first free election in the company’s 82-year existence in Liberia last July – thanks in part to international support.

-ilrfundphoto

Voting was monitored by the United Steelworkers (USW) in the U.S. and the Solidarity Center, and the Steelworkers helped train and support the new leadership. Plantation management at first refused to recognize the new union leaders and withheld dues it had collected from workers; but after both a strike and landmark ruling from Liberia’s Supreme Court in December, the company backed down.

Rubber tappers work 14-hour days, with no basic safety equipment, to meet impossible production quotas for little more than $3 a day and a monthly 100-pound bag of rice – if quotas are met. Some of the workers are children. When they went on strike, says the AFL-CIO, “they were beaten, disciplined and fired.”

On June 25, the AFL-CIO honored the “extraordinary courage, strength and solidarity” of the Firestone Agricultural Workers Union of Liberia with its annual Human Rights Award, and noted that the campaign was “a true example of international union solidarity.” The Steelworkers also honored the Liberian union at their Constitutional Convention.

Working together to “change the world”

Why have the Steelworkers reached across borders to support faraway rubber tappers? Because they’re up against the same management disregard for worker rights. Mike Zielinski, a USW staff representative who gave the Liberians critical training and support, was impressed that “These workers… are determined to change the world.” And the world needs changing.

While Firestone brutally exploits foreign workers, its American workers are losing their jobs. Bridgestone Firestone plans to shut its Noblesville, Indiana plant next year, because, as the Firestone Industrial Products president admitted to the Indianapolis Star, it’s the company’s last unionized factory in a county where Firestone used to be the biggest employer.

Liberian union officials have pledged that they will, if necessary, act in support of future USW contract campaigns with Bridgestone Firestone in North America.

Creative global organizing tactics

The campaign's creative tactics might inspire others. A global coalition launched a “Stop Firestone” web site to highlight their united struggle against company abuses. A “Stop Firestone” photo protest encouraged people to upload pictures with a “Stop Firestone” tag to the Flickr photo sharing web site. International rights advocates also sued in U.S. courts against Firestone’s use of child labor in Liberia.

Workers Uniting: The Global Union

Steelworkers commit to new global union for organizing, bargaining

Taken from PAI and WINS

It’s official. In July, the United Steelworkers and Unite, Great Britain’s largest labor union, signed a pact to form a new global union called Workers Uniting: The Global Union. This stroke of the pen will unite 3 million workers in the U.S., Canada, Britain, and Ireland.

A global union to confront global companies

Why? United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard said the union will strengthen the power of current members, through joint organizing as well as coordinated bargaining.

Steel Workers President Leo Gerard and British union leader Derek Simpson

PAI Photo Service

"Globalization has given financiers a license to exploit workers in developing countries at the expense of our members," he explained. "Only global solidarity among workers can overcome this sort of global exploitation wherever it occurs... before it does any more damage to the lives of working people.

Financial giants vs. workers

"The growing power of global corporations is all around us," he continued. "We see it in the way employers try to use globalization to whipsaw us in bargaining. We see it in the way multinationals dominate Congress and Parliament. We see it in the glut of corporate buyouts in every industry, from aluminum to mining, from paper to steel. “

"As long as manufacturing dominated economies and unions could organize factories, the middle class rose," Gerard pointed out. But as finance becomes "the dominant economic force in industrial societies," it's a new ball game.

"In addition to empowering the interests of our unions' members, our mission is to advance the interests of millions of workers throughout the world who are being shamefully exploited," agreed Unite General Secretary Derek Simpson.

USWA and Unite – not to be confused with the U.S. union UNITE HERE – will keep their separate headquarters in Pittsburgh and London, respectively, with Gerard and Simpson as the top leaders.

First union victory for part-time faculty in Maryland

Taken from article in The Gazette

For the first time ever, on June 3, public part-time faculty in Maryland are forming a union. Montgomery College adjunct teachers chose the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 500 by a 365-105 vote, after a state agency gave a green light for the employees to unionize.

Adjunct professors teach at least half the courses at Montgomery College. Yet they've been making no more than 29 cents for each dollar that full-time professors can earn. "We are like the underpaid, under-appreciated people in higher education," said Victoria A. Baldassano, a union supporter who's been an adjunct professor for three years. ‘‘At least now we have a say, whereas before we didn’t.”

College officials had argued that the teachers weren't’really professionals and warned, in a memo circulated before the vote, that going union might cause problems with the assignment and scheduling of classes, and undermine relationships with full time faculty. But the part-time teachers didn't buy it.

“We’re looking forward to working with SEIU," a college spokesman now says. "We’re really trying to focus on the process ahead.”

The local already represents more than 1,200 part-time faculty at George Washington University in Washington D.C., where It finally won a contract in January, after adjunct professors had fought for six years for union representation.

Prize-winning ideas from Labor College Grad:

'What unions can do to help women plan for retirement'

Taken from a blog by James Parks

Pamela Fero and one of her sons

Pamela Fero, a member of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association from Lauderhill, Fla., won a prize  from the Alliance for Retired Americans for a paper she wrote to graduate from the National Labor College. The College is allied with the University of Baltimore and the American University.

 Fero says she got the idea for her paper “Winning the Game: What Unions Can Do to Help Women Plan For Retirement” when she met with her financial adviser to plan for retirement. At age 40, she says, she found out she couldn’t afford to retire when she planned to do so. 

Fero surveyed 185 working women and found many of them, like her, are not as prepared or knowledgeable about retirement planning as they could be. Many were unaware of resources offered through their unions. Her paper also shows many women place the welfare of others over their own and often are forced to choose between meeting immediate needs over long-term planning.

Fero recommends that unions help improve women’s knowledge and planning for retirement by encouraging early savings, offering education on retirement and helping with fiscal planning. She also calls for unions that already provide such services to make them more readily available and better publicized.  And she urges more union members to take advantage of the NLC’s program. If she can complete a degree while juggling a tough job as an air traffic controller and caring for seven children ranging in age from 24 to five years old, she feels that others can do it. 

New York bans forced overtime for nurses

Taken from Doug Cunningham report in WINS

Thanks to the work of a coalition of unions representing nurses, mandatory overtime for nurses will be banned in New York in July of next year. Mandatory overtime is a big issues for nurses and for their patients, as health care corporations squeeze nursing staff to maximize profit.

The situation got a lot worse when the Bush-appointed NLRB told California nurses that if they refused as a group to volunteer for overtime work without giving at least 10 days notice – in writing – they could be fired. (Read more about it.) Unions complain that nurses are often forced to work double shifts with no advance warning, and that puts a tremendous strain on both nurses and patient care. New Jersey earlier paved the way in winning a law against forcing nurses to work overtime.

Union organizing hit by negative ads

Candidates for Employee Free Choice Act are targeted

Taken from article by Steve Share in Minneapolis Labor Review & PAI

"The Sopranos" mobster Johnny Sacramoni was back on the air in Minnesota recently, in anti-union ads paid for by a management-backed group. The ads attack the Employee Free Choice Act, the legislation designed to level the playing field between workers and bosses in organizing drives and bargaining. Although the EFCA didn’t survive a Republican filibuster in the last Congress, Americans could elect a more progressive Senate this November.

In the ad, actor Vince Curatola from “The Sopranos” plays a mob boss who criticizes Sen. Norman Coleman (R) for opposing the Employee Free Choice Act and then praises “my pal Al,” Senate candidate Al Franken, the union-endorsed Democrat opposing Coleman.

Wrong and demeaning

The state AFL-CIO condemned the Minnesota ad and called on Coleman, who voted for the filibuster that killed the bill, to denounce the ad. It is “demeaning to workers and to their unions” and plays on “negative stereotypes of union leaders,” Minnesota AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Steve Hunter told a news conference in July.

Pro-labor politician defends EFCA in another YouTube video

The ad’s announcer claims that: “Norm Coleman says keep the secret ballot for union organizing elections” while Franken wants to eliminate it. That’s “deceptive and inaccurate,” said Hunter. Current law lets an employer refuse to accept a union in a workplace even after most workers sign authorization cards saying they want the union. The employer can insist on an NLRB election. Then they can draw out the process and “use the election process to intimidate employees,” Hunter noted. “We don’t think that¹s a fair and democratic way to have an election.”

The Free Choice Act would recognize a union when a majority of workers sign union authorization cards. An NLRB-run election could still take place if 30% of the workers asked for it.

Anti-EFCA commercials are also popping up in other states with competitive U.S. Senate races such as Oregon, where another business front group is bankrolling them. The Minnesota ad can be viewed on YouTube.

Meanwhile, a nationwide union drive to collect at least 1 million signatures in support of the Employee Free Choice Act is gaining momentum. In just four months, nearly 300,000 people signed postcards.