Before he was fired, Errol Hohrein worked as a boilermaker at the Front Range Energy ethanol distillery in the northern Colorado town of Windsor. Like many of his co-workers, Hohrein was hired with the promise of good pay and affordable health-care benefits. Despite the distillery’s monthly million-dollar profits, the company callously reneged on their pledge of wage increases and benefits. Hohrein and his co-workers came together to form a union with the Steelworkers to bargain for better working conditions. The company fought the workers’ efforts tooth and nail, threatening the workers with lower wages and even threatening to fire Hohrein — a vocal union supporter.
Sure enough, after the union election, Hohrein was fired.
In Hohrein’s words, “It was revenge for my talking up the union.” The National Labor Relations Board’s office of general counsel agrees. In February of 2007, it charged Front Range with violating federal law by firing Hohrein.
Sadly, Errol Hohrein’s story is not unique. Every day corporations deny employees the freedom to decide for themselves whether to form unions to bargain for better wages and benefits. In 2005 alone, there were 31,358 cases of illegal firings and other forms of discrimination against workers for exercising their federally protected labor law rights.
Twenty percent of union activists are likely to be fired when trying to form unions, according to a new study by the Center for Economic Policy Research.
Seventy-eight percent of employers force supervisors to meet with the people they supervise, and urge them to vote “no.” Fifty-two percent of employers threaten deportation or other forms of retaliation during organizing drives that include undocumented- immigrant employees. In more than half of worker campaigns, employers threaten that the workplace will close if workers unionize, although 99 percent of plants remain open after organizing drives.
As a working-class person born and raised in Colorado, it has become painfully clear to me that working people in this state are being squeezed. The costs of housing, education and health care are on the rise. Household income in Colorado has dropped over the past five years.
If we add to this list the destructive effects of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, it’s clear Coloradans are being forced to carry the burden of a broken state budget while struggling to make ends meet.
For decades, unions have given workers a toehold in the middle class when everyone else has failed them. Workers who belong to unions earn 30 percent more than those who don’t and are much more likely to have employer- provided health coverage and pensions, according to government statistics. Beyond being good for workers, unions are good for communities. Better wages and benefits mean that more families can make it on their own — thus shifting the cost burden off the taxpayers’ backs.
But for too long now, working people have been denied the opportunity to have a union because employers routinely violate workers’ freedom to form unions and the law lacks the power to stop them. The result is an America where CEOs are showered with lavish pay packages while everyone else is struggling to get by.
Approved by a bipartisan majority in the House, the Employee Free Choice Act would protect workers trying to form unions by enacting new penalties when employers threaten workers’ rights and by bringing in an outside mediator to settle a first contract when the employer and workers can’t agree. The bill restores balance to the process of forming unions by giving workers, not bosses, the option of deciding how they will choose whether to form a union — either through ballot elections or majority sign-up, a process that enables people to form unions when a majority of employees indicate in writing that they want one.
We’re counting on Colorado’s U.S. Sens. Wayne Allard and Ken Salazar to stand up for working people like Errol Hohrein and his co-workers. They deserve better, and the Employee Free Choice Act is a solid first step to righting this terrible wrong.
Jessie Ulibarri is the director of the Colorado Progressive Coalition’s Campaign for Economic Justice (www.progressivecoalition.org). |
