The Key to Economic Progress for America's Working Families: Restoring the Freedom to Form Unions

June 25, 2004

Without strong unions, our entire community pays a heavy price: Wages lag, race and gender pay gaps widen and insecurity and poverty increases. Democracy suffers, in the workplace and beyond it. That is why more than 200 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senators have co-sponsored the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workers to form unions without the obstacles employers now use to block workers' free choice. This event highlights the benefits that workers and the economy in general can hope to reap from stronger legal protections to form and join unions.

• Remarks of John Podesta at the Restoring the Freedom to Form Unions event
• The Struggle to Unionize: A Worker's Story, October 19, 2004
• Report in PDF: The High Road to a Competitive Economy: A Labor Law Strategy, by Harley Shaiken, June 25, 2004
• Labor's Two-Pronged Strategy in Responding to Globalization, by Greg Junemann
• Rights and Wrongs: Protecting the Freedom of Association in the American Workplace, by David Bonior
• Yahweh Gave Us the Sabbath but Unions Brought Us the Weekend, by Edith Rasell

Reports and Other Resources:

Human Rights Watch, Unfair Advantage: Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States Under International Human Rights Standards.

Bruce Nissen and Mary Beth Maxwell, "Some of Them Are Brave." American Rights At Work report.

Lawrence Mishel with Matthew Walters, Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper, "How Unions Help All Workers."

AFL-CIO Issue Brief, "The Silent War."

The Employee Free Choice Act

American Rights at Work: Employee Free Choice Act

Paula Voos, "Democracy and Industrial Relations," IRRA Presidential Address, January 4, 2004.

John Logan, "Consultants, Lawyers and the 'Union Free' Movement in the USA Since the 1970s." Industrial Relations Journal 33:3 – 2002.