Ohio Worker Speaks Out on the Need for Employee Free Choice

At Wednesday's Capitol Hill rally in support of the Employee Free Choice Act, a number of brave workers - including Bill Lawhorn of Ohio - who have been hurt by our broken labor law system spoke out to explain why we badly need this vital new law to protect the freedom of workers to form a union and bargain.

These workers are just a few of the nearly 30,000 workers who are harassed, discriminated against and fired every year for trying to exercise the freedom to bargain for health care, pensions and fair wages and treatment. Their stories illustrate, on an honest and personal level, the real problem with the nation’s current labor laws: People who want to form unions are at the mercy of corporations because the laws are badly tilted toward companies, not workers.

Lawhorn, a forklift operator, was fired for joining with his co-workers in Ohio to try and form a union. Because of the weakness of current labor laws, his company faced virtually no penalty. After six years of legal action, his company reinstated him but has yet to pay him any back wages.

We tried to form a union to get a little respect and dignity, maybe a little retirement....We had majority support; then the company started to scare everybody, threatening to close the factory, threatening to take away wages, benefits. It scared enough people that we lost the election, and I was fired.

We need the Employee Free Choice Act so this doesn’t happen to anyone else. Nobody knows what it’s like until it happens to you for six years.

The high-dollar corporate attacks on the Employee Free Choice Act rely on the fiction that unions are sinister outside forces, separate from and unwanted by workers. That myth is leveled by the stories of real people like Steffens, Gares, Lawhorn and Espiritu, who are honest, hardworking people who just wanted the freedom to have a say in their workplace and the ability to bargain for a better life for themselves and their co-workers.

It’s stories like these that illustrate why the Employee Free Choice Act is so urgent and necessary to restore the balance for workers.

(Cross-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog.)