Over the past quarter century, Congress has held numerous hearings on how and why labor law is failing to protect American workers’ right to organize. These hearings have exposed how anti-union consultants have profited from the destruction of workers’ democratic choice, how managers and supervisors are bribed or bullied into spearheading anti-union campaigns, how pro-union workers are threatened with termination, and how consultants bombard employees with scaremongering propaganda on the allegedly disastrous consequences of unionization.And yet, after twenty-five years of almost continuous hearings, the problem has only gotten worse. The so-called “representation gap” has grown to record levels, labor law is still not working the way its architects had intended, and it appears that few people are listening to those who are attempting to fix it—something that was painfully apparent during last summer’s Senate hearings on the right to organize.Most people have viewed debates over the right to organize as a never-ending power struggle between organized labor and its employer group adversaries, rather than as an issue that profoundly influences the daily lives of ordinary citizens. But the failure to protect the right to organize—and the corresponding decline in union membership—has adversely affected the lives of tens of millions of ordinary Americans in fundamental ways. This decline has had an effect that is evident not just in the loss of millions of well paid union jobs that enabled several generations of postwar Americans to enter the ranks of the middle class, not just in the loss of the affordable health care and decent pension benefits that frequently accompanied these union jobs, thereby contributing to the catastrophic crises in health care and Social Security of recent years, not just in the failure of American employees to gain legal rights to vacation time, which means they now work up to nine weeks longer per year than their continental European counterparts, nor in the weakening of a once powerful political lobby, the AFL-CIO, which was central to the enactment of many universally popular social programs and legal protections, including Medicare, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Family and Medical Leave Act. (Witness the significant achievements of a reinvigorated and politically savvy state labor movement in California, including the first paid family medical leave act in the nation.) The failure to protect the right to organize, as Princeton economist Henry Farber has recently demonstrated, has also resulted in a deleterious impact on the wages and benefits of non-union workers over the past three decades.
