Union Rhetoric

jul 13, 2010

press release

priorities

the u.s. chamber supports fair workplace rules that protect workers and promote employer flexibility and economic growth and opposes harmful proposals and burdensome regulations that generate litigation instead of jobs.

the facts

• unions make up only 7.2% of the private sector workforce.
  
• if the employee free choice act (efca) becomes law, the unionization of 1.5 million current jobs would lead to an estimated economywide loss of 600,000 jobs the following year.
  
• unions want the national labor relations board to reverse dozens of balanced decisions to
  increase the number of employees eligible for unionizing and to increase leverage in all aspects of labor-management relations. the chamber details more than 50 such cases in its report "the national labor relations board in the obama administration: what changes to expect."
  
• the department of labor (dol) is working from organized labor's wish list. the most recent regulatory agendas are packed with proposals, submitted by organized labor to the obama administration, that would reduce employers' ability to respond to organizing campaigns, weaken financial disclosure requirements, and increase the use of enforcement over compliance assistance.
  

the u.s. chamber's plan to fight unfair and harmful workplace rules and mandates

• the chamber is determined to educate and mobilize americans to help block anti-employer legislative initiatives, provide meaningful written comments to the administration's proposed
  regulations, and expose coercive and intimidating union organizing tactics.
  
• the chamber mobilizes its members and resources to oppose harmful rewrites of our nation's
  employment laws and regulations, including the following:
  
  • reviving the effort to impose a multibillion-dollar, unworkable osha ergonomics rule.
    
  • expanding liability and damages under federal employment laws.
    
  • exposing employers to new liabilities on how they classify their workers.
    
  • implementing dol's agencywide "plan, prevent, protect" program.
    
  • rigging government contracting procedures to favor organized labor.
    
  • allowing unions to engage in abusive shareholder activism.
    
  • mandating that employers implement safety and health programs designed by osha,
    rather than ones that reflect their specific needs.
    

  [*]the chamber, through its workforce freedom initiative, a multimillion-dollar grassroots mobilization and advocacy campaign, works to preserve democracy in the american workplace, restrain abusive union pension fund activism, and block labor's anti-competitive agenda.