By Mark Gruenberg
Press Associates

BALTIMORE – Employers “interested in tyranny” over their workers are spending $1 million a week in their drive to trample workers’ rights and fight passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, Communications Workers Association President Larry Cohen says.

Speaking at a Jan. 12 “Future of the Media” conference of three of CWA sectors – The Newspaper Guild, NABET, and the Printing, Publishing and Media Workers – Cohen laid out the case for how passage of the law would benefit workers in the financially endangered media industry.

It would do so by leveling the playing field in organizing and bargaining, giving workers more economic leverage with employers – and giving them more credibility to go to companies with solutions to financial problems.

Despite the advantages of cooperation with their workers – advantages spelled out in many sessions over the conference’s three days – bosses at media firms and in other industries nationwide strongly oppose the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) on both ideological grounds and because they want to keep all power to themselves, Cohen said.

The act would write "majority sign-up" of union authorization cards into labor law, increase fines for labor-law breaking, order the National Labor Relations Board to get court injunctions against egregious violators, and mandate binding arbitration for initial two-year contracts if unions and bosses cannot agree on a first contract within 120 days.

It is expected to easily pass the House this year, but needs 60 votes to overcome a business-backed Senate GOP filibuster. To counter business’ pressure and million-dollar ad blitz, labor has enlisted tens of thousands of workers in an election-like ground campaign in more than a dozen key states, and enlisted allies from the civil rights and environmental movements. Pro-worker groups are also buying $3 million in national media ads.

Cohen likened the employers’ campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act in particular and against unions in general to “a class war,” complete with threats to workers that support for unionization means “you give up your career.”

“It’s us versus them, and they’re running it. If a supervisor doesn’t toe the company line, they’re fired. They [companies] believe that only they have free speech,” in and out of workplaces, Cohen said. “They’re interested in tyranny – and that there’s no collective bargaining at all,” he declared.

“In terms of power and arrogance, they’re back in the middle of the19th century” Cohen added about business and its Right- Wing allies.

Cohen warned that while labor and its allies appear to have a good shot at the 60 Senate votes that will be needed to cut off the GOP talkathon that could kill the Employee Free Choice Act, “several of them are shaky.”

And he said wavering senators – whom he did not name – may be particularly vulnerable to the Right-Wing argument that a deep recession “is the time when you cut wages, healthcare, pensions, and jobs, while waiting on a stimulus” package pending before Congress.

“There is no stimulus that can offset that,” he said of the companies’ cuts, in media firms or anywhere else. “Like 70 years ago,” with the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, “there has to be a recovery plan that takes away the advantage” to business “of cutting wages and benefits. And that’s the aim of the Employee Free Choice Act.”

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