By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer

When European labor experts look at the state of union organizing and collective bargaining in the United States, they often are appalled.

"You may think Britain's anti-unionism is bad; in America, industrial
relations are reaching an all-time low," wrote Professor Gregor Gall in a recent article for the Guardian newspaper.

"Having just visited the U.S. for an industrial relations conference, it's hard to fully comprehend just how anti-union employers are there," he reported. "While not
wishing to let employers in Britain off the hook for their anti-unionism, their American brothers and sisters are in a different league altogether."

Gall, who teaches industrial relations at the University of Hertfordshire, went on to cite some statistics about workers' organizing struggles in America that he found
shocking:

"In 2005, over 31,000 workers (in the U.S.) were disciplined for union activity - that's one every 17 minutes of the year. And the number of workers being disciplined or fired is increasing - between 1993 and 2003, the average was 22,633…."

"Research has found that 49 percent of employers threaten to close their operations when faced with unionization attempts and 91 percent of employees are forced to have one-on-one meetings with supervisors to dissuade them from joining," Gall noted. "Even when (American) workers successfully unionize and gain union recognition, only a third of these agreements ever lead to collective bargaining. So two-thirds of employers that concede union recognition say to themselves, 'we've lost the battle but not the war,' and they get another opportunity to stymie union recognition by
simply refusing to bargain," the professor reported.

He went on to point out: "In this environment, you can then understand why more than half (58 percent) of the U.S. workforce - some 60 million workers - say they would join a union if they could. But they do not, because employers impose costs on workers for joining a union. They make it a risk-laden activity."

Gall explained to his British readers that the American labor movement is pushing for the Employee Free Choice Act to restore organizing and bargaining rights, and making this a central issue in the 2008 congressional and presidential elections.