Daniel TilsonHow’d you like your weekly salary to be 20 percent higher than it is now?
How about knowing for sure that if you do your job well, you’re going to get a raise every year or two and have a shot at keeping up with cost of living increases?
What about knowing you can’t get laid off without demonstrable just cause and due notice, when your employer decides higher profit margins are more important than fairness and loyalty to frontline workers?
Would your chances of long-term financial stability improve if you had a pension benefit or retirement savings plan that was at least partly funded by your employer?
Would health insurance costs for you and your family be easier to cover if your employer shared some responsibility for them?
If and when you catch an awful cold or the flu, would it keep you from dragging your infectious germs to work and get you better quicker if you had a few paid sick days?
If any or all of that sounds good, well…it should.
And it’s what comes with membership in and representation by a labor union.
You pay your union dues, a low monthly amount to keep the union organization staffed, resourced and running effectively enough to negotiate on a relatively even playing field with management.
In exchange, the union is your bargaining agent and representative in the workplace.
But only about one of every 20 Florida workers is assured of the better pay, benefits and on-the-job advocacy that comes with union membership.
Worse yet, many of those other 19 workers in the equation have been effectively misinformed and turned against that one worker who has what they never had themselves, or have had stripped away.
Florida is one of more than 20 states with laws that keep most of those 19 workers out of reach of the truth that union organizers could be sharing with them, about all the above-mentioned benefits of union membership.
Corporations and conservatives call their unfair labor practices “Right To Work” laws and have convinced many of those 19 workers that unions hoping to organize and help them are actually looking to interfere with their “right to work”.
It never made a shred of sense and still doesn’t.
What the laws do is force unions into long, expensive secret ballot election campaigns that time after time have proven to empower employers to use disinformation and outright intimidation to get workers to vote against their own interests.
So unions in states like Florida can rarely, barely even risk trying to organize those 19 non-union workers.
And if they can’t get into individual workplaces to start sharing the facts, telling the truth and setting the record of misinformation straight, then those 19 workers will go right on believing all the lies and propaganda that corporations and conservatives keep spreading.
If we gave those 19 workers a fair chance to hear the truth and join a union, I’m betting at least 12 or 13 would jump at all the benefits that would accrue to them and their families.
That’s not to mention the incredible relief that would come for all middle-class taxpayers who no longer had to pay for food stamps, Medicaid and other public assistance for working poor people denied their civil right to join a union.
I’m crossing my fingers that at least some of you who are those 19 workers, multiplied by millions statewide, will move labor law reform up near the top of your list of what you insist on from Florida’s elected officials and political candidates in 2014.
