• America’s working people are stretched as never before. Wages are dropping, health care

costs are rising and pensions are disappearing. For the first time in generations, people are

very worried that their children will be worse off than they are.

• Union members make 28 percent more than workers who don’t have a union. That’s almost

$200 a week, or $10,000 a year!

• Union members are 52 percent more likely to have employer-provided health insurance,

and the benefits and costs are better. And 77 percent of union members have defined-benefit

pension plans through their jobs, compared with only 20 percent of workers who don’t

have unions.

• And communities with strong unions have higher living standards for everybody.

• Companies routinely intimidate, harass, coerce and even fire people who try to form unions—

and current labor law is helpless to stop them. The penalties are so slight for breaking the

law that corporations simply consider it the cost of doing business. The government found

that companies violated the rights of 29,559 workers in 2007 alone (and those are just the

documented cases). A quarter even illegally fire workers.

• Even when workers win their unions, many companies delay bargaining any way they

can. According to a new study by MIT, 44 percent of workers who form a new union

never reach a first contract.

• The Employee Free Choice Act would put the choice of whether to form a union back in

workers’ hands by giving them the option of using majority sign-up, an alternative to the

current company-dominated system. Large national companies with good profit margins

and good labor relations, such as AT&T and Kaiser Permanente, have used majority sign-up

successfully for years.

• The Employee Free Choice Act guarantees that companies can’t just drag their feet on a

first contract. To guarantee workers can win a union contract, it provides for mediation or

binding arbitration when it’s needed.

• The Employee Free Choice Act levels the playing field by putting real penalties on companies

that violate the law during organizing and contract campaigns.