By Dick Meister
(Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based journalist, has covered labor and political issues for more than a half-century.)
The preliminaries are over and what’s certain to be one of the fiercest political fights in many years is finally underway. It pits the nation’s labor unions and their Democratic allies against the pillars of corporate America and their Republican allies.
The stakes are huge. A union victory would give U.S. workers the unfettered right to unionization that would raise their economic and political status substantially. But that would come at the expense of employers, who have been able to block a large majority of them from exercising the union rights that the law has long promised all workers.
The union-employer fight began in earnest on March 10 with the re-introduction in Congress of the long-proposed Employee Free Choice Act. The bill would strengthen the National Labor Relations Act to make it easier for workers to form and join unions, the stated purpose of the NLRA.