Know Your Rights

WHAT CONGRESS SAYS ABOUT: ORGANIZING

In 1935 due to pressures caused by employees demanding fair and equitable treatment by those that control capitol. Congress enacted a law known as the National Labor Relations Act or the NLRA. The NLRA guaranteed workers the right to join unions without fear of management reprisal.  It created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to enforce these rights and prohibit and punish employers whom commit unfair labor practices that might discourage organizing or prevent workers from negotiating a union contract.

Congress included the following statement in the Act itself:
 
The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract and employers who are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners in industry and by preventing the stabilization of competitive wage rates and working conditions within and between industries.

Experience has proved that protection by law of the right of employees to
organize and bargain collectively safeguards commerce from injury,
impairment, or interruption, and promotes the flow of commerce by removing certain recognized sources of industrial strife and unrest, by encouraging practices fundamental to the friendly adjustment of industrial disputes arising out of differences as to wages, hours, or other working conditions, and by restoring equality of bargaining power between employers and employees.

And further:

It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.

The Federal Government also made it illegal for employers to interfere in their employee's choice to form a union and collectively bargain with their employers:

Sec. 7 Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join,
or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted
activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid and
protection.