Correspondence

Moving toward Equality
Professor Keith Berry’s article (“Teaching While Black, Practicing American History at a Majority White College” August 2008) is admirable and thank you for printing it.

Commendable also is his persistence in helping all his students move towards comprehending the multi-racial, multi-ethnic make-up of the American people and their history.

The insights evinced by Professor Berry are especially important as the American people in their great majority move towards labor, racial, gender, LGBT and overall unity and equality. Hats off to Professor Keith Berry. 

—George Fishman

Support Employee Free Choice Act

Colleagues,
Freedom of association is among our most prized rights. We would like to do something to once again make that right a reality at the work place. Please join us.

American workers gained freedom of association when the Wagner Act of 1935 granted them the right to collective bargaining through representatives of their own choosing. Everyone knows that. It is in the New Deal chapter of every textbook. What is less well known is that the law has been turned into an instrument for oppressing employees. Against a formidable, determined employer—say, Wal-Mart—workers stand virtually no chance of achieving the collective bargaining that the law says is their right.

The remedies to this travesty are actually straightforward. First, enforce the prohibition—now toothless—against firing or discriminating against pro-union workers. Second, impose arbitration on employers who flout their duty to bargain (which they do, successfully, in one third of all first-contract negotiations). Third, enable workers to demonstrate their support for collective bargaining by signing authorization cards and thereby insulate them from the massive employer coercion that accompanies—and is given a platform by—the representation election. These three provisions constitute the Employee Free Choice Act, which will be debated in the next Congress. It will be an epic, no-holds-barred battle, because at stake is nothing less than whether the United States, already well on the way, becomes a “union-free” society.

If that is not a pleasing prospect, join us in this petition: “We, the undersigned members of the Organization of American Historians, support the Employee Free Choice Act and urge Congress to enact it.” If you want to add your name, just e-mail your name and institution to: Joseph Eugene Hower <jeh67 at georgetown dot edu>.

And if you are in one of those battleground states where the employer-side propaganda is already in high gear, pay no mind to that hit man from the Sopranos  impersonating a union organizer.

—David Brody

University of California-Davis

Alice Kessler-Harris

Columbia University

Mike Honey

University of Washington, Tacoma

P.S. For more information, visit <http://lawcha.org/> and click on "civic engagement" at the top.