Today, CEOs get contracts that protect their wages and benefits and deny those same protections to their workers. The out-of-state special interests behind S.O.S. continue to defend the broken status quo that puts employee needs at the bottom and allows corporate CEO's to routinely harass, intimidate, coerce and even fire workers struggling to gain a union so they can bargain for better lives. Employees are on an uneven playing field from the first moment they begin exploring whether they want to form a union, and the will of the majority often is denied by strong-arm management tactics.

Meet some of the Missouri workers the broken status quo continues to fail:

A new study by renowned labor expert and Cornell University professor Kate Bronfenbrenner reveals that private sector employer opposition to workers’ efforts to form unions has intensified and become more punitive than in the past. Employers are more than twice as likely to use 10 or more tactics – including threats of and actual firings – in their campaigns to thwart workers’ organizing efforts. Today’s anti-union activities include a greater focus than in the past on more coercive and punitive tactics designed to intensely monitor and punish union activity.

For the vast majority of workers who want unions today but do not have them, the right to organize and bargain collectively—free from coercion, intimidation, and retaliation—is at best a promise indefinitely deferred. According to Bronfenbrenner, in NLRB election campaigns, it is standard practice for workers to be subjected by corporations to threats, interrogation, harassment, surveillance, and retaliation for union activity. From the 1999-2003 data:

If you sign up to join a union, you won’t face coercion or intimidation from your co-workers—or employers. Despite dire warnings by corporations against the majority sign-up process, a new study shows majority sign-up (card-check) protects workers and gives them the chance they need to form a union. It’s another critical point in favor of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would give workers across the country the choice about how to form a union and bargain for a better life.

The study, “Majority Authorizations and Union Organizing in the Public Sector: A Four-State Perspective,” written by top labor policy scholars under the direction of Robert Bruno of the University of Illinois, looks at the experience of four states (New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Oregon) where public-sector workers have the freedom to form unions through majority sign-up. If passed, the Employee Free Choice Act would give millions of workers the option of using either majority sign-up or a National Labor Relations Board election to form a union.