Many workers who try to form and join trade unions to bargain with their employers are spied on, harassed, pressured, threatened, suspended, fired, deported or otherwise victimized in reprisal for their exercise of the right to freedom of association. Penalties are virtually non-existent. If the National Labor Relations Board decides a worker was fired illegally because of union organizing, the guilty employer only has to post a written notice promising not to repeat the illegal conduct and give the victim back pay. Valenzuela and his co-workers at Acme Die Casting organized into UE and faced years of legal delays in efforts to achieve a first contract. Acme is one of two UE examples among the case studies in Unfair Advantage .
Geographic diversity matches the range of sectors.
The cases studied here offer a cross-section of workers attempts to form and join trade unions, to bargain collectively, and to strike. These examples are not isolated exceptions, Unfair Advantage stresses. When an arbitrator certified that a majority of workers had signed union cards, Marriott intensified an anti-union campaign. The case is still pending. The company s efforts to smash organizing included firing of key union activists, intimidation, interference, coercion, threats and discrimination and the presence of police and sheriffs.