Library Worklife

Volume 4, No. 3 • March 2007

HR Law & Regulation

U.S. House Passes Employee Free Choice Act

ALA-APA’s June 2006 resolution supporting the Employee Free Choice Act has borne fruit: on March 1, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 800, 241 to 185. Senators expect the bill to reach the Senate floor in the next few weeks.

The Employee Free Choice Act, which amends the National Labor Relations Act, “goes a long way toward protecting library employees who form unions,” says Emily Sheketoff, Executive Director of the ALA’s Washington, D.C. office. In a statement of ALA-APA’s support of H.R. 800, Sheketoff explains that the bill “strengthens penalties against offending employers, requires mediation and arbitration to help employers and employees reach a first contract in a reasonable period of time, and permits workers to form a union through ‘majority sign-up,’ a process in which workers present signed authorization cards as demonstration of their choice to belong to a union.”

Read H.R. 800 through THOMAS at the Library of Congress website, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.+800:. For information about the Act and testimonies from experts and from workers who were penalized for trying to form unions, visit the AFL-CIO Web site.

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