The Employee Free Choice Act would restore workers’ right to form unions.

Maine’s working families are falling behind while those atop the economic ladder are raking record profits. Wages are falling while health care costs and oil prices are soaring and retirement security is all but disappearing. Our middle class, once powerful, is shrinking fast and being stretched thinner than ever.

Working people are being left behind because they’ve lost their ability to bargain with their employers for better lives. Workers who have unions earn 30 percent more than workers who don’t, and are more likely to have health care and pensions. It’s no wonder nearly 60 million workers nationwide say they would join a union right now, if they could. But the cards are stacked against workers and too few people ever get the chance to organize at work.

A case in point: The nation’s largest private employer, Wal-Mart, recently held mandatory, closed-door meetings with thousands of store managers and department heads to notify them about the supposed consequences if Sen. Barack Obama is elected president in November.

Company representatives tried to intimidate workers by claiming that Sen. Obama’s support of the Employee Free Choice Act, which levels the playing field for workers who want a voice at work, would lead to increased union memberships across the country. This increase in unionized workers, Wal-Mart higher-ups claimed, would hurt workers. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Workers have a right to organize. However, intimidation, harassment, coercion and even firing people who try to organize unions is routine with many corporations like Wal-Mart, and our labor laws are powerless to stop them.

The news that Wal-Mart used company time to denounce the presumed Democratic presidential candidate and intimidate employees is hardly a surprise. The story illustrates how giant corporations often abuse their positions of power and is the reason nearly half of the nation’s workforce wants the Employee Free Choice Act passed.

This Labor Day, it’s time for Maine to realize that the 70-year-old laws covering how workers form unions are broken. On a daily basis, corporations deny employees the freedom to decide for themselves whether to form unions to bargain for better lives – something must be done. That is why the Employee Free Choice Act was created: to level the playing field between employer and employee and restore workers’ rights.

The truth is simple. The Employee Free Choice Act would remove barriers to workers who want to form unions by enabling them to organize unions when a majority signs union authorization cards, or by a secret ballot – whichever they choose. It also strengthens penalties for companies that coerce or intimidate employees and ensures that workers have a fair chance at winning a contract guaranteeing their wages and benefits.

The Employee Free Choice Act moves the choice of whether employees can come together to bargain for a better life away from corporations and gives it to workers.

This, in turn, would begin to shift power from executives to working people. Standing up for our rights as workers is a notion we should all embrace.

Don Berry of Sumner is president of the Western Maine Labor Council.