June 23, 2009 | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The federal stimulus package has created or saved 150,000 jobs, and will produce or retain another 600,000 by summer’s end, according to President Barack Obama. Stimulus dollars will do other things, too: expand health centers, rebuild infrastructure and help communities go green. But the stimulus alone won’t do enough to rebuild the middle class.

That’s because the stimulus was designed to create jobs, not improve job quality — the critical issue of whether jobs can support a middle-class standard of living. For that, we need not only a bailout, but the tools to bail ourselves out.

Among those tools is a stronger recognition of workplace rights, especially the right to organize unions. The Employee Free Choice Act, expected to come to a vote in Congress this summer, would make it easier for working people to organize unions and bargain collectively.

We need it to ensure that the economic recovery doesn’t just include growth for the few but actually creates lasting benefits for working people: increased wages, improved health and pension coverage, more paid time-off and greater work-life balance.

Today the benefits that increased unionization can bring to the entire economy are under attack. But critics who try to scapegoat the UAW for decades of bad decisions by the union’s management that brought down the American auto industry get it backward: good wages and benefits are not a problem the nation needs to overcome, they are what created the American middle class in the first place and will revive it and enable it to thrive in the future.

In the 1950s, more than a third of American workers held a union card. By negotiating for higher wages and better working conditions, unions transformed “bad” jobs on manufacturing assembly lines into today’s “good” jobs, providing the economic mobility that enabled working people to enjoy a middle-class standard of living. Such benefits as workers’ compensation, overtime pay, and, famously, the right to time off during the weekend, were won as the result of union organizing. Today union jobs still offer higher pay and better benefits — including health care, retirement, and paid leave — than non-union positions. And, in industries where union density is high, unions continue to set the standard, lifting wages and improving working conditions even for employees who are not union members. While more progress is needed, contemporary unions are also more diverse and inclusive than they were in the past.

Yet in 2008 unions represented just 7.6 percent of the private sector workforce. Working people’s lack of power in the labor market is a major reason why, when corporate profits were booming, real median incomes stagnated and fewer Americans received health coverage from employers. Labor’s own complacency has contributed to its waning influence. But decades of anti-labor decisions by the National Labor Relations Board played a more significant role, undermining employees’ rights through weak enforcement of labor laws.

Illegal anti-union tactics by employers are now much more pervasive as a result. A new study by Cornell University professor Kate Bronfenbrenner reveals that more than half of employers faced with a union organizing drive illegally threaten to close down their facility if the union wins, while one in three companies illegally fire workers for union activity. Employers regularly engage in surveillance, intimidation and harassment of employees trying to unionize. Today, supporting a union at work poses a significant risk of getting fired.