Experts Bust Arbitration Myths Spread by Employee Free Choice Opponents

Arbitration provisions in the Employee Free Choice Act are fair to both sides and essential to fix the country's broken labor laws, experts said Wednesday during a media call to refute the latest Big Business campaign against Employee Free Choice.

"Without binding arbitration in this bill, it's like having a car with no transmission. It may look good, but it's not going anywhere," said Rep. Phil Hare (D-Ill.) a former local union president.

Today, nearly half of all workers who beat the odds and form a union can't get a first contract because of management stonewalling at the bargaining table.

Employers benefit by stalling because after a year they can move to decertify a union, while the prospect of arbitration would motivate employers -- and unions -- to bargain productively, Hare and Thomas Kochan, professor at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said during the phone call coordinated by American Rights at Work.

"If employees have voiced their desire for a union and been certified, they are entitled to have a good faith process to reach agreement," Kochan said.

CWA members at Comcast in Pittsburgh know about company stalling tactics. Technicians fought for their union for five years, through four elections and nearly endless management stonewalling, before finally getting a first contract.

Kochan said the business lobby's $200 million misinformation campaign is spreading myths about arbitration that simply aren't true.

One such myth is that if arbitration is allowed, unions will want to use it every time. "That has not been the case," said Kochan, who has done extensive research on arbitration pratices. "The best data we have shows that in the public sector, in states like New York and New Jersey, less than 10 percent of the contracts get resolved by arbitration."

Another myth is that arbitrators could be biased toward unions. Kochan said there's no evidence to back up such claims and under the bill, each side would present lists of proposed arbitrators until both the union and management agree on one. After the neutral arbitrator is selected, each side would each choose another arbitrator. Together, the three arbitrators would hear a case. "This has the effect of controlling against any kind of decision that wouldn't be workable for the parties," he said.

Kochan says MIT research shows that arbitrators' decisions closely mirror the result that would have been expected had the parties themselves been able to reach agreement. Economic studies on the effect of arbitration on wages "show that it's essentially zero," he said, explaining that despite opponents' claim, arbitrators don't award higher raises than what bargaining ultimately would have produced.

Hare said the business lobby knows it can't win on the merits, "and when you can't win on the merits, you start throwing out all sorts of things that aren't factual."

"There's an old saying, 'You know you're losing when you start abusing' and the other side must be feeling pretty bad right now because they're spending a tremendous amount of money trying to distort the facts," Hare said.