RALEIGH - Everybody wants their children to do a little better than they've done. A little better education. A little more saved. But today, too many people think that American Dream is a pipe dream. Less than a quarter of Americans feel the next generation will be better off, according to a new survey by Peter D. Hart Research Associates.

One of the primary reasons working people are getting left behind is they've lost their ability to bargain with their employer for better wages and benefits through unions. Union workers earn on average 30 percent more than workers who don't have a union, according to government statistics, and they are much more likely to have health care and pensions.

In fact, more than half of workers who don't already have a union say they'd join one tomorrow if given the chance. But too few are getting that chance. That's why we need to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation in Congress that would give more workers the opportunity to freely choose whether they want to join a union.

Employers routinely intimidate, harass, coerce and even fire people who try to improve their lives through unions, and our laws are helpless to stop them. About one in five union activists who tried to form a union were fired since 2000, according to a new study by the nonpartisan Center for Economic and Policy Research. Employers routinely threaten workers with loss of pay and benefits if they form a union. Seventy-eight percent of private sector employers require supervisors to meet one-on-one with employees they directly supervise, urging them to vote against the union, according to research by Cornell University's Kate Bronfenbrenner. Even after workers successfully form a union, they can't get a contract one third of the time.

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The National Labor Relations Act was designed to protect employee choice on whether to form unions, but it has been turned upside down. The current system is not like any democratic election held anywhere else in our society. Employers have all the power and control all the decisions in the election process. By the time employees vote in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election, the environment has been so poisoned that a free and fair choice isn't even an option.

The Employee Free Choice Act would go a long way to leveling the playing field between management and employees, and putting the choice to form a union back into employees' hands. The legislation would enact new penalties when employers roll roughshod over workers' rights. It would bring in an outside mediator to settle a first contract when the employer and workers can't agree. And it would establish "majority sign-up," which says that employees can have union representation at a company if a majority of the employees indicate in writing that they want one.

The Employee Free Choice Act wouldn't eliminate union elections -- if 30 percent of the workers at a workplace want to vote on union representation, they can still do so. However, the Employee Free Choice Act limits employers' ability to game the system, and gives working people back their freedom to make their own decision about whether to have a union to improve their lives.

Majority sign-up is not a new approach. For years, responsible employers such as Cingular Wireless and DaimlerChrysler have taken a position of allowing employees to choose, by majority decision, whether to have a union. Workers in North Carolina organized three DaimlerChrysler facilities with the United Auto Workers using majority sign up, and many of North Carolina's Cingular Wireless workers organized through majority sign up. Both of these companies have found that majority sign-up is an effective way to gauge workers' free choice -- and it results in less hostility and polarization in the workplace than the failed NLRB process.

All people who want to have a union to bargain for better wages and benefits deserve a fair chance to form one. It's time to reform our labor laws to make sure they get that chance. Congress should pass the Employee Free Choice Act to give working women and men a fighting chance in today's economy.

(James Andrews is president of the North Carolina AFL-CIO State Federation, and Marybe McMillan is the organization's secretary-treasurer.)

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