What You Can Do - Educate and Engage Key Stakeholders

The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) – commonly called “card check” – represents a fundamental change in the relationship between employer and employees. As an employer, there are a number of steps you should consider taking above and beyond the critical step of evaluating your company’s potential risk:

• Educate and engage employees: Perhaps the best step that can be taken to defeat card check is making sure employees are fully informed about the legislation. Employees need to understand what signing a union authorization card currently means and how that will change under EFCA. It’s also essential that all employees understand the erosion of their right to information and their right to a secret ballot under card check. After employees fully understand the ramifications of card check, it’s important that they know how to make their voices heard so they can effectively stop its passage.
  

  This Web site was created to provide a variety of tools – a fact sheet, a newsletter article, a letter, a Q & A document, a bulletin board poster – that you can share with employees, as well as tips and tools that both employers and employees can use to communicate their concerns to elected officials, fellow workers, community leaders, the media and others.
  
  The Web site, www.WeAreManufacturers.com, was created as a place you would feel comfortable referring your employees for more information.

• Contact your members of Congress: It is critical that you let your elected representatives serving in the U.S. Congress know of your concerns about the potential impact the proposed Employee Free Choice Act could have on your company and others like it. Let your members of Congress know that Ohio manufacturers have made great strides in enhancing their competitiveness by forging constructive, collaborative, consensus-building relationships with their employees – and that the last thing Ohio needs, especially in the current economic climate, is an ill-conceived policy proposal that would undermine the very heart of those relationships. Click here to find your Elected Officials.

• Educate and engage suppliers: Because card check represents a threat to your business, it’s important that those who do business with you understand the seriousness of the situation. Your suppliers should be given the same information you provide your employees so they, too, can become active in the campaign against card check.
  

• Talk to business leader peers and other thought leaders in your community: Be sure those with whom you routinely interact understand the threat card check poses not just to your business but also to the local economy and the state of Ohio. Encourage them to join the effort to defeat card check.
  

• Contact the media: As you interact with you local media, whether it be informally with an editor at a community or social event, or more formally in an editorial board meeting or during an interview with a reporter covering a story, be sure they are aware of card check and your concerns about its potential impact on your company, your workers and your community.