A recent poll revealed that 44 percent of Americans not in a union today would like a union if they did not have to walk through a minefield to get one. Forty-four percent is amazingly close to a majority and a strong basis for a labor upsurge of organizing and unionism in this country. So why do only 14 percent of America's workers belong to a union?

The first reason is the "minefield" to which the unorganized speak. One of the best-kept, dirty secrets in American is how unfair the organizing process is to workers. Unions lose about half the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections we participate in. One reason for this is that the law is inherently lopsided. NLRB elections force unions into a monied propaganda war where we try to convince workers, with restricted access to them, that life can be better for them if they are organized.

Current law arms management with a full array of weapons to thwart an organizing drive. During the election process management often hires anti-union law firms to carve out a bargaining unit of workers with a minimum of union support. This tactic delays the election until a hearing can be held and grants management the opportunity to create an atmosphere of terror to dampen union support.

The terror campaign often takes the form of closed-door interrogations or forced attendance at captive audience meetings where for-hire union busters show videos distorting the union image. In the meantime, the union is excluded from the workplace entirely and has no way of stopping illegal activity before the voting takes place. Even worse, unions win first contracts only in about half of the companies where we overcome this process and workers vote for representation.

Many push labor law reform as the answer to our organizing dilemma. At least three reforms could level the playing field and enhance the unorganized workers' chance of having a union. First the law should be changed to use card check union recognition procedures instead of an election. Once a majority of workers have signed cards, the NLRB could order bargaining, before an employer terror campaign has escalated. Card check rules already apply in most Canadian provinces.

Second, the law should include first contract arbitration. the current law only requires that employers bargain with unions. It does not require employers to reach an agreement. Arbitrators could award contract provisions based on prevailing wages and benefit practices in the industry and deny management proposals designed solely to weaken the union, such as proposals to impede union representatives' participation in grievance hearings.

Third, if card check cannot be put into place, the NLRB rules should be changed to restrict employer coercion and allow the union equal access to the unorganized. These reforms could take many forms, including granting union representatives access to company property during an organizing drive, prohibiting supervisors from meeting with workers to lecture against unions during paid working hours, restricting the parties' time to advance their positions and granting a union "equal time" to respond to the employer's anti-union propaganda.

But labor law reform is an unlikely solution in the current political arena and only a partial answer to the reasons why 14 percent of Americans belong to unions when a Peter Hart poll taken in 1997 showed that 44 percent of the unorganized would like to be in a union and are not. Unions largely created our organizing crisis by ignoring the unorganized worker over the years and focusing instead on becoming service-only institutions. Labor should be using the resources of our movement, which are still considerable, not just to service our members but to systematically reach out to workers in society who are not union members. Only then can we create a political climate friendly to labor law reform.

To succeed today, unions must change the way that we think about organizing and how we approach it. Instead of approaching organizing on a drive-by-drive basis, we must create a moral crisis in our society over the right of employees to have a union in the same way the civil rights movement created a moral crisis to give blacks the right to vote. In short, unions must see and help others see that organizing is a civil right guaranteed by the Constitution and written into the National Labor Relations Act.

To be sure, the right to organize includes the same goals and values as other more commonly recognized civil rights. It is about workers' need to have power and influence over their jobs and lives and finding their own voice in the workplace. Organizing, like other civil rights' fights, also requires perseverance and courage to stand up in the face of fear, and even violence, to change the entrenched status quo. Organizing embraces community, the realization that what makes you stronger, makes me stronger. Even our demands echo those of the civil rights movement: dignity, respect and a fair shake.

Approaching organizing as a civil right celebrates our history. In the 1960s Martin Luther King, Jr. saw the labor movement and the civil rights movement as one in the same with a united purpose. Indeed, Rev. King's tragic death while fighting for justice during the Memphis Sanitation Workers strike symbolizes the organizing and civil rights alliance.

There are three key ways unions and our members can reconnect to our past and recognize organizing as a civil right.

First, unions must get involved in our communities. Through community action, unions can draw power and support from other causes and promote organizing with other basic rights. This is beginning to happen with more and more success.

For example, the Jobs with Justice campaign, which links labor with religious and other community-based organizations, works for social justice on the theory that labor should be there for other fights as well as our own. Community action continually builds a network for labor to rely on when we need community pressure and, at the same time, demonstrates labor's strength in the community and establishes labor as a helping hand to all.

Community action also highlights why unions are good for communities, not only financially but also socially. When individual union members get involved in community or volunteer activities wearing union shirts, hats and buttons, people learn that it's union jobs which provide decent hours and good wages that allow union members to give back to the community.

Second, unions must educate the unorganized that it's uniquely American, and not anti-company, to be pro-union, and that just about everyone needs a union if democracy and America are to succeed. Democracy means everybody should have an equal say in how society is run. Only by pooling their resources through organizing can workers with few limited resources come close to having the "equal say" that defines democracy.

Without worker organization, there is no effective check on the power of the few to control the outcome for the many. Democracy becomes a joke and the distribution of resources and human welfare reflect it. It is un-American that one in four children under the age of 5 live in poverty in this country. It is un-American and undemocratic that the average CEO makes 273 times what the average American worker earns.

We must also educate the unorganized through advertising campaigns or other similar communications that unions are responsible for many rights that Americans take for granted. Our school children are taught that America's social pioneers and heros were almost exclusively great presidents, generals and captains of industry, while labor's contributions are so slighted that they appear as accidental phenomena if they receive any attention at all. The unorganized do not know and we must teach them that labor won many of the most basic rights we have in this country.

Finally, for organizing to be successful, our political activism must grow. Not only must we register our members to vote and make sure that they do, we must challenge our members to get politically involved at a grass-roots level. We know from experience that if a local officer can run a local union, he or she can sit on a local school board, a county oversight commission or run for a state representative's seat. When labor occupies local office, we bring our interests to the table including the right to organize.

Labor also must require others to honor our agenda at all levels. Many politicians happily accept union PAC donations, but are indifferent about the labor movement. To those individuals, we say: "You must prove to us that you are pro-union, pro-organizing to receive our money."

If labor cannot find the outside individuals who are worthy of our dollars we are better off spending our money advertising labor's successes and contributions and rousing public support for organizing or bringing our money home to run local union members for office.

Labor has been there before. In U.S. labor history, large-scale union organizing has always been linked with a broader social movement fighting for the interests of all workers, organized and unorganized, employed and unemployed. The company unions, strikebreaker violence and the lack of legal rights which faced workers in the 1920s were swept away a decade later when American workers forced corporate acceptance of labor for the first time in the country's history.

Their activism mobilized workers to overcome obstacles not unlike those we face today. In our times, as in theirs, we can overcome obstacles by communicating to the unorganized a vision for social and economic change that includes demanding organizing as an undeniable right. If we do, the "minefield" facing the unorganized today can become a historical relic as quickly as the challenges facing workers earlier in this century.

Reprinted from AIL Labor Agenda July 1998.