Had I sued, the outcome, at best, two and half years later, the way the system is rigged for the companies right now, I would have got my job back. So I accepted the severance, so I lost my right to sue. “I had to take the severance, because I didn’t make enough to save up a bunch of money.

So, if Lee Enterprises fired Steve Arney for supporting a union, then Lee Enterprises should have gotten in trouble, right? I was selected because I was involved in the union, it’s just that simple.”įiring someone for supporting a union is a violation of federal labor law. To which I responded, ‘Well, we know that’s a lie, because I can work in any other department in the newsroom.’ I had proven year after year that I was a very versatile reporter. “They said I was selected because they had decided to cut a job in Features, and I had the least seniority among three people who were writing for Features. At the time of the organizing drive, he was working as a Features writer. He’d been a writer in various departments, and had had excellent evaluations. Lee Enterprises responded with a campaign to defeat the effort by Pantagraph employees to form a union.Īs part of Lee’s anti-union campaign, Steve Arney lost his job.Īrney had worked at the Pantagraph for sixteen years. He used to be a reporter at the Bloomington Pantagraph, a newspaper in Illinois owned by Lee Enterprises.Ī majority of employees at the Pantagraph signed cards to support forming a union with the St. What difference would that make? Ask Steve Arney. When the Employee Free Choice Act is signed into law, millions of private sector workers will have greater protection from having their rights violated.

Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act is easy to justify on the basis of guaranteeing the basic human rights of working Americans. It increased the power of people previously excluded from power, and thereby reduced the power of corporate interests.īut the right of workers in America to organize has been steadily eroded by unpunished abuses by anti-union employers. The passage of the National Labor Relations Act – establishing the right of American workers to organize unions and bargain collectively – was a strategic reform. Sometimes an opportunity for reform comes along that is “strategic” in that it changes the playing field for efforts to win other reforms in the future.

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