The following is a statement by Stefan Gleason, Vice President of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, regarding the AFL-CIO’s poll released yesterday:

“Now that the AFL-CIO claims that 50 percent of Americans would choose to join a union, the AFL-CIO should next announce that it will abandon and repudiate its national strategy to impose unions on employees without even so much as a vote.

“In recent years, the AFL-CIO has engaged in a concerted strategy of bringing pressure to bear on employers through “corporate campaigns” which involve pressuring of suppliers, stockholders, and utilization of elected officials as well as OSHA, EPA, and the NLRB to bring employers to their knees until they agree to recognize a union without a vote of the employees.

“The fact is that when employees are given a free choice of whether to join a union, a vast majority have refused. And nearly 80 percent of the American people oppose the practice of requiring employees to join or support a union as a job condition — the official policy of the AFL-CIO.

“If the poll conducted by union-pollster Peter Hart is correct, then there is even further lack of justification for union officials to continue these tactics.”

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is a nonprofit, charitable organization providing free legal aid to employees whose human or civil rights have been violated by compulsory unionism abuses. The Foundation, which can be contacted toll-free at 1-800-336-3600, assists thousands of employees in about 200 cases nationwide per year.