Here is a summary of recommended changes in U.S. labor law to address the problems cited above:

Interim Reinstatement; Tougher Remedies
A worker who is fired for union activity should be reinstated immediately while the case continues to be litigated. Only such an interim reinstatement remedy can overcome the devastating impact on individual workers who are dismissed and on the workers' overall organizing effort.

Remedies and sanctions should have a deterrent effect. Workers should receive full back pay regardless of interim earnings. They should receive punitive damages in cases of willful violations. In addition to paying workers victimized by violations, employers who repeatedly engage in discrimination against union supporters should pay substantial fines to the NLRB.

Equal Access to the Workplace
A principle of equal access should apply so that workers have access to information from union representatives in the workplace about their right to form and join trade unions and to bargain collectively. When employers require workers to attend captive-audience meetings, similar arrangements should be made for workers to meet with union representatives under parallel circumstances.

Tighter Scrutiny and Tougher Remedies
The NLRB should more closely scrutinize employers' anti-union statements for potentially coercive effect, removing the artificial distinction between "predictions" and "threats." Where it finds violations, the board should apply strong, swift remedies like additional union access to the workplace or bargaining orders where employers' conduct makes fair elections impossible.

Faster Elections; Bargaining Units Shaped by Workers' Needs
The NLRB should conduct an election as quickly as possible after the filing of a petition. The election should take place among workers in bargaining units they seek to form based on their evaluation of the "community of interest" (the legal standard for an appropriate bargaining unit) most responsive to their needs.

Legal Responsibility of the Dominant Economic Force
Labor law must change to encompass the rights and interests of contingent workers, contract workers, and others involved in new occupations and industries. Congress should enact legislation cutting through the fiction of subcontracted employment relationships that are structured to avoid responsibility for recognizing workers' rights. Fixing responsibility should be based on a test of effective economic power to set workers' terms and conditions of employment, not on the formality of an employment relationship. The dominant economic entity in the employment relationship holding real power over workers' terms and conditions of employment should have legal responsibility to bargain with workers when a majority choose representation.

Expanded Use of Voluntary Card-Check Agreements
Human Rights Watch believes that secret-ballot elections should remain a standard method of determining workers' choice whether to bargain collectively with their employer. At the same time, experience demonstrates that where workers and employers can agree to use card checks - neutral verification that workers freely signed cards authorizing representation and collective bargaining - they can combine the benefits of freedom of choice and a mutually respectful relationship that carries over into collective bargaining. Public policy should encourage the use of voluntary card-check agreements as an alternative means of establishing workers' majority sentiment and collective bargaining rights.

Stronger Remedies for Surface Bargaining
Stronger remedies should be fashioned for willful refusal to bargain in good faith. For example, where workers have formed and joined a new union in a previously unorganized workplace and the employer is found to bargain in bad faith, workers should have recourse to first-contract arbitration as a remedy, where an independent arbitrator sets contract terms.

Average contract settlements in comparable industries or facilities can be used as guideposts for an arbitrator applying the first-contract arbitration remedy. Arbitration for a first contract gives workers an opportunity to establish a bargaining relationship that would most likely have taken shape had the employer bargained in good faith. It also provides a chance to demonstrate to the employer that both parties can act responsibly under a collective agreement, making good-faith negotiations more probable in subsequent bargaining.

Eliminate Statutory Exclusions; Protect All Workers' Organizing Rights
Congress should bring agricultural workers and domestic workers under NLRA coverage with the same rights and protections as all other covered workers. Legal reform should also subject employers' claims of workers' "independent contractor" status to strict scrutiny under standards that make the workers' real-life dependence on employers -- not how employers classify them -- the test for NLRA coverage.

In general, workers who want to organize and bargain collectively should have the right to organize and bargain collectively, except where there are manifestly no employers to bargain with or where the essence of such workers' jobs is so truly managerial or supervisory that they effectively would be bargaining with themselves.

Reverse the Permanent-Replacement Doctrine
Congress should enact legislation prohibiting the permanent replacement of workers who exercise the right to strike. The balance should be restored to a genuine equilibrium in which temporary replacements give way to employee strikers when the strike ends. In effect, prohibiting permanent striker replacements effectuates a "balance of pain" in a strike that promotes more rapid resolution of a dispute while respecting both workers' right to strike and management's continued operations.

More Protection for Immigrant Workers; Stronger Remedies
Congress should establish a new visa category for undocumented workers who suffer violations of their right to organize and bargain collectively, and the INS should exercise discretionary authority to allow them to remain in theUnited States. Workers who obtain a reinstatement order because their right to freedom of association was violated should be immediately reinstated and granted a work authorization card for sufficient time to allow them to seek renewed, extended, or permanent authorization under discretionary authority in such cases.

Mobility and Organizing Rights for H-2A Workers
The H-2A program should allow workers to seek work with a different employer if their employer violates their rights. Where workers are dismissed or discriminated against for exercising rights of association, a strengthened regime is needed to ensure swift reinstatement or placement with another employer who will respect their rights.

Labor department regulations governing the H-2A program should halt H-2A recruiters' characterizations of unions and legal services as "enemies" of H-2A workers. The H-2A program should instead require that workers be fully informed of their rights to organize and bargain collectively and have access to legal services and to the justice system, as they desire.