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I BELIEVE THE GOP HAS GIVEN RISE TO A NEW UNION MOVEMENT
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Date Posted: 10:55:24 05/27/07 Sun
Read more from President Sweeney.
Maybe the loudest message from the recent congressional election was that regular folks have had enough and are ready to take back economic power from the corporate elite and radical right wing.
Working America has seen wages stagnate, costs soar and wealth and privilege become more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. This has not been an accident. The pro-corporate and anti-union policies of the Bush administration and its congressional rubber-stampers have deliberately favored the wealthy and corporate interests over working people.
The new Congress has many opportunities to right these wrongs. I believe the most important step the new Congress can take to rebuild the beleaguered middle class is to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. This law would repair the hopelessly broken system that is supposed to ensure workers’ freedom to form unions.
It’s no accident that the 25-year decline in workers’ wages in our country has paralleled a 25-year slide in the size and strength of America’s union movement. Unions are the surest way for workers to protect themselves against corporate greed and lift their families up into higher standards of living. Unions and our members are also the great leveling power in our capitalist economy, ensuring that money doesn’t flow too fast to the rich and leave the rest of us with nothing to spend or invest or save.
But for the last quarter century, unions and working people have been under relentless attack. Employers and the politicians they control have been waging an all-out war against workers who simply try to exercise their right to form the unions they want representing them. Worker after worker after worker is fired for trying to form unions—like Ed Martin, a former Comcast service technician in Beaver Falls, Pa., and John Summerhour, a former baggage screener at Jackson-Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta. Worker after worker waits years for the benefits of union membership—like registered nurse Lori Gay and her colleagues at Salt Lake Regional Medical Center in Salt Lake City who have been waiting for four years for the ballots to be counted from their union election.
The struggles of Ed and John and Lori are not aberrations. These violations of basic human rights take place every day in our country. In America, we don’t enslave, torture or murder workers as they do in Burma, Zimbabwe, Colombia, Russia and China. We’re much more subtle: We enslave dreams, torture hopes and clamp the iron shackles of poverty around the ankles of workers so they can’t climb any higher on the economic ladder. It is the shame of our nation—and it’s an international disgrace.
The Employee Free Choice Act won’t instantly end the war on working families. But it will make it harder for employers to interfere with the basic rights valued by every person in America: Freedom of speech. Freedom of association and assembly. Freedom to join or form unions. The Employee Free Choice Act won’t guarantee a high-wage economy or automatically close our wage and wealth gap. But it will give more workers a chance to become union members with the kind of wages and health care and pensions they deserve. It will help build stronger communities. It will help create a more balanced economy. And it will give working families a level playing field so we can further strengthen the progressive movement that is so important to the political balance in our country.
The fight to enact the Employee Free Choice Act belongs to all of us. It’s a fight for our rights, our economic security and our future. We are taking it to Capitol Hill, where the newly elected majority party actually supports our cause, and to the streets and worksites of America to lobby from the grassroots.
We will win this struggle the same way we won back the House and Senate—by the power of our purpose, the clarity of our conviction and the strength of our solidarity.
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