‘AFL-CIO Determined to Restore Workers’ Right to Organize’

On Saturday, AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff spoke at an American Rights at Work conference at Harvard University. Here are some excerpts from that speech, which focused on the determination of the union movement to restore the right of workers to join unions.

Workers in America have lost the fundamental human right to freely organize unions and engage in collective bargaining. Everyone here knows the basic facts about what happens to workers in America’s workplaces when they try to organize. I think almost everyone knows the consequences:

• [There is a] direct correlation between 25 years of stagnant, flat-lined wages and the assault on unions.
• 46 million of us are without health care and 40 million with inadequate health care, [and] 20 percent more of us (live) in poverty now than when this decade started.

The AFL-CIO will convene an Organizing Summit in Washington, D.C., Dec. 8-9 to bring together 700 union organizers, leaders and activists to plan and strategize how we confront this crisis at this particular moment in history. We will talk about and review and learn from each other how to escalate our internal organizing capacity development and how to prosecute the kind of huge, non-National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) organizing campaigns that capacity development enables.

We’ll review and advocate for the kind of massive infusion of new resources to organizing that we saw this summer when six affiliates of the AFL-CIO put 150 million new dollars into organizing.

We’ll learn from great organizers like Leticia Zavala at FLOC (Farm Labor Organizing Committee), Jim Schmitz at AFSCME and Ed Sabol at CWA (Communications Workers of America), who’ve run great, huge non-NLRB campaigns, including:

• Cingular Wireless, where 20,000 workers joined CWA, which is now being taken to the Verizon family of employers;
• FLOC’s North Carolina farm worker campaign, where 7,000 Mexican farm workers organized;
• AFSCME’s effort to organize 10,000 hospital workers at Resurrection Hospital in Chicago;
• UMWA’s (Mine Workers) successful effort to organize 3,000 workers at the Navajo Nation and our current effort to organize 2,500 Peabody coal miners;
• The multiunion construction organizing in the Southwest.

We’ll look at the internal culture change at the IBEW [Electrical Workers] that is enabling the union to hire 150 new organizers [and] facilitate new organizing and growth. We will again assert and affirm that we must organize now at greater pace and scale in spite of the environment or climate.

We will meet with the organizing directors of national labor centers from 10 other countries to strategize a much more aggressive global effort to combat neo-liberalism and the global assault on workers’ rights.

We will say again that none of this is enough—that nothing we do will substitute for the free right of workers in America to decide for themselves whether to organize and bargain collectively. We will strategize and plan our effort to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. We intend to see it passed and enacted.

State federations and CLCs (central labor councils) made endorsements in federal races contingent on support for the Employee Free Choice Act and other organizing efforts. We’ve signed up near majorities in Congress—216 in the House and 44 in the Senate—and we helped elect a pro-worker and pro-working family Congress.

We know [anti-worker extremists] and employers will fight us tooth and nail, so we are ratcheting up our effort to create and train a workers’ army of shop stewards and workplace leaders…to keep the heat on Congress, to mobilize, to win this right, grow their union, hold employers accountable and elect a president who will sign the Employee Free Choice Act.

The fundamental source of power for unions is workers united and in motion.  The Stewards’ Army will put tens of thousands in motion.

We will arm ourselves with the best polling and focus group research on messaging to help withstand the right-wing assault. We will challenge our unions and our folks to re-sign 216 co-sponsors in the House and 44 in the Senate and every newly elected Democrat by the end of the year.

Friday, we will rally with thousands at the Capitol…to remind the incoming Congress…of the abrogation of human rights in America’s workplaces. We are determined to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. But we know we can’t do it alone.

We know the counterattack by the right wing and employers will be unlike anything we’ve experienced recently. They will demonize unions and our campaign and our supporters.

We need your help. We need your help right now. We need you to help tell the stories.  We need more research. We need you to help us make the case. We need your help to make the case that workers’ freedom to organize and bargain collectively is directly tied to a fair economy and any hope of a real struggle for economic and social justice. We need your help to make the case that workers need more power and corporations less.

We have to win this fight, because if we don’t we will be the first generation in the history of this country to leave our kids and grandkids less than what was left us:  less justice, more avarice, less compassion, more greed. We are social creatures, and when we use our social nature to lift ourselves and one another together, our kids and each others’ kids together, we are most human.

The fact that workers are routinely fired and abused for doing what we all should do is an abomination that we must end.

To register for the Organizing Summit or for more information, call Tiffany Heath at 202-637-6247.

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