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Thousands Rally on Capitol Hill for Employee Free Choice |
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| Thousands of workers called for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. | |
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| AFSCME members left their leadership conference to join the Employee Free Choice rally. | |
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| Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) says Employee Free Choice Act will pass in the Senate. | |
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| Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) addresses the rally on Capitol Hill. | |
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| Lee Mabry and Amelia Rivera told how they were denied their choice to join a union. |
As the Senate began debating the Employee Free Choice Act today, more than 4,500 union members joined with Democrats in Congress, civil rights groups and progressives in the sweltering Washington, D.C., heat and humidity to let lawmakers know that passing this legislation is a top priority for America’s working families.
Carrying signs saying “Employee Free Choice Act Now!” and “Rebuild America’s Middle Class with Unions,” members of AFL-CIO and other unions and participants from the Take Back America conference gathered on Capitol Hill in a massive show of unity.
Gloria Prevost, a member of AFSCME Local 1012 in Pawtucket, R.I., who was in town for her union’s leadership conference, joined 2,000 delegates to AFSCME’s Legislative Conference at the rally. Says Prevost:
“This country was built on unions. Everybody should have a right to join a union. It’s important that people choose to join a union without being intimidated.”
Ray Embry, an 18-year-old retail worker from Mesa, Ariz., who was in town for the Take Back America conference, said he supports the Employee Free Choice Act because “unions are a big part of this country, and for a long time they have been marginalized.”
“There are a lot of industries that could use labor unions like the retail industry. I work at Target, and the Employee Free Choice Act would really help us.”
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney told the crowd momentum is building for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act:
“Momentum is building and history is being made because the Employee Free Choice Act is the most important legislation helping workers economically in many, many years. It’s the most important link to good living standards and a strong middle class. That’s why grass-roots support is rippling across our nation.
“And today, thousands of union members and our allies are speaking to our senators with one powerful voice, asking: Are you going to join us on the right side of history?”
The Capitol Hill rally was one of more than 100 rallies this week across the country demanding that Congress restore the fundamental freedom to join a union and bargain for a better life. Middle-class Americans have generated 50,000 telephone calls to the Senate, 156,000 faxes and e-mails, and 220,000 postcards, including 120,000 delivered to the Senate today.
More than 1,200 elected officials in all 50 states have voted in support of resolutions calling on Congress to pass the bill. (Get the full list here.) Fourteen Democratic governors also have signed a statement in support of the legislation.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced to the cheering crowd that the Senate will vote on the Employee Free Choice Act soon, although he did not specify a date. Reid also said:
Last year, the top three hedge funds earned $4.4 billion in profits, and the ex-CEO of Exxon got a $400 million golden parachute. Today, hourly wages are down while the number of uninsured is up. Today, household income is down, while the average CEO makes 411 times more than the average worker. Today for far too many Americans, that New Deal has become a raw deal. It’s time to give working families a square deal. A square deal that honors workers and their families by giving them a real chance for a better life.
The bill’s sponsor and long-time champion, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), assured the crowd the bill will pass when the roll is called. Kennedy opened debate on the Senate floor today, describing the connection between the nation’s shrinking middle class and the decline in union membership, which has occurred in large part because of the difficulty workers face in forming unions.
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said unions can return the country to the prosperous days after World War II when returning soldiers joined unions and built the strongest middle class in history.
We’re going to give workers across this nation the same chance they had after that war: to be treated with dignity, to organize in the workplace, to stand up and fight for things that count like a decent living wage, health insurance that covers everything a family needs and pension benefits that you won’t lose in the next merger or bankruptcy. (See video.)
Presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), one of the 46 co-sponsors of the legislation, told the rally:
This bill is about giving people choices and protecting workers’ fundamental rights. Unions helped to build the middle class in this country. To rebuild our middle class, we need to restore a level playing field for unions and give them a meaningful opportunity to organize for better wages, stronger benefits and safer working conditions.
Click here to see if your senator is a co-sponsor.
Lee Mabry knows what it’s like to try and form a union when the cards are stacked against you. He was one of three workers who described his experiences in forming a union.
Mabry worked for more than a decade as a machine operator at a Pennant Foods factory (formerly known as Chef Solutions) in North Haven, Conn. He was severely injured on the job and needed two reconstructive surgeries on his spine after a forklift operator dropped a pallet of sugar on the top of his head.
In 2000, my co-workers and I wanted to form a union (with the UAW) to protect ourselves and our families from these very dangerous working conditions. A majority of us signed union cards, but the company refused to honor our free choice—and forced a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election.
Meanwhile, the company ran a vicious anti-union campaign that included threatening to close the plant and firing two workers who supported the union. The union lost the election.
Finally, the company entered into settlement agreements with the NLRB. Under terms of those agreements, the company had to reinstate two workers fired for their union support and promise not to spy on workers’ union activities, threaten to close the plant, physically assault or threaten union supporters, restrict workers from distributing union literature and not to close or withhold pay increases if they voted for a union.
The company also agreed to have the 2001 election overturned and a rerun election conducted, which didn’t come until five years later. In the second election, which was held last year, the company did the same thing, and the workers were denied their union again.
If the Employee Free Choice Act had been enacted, Mabry and his co-workers would have had a union years ago. Under current law, the employer can reject union-authorization cards even if a majority of workers has signed. Most employers insist on a government-supervised election process, which is long and cumbersome and allows the employer time to harass and threaten workers. The Employee Free Choice Act allows workers to decide how they want to choose without employer interference.
Mabry says:
We are still waiting for justice from the NLRB. Obviously, the system is broken. Now more than ever, we need Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act to protect our rights to form a union so that we can improve our working conditions.
Other speakers at the rally included presidential candidates Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio); Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.); Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.); AFSCME President Gerald McEntee; Communications Workers of America President Larry Cohen; Mineworkers President Cecil Roberts; UAW Secretary-Treasurer Elizabeth Bunn; James Hoffa, president of the unaffiliated Teamsters; Joseph Hansen, president of the unaffiliated United Food and Commercial Workers; Roger Hickey, co-director of Campaign for America’s Future; US Action President William McNary; Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights; American Rights at Work Executive Director Mary Beth Maxwell; and Eric Perry, AFGE’s transportation security officer.
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We need all the unions that can be created. We need a strong voice and plenty of the same congressmen and senators that voted for these trade agreements. I feel every type of work in particularly the telecommunication industry (call centers) be unionized. I can tell you that there are plenty of abuse to workers there.
Unions are not the answer to low wages. If more unions are formed wages might go up but it will just make corporations move their jobs overseas or import more low wage immigrant workers leaving us with no jobs at all. The problem is President Bush’s insane “Free” trade policy. The only way we can compete with countries like communist China, that locks workers into factories and pays them 50 cents an hour, is to pay our workers 50 cents an hour.
Americans are insane they expect companies like GM and Ford to pay them $25.00 an hour while they drive their Japanese cars and buy cheap Chinese trash from Wal*Mart. While our economy is collapsing Chain’s is booming and while our military is being depleted China is building its military on its way to becoming the worlds only super power! So many more shipping containers are coming here from China than is going out of the U.S. that they have been stacked so high in California, that the sun set an hour earlier in some places.
Democrat Bullshit Artist Confab
Fragments of the once Democratic electoral majority met this week at a forum dubbed “Take Back America,” a/k/a “The Bullshit Artist” confab. This party conference was all things Democrat—a rehearsal of the same stale mantras they have been promising Americans for a decade. Maybe the electorate has acquired wisdom with the approval rating of both congress and the president hovering in the twenties.
The Democratic choir sang their simple subject sentences of Benediction: Blessed be health care reform, improvement of education; protection of the environment and the provision of national security.
Several of the presidential aspirants pledged they would continue America’s imperialist occupation of Iraq which will surely continue to stoke the fires of discord in the Middle East. However, they know that at home Jingoism and fear are great mechanisms of control. Our Iraq policy makes one pause for it’s a fundamental example of the extent to which both parties will go to impose U.S.- Euro globalization.
The Democrats agenda, like their “electoral coalition,” is as old and useful as the Edsel. The base of their support is drawn from a moribund labor movement, a stale environmental bureaucracy, along with the out of date civil, women and gay rights rhetoric which were appeasing when initially uttered in the 1980’s. The gay community is pandered to for money but distanced from as Election Day nears.
Democrats are patting themselves on the back for their “victory” at the polls last year, and the “Fund For American’s Progress,” the host of the wing-thing, is claiming they have defeated the “vast right wing conspiracy” while the latter charges there is a “vast left wing conspiracy. The descriptive “left wing” is about as apt as Marxism is to Stalinism. Rather, opinion manipulators utilize techniques designed to tell the voters what they want by the framing of so-called issues in opinion polls, the mainstream media and the Internet. Why not inspire a serous critique of American society.
Why is there no discussion among Democrats which addresses employee ownership of corporations?
Why aren’t Democrats advocating a policy which addresses the unconscionable income disparity that exists in this country?
Why are Democrats advocating a health care proposal that will result in a three tier system of care: one for the poor, another for the privately insured and another for the well-heeled?
Why doesn’t a single Democrat have the courage to discuss means testing upper and middle class tax subsidies, including, mortgage interest, property, sales and capital gains tax deductions?
Why isn’t Social Security already means-tested?
These questions are all very simply answered since the Democrats are as much a protector of the status quo as the Republicans. Like the GOP their contributors compose the companies and executives of U.S.-Euro global conglomerates. Generally, these mega-corps hedge their bets and contribute to both parties. There is no tacit understanding of this “arrangement” it is as overt as it can be. How much will Democrats receive in contributions from defense, health care, pharmaceutical companies, big agriculture, big tobacco and a plethora of other interests that would fill a pocket dictionary?
Quid pro quo politics is the mother’s milk of what we euphemistically call “public” policy.The Democrats, like one of their main supporters, George Soros, support a politics of stasis, a state devoid of political and socio-economic evolutionary change.
Instead, Democrats mimic the political strategies of Republicans by seeking support from evangelical Christians and tempering their support of contentious social issues based on a fear to challenge religious medieval thought, or the theocratic fundamentalism spewed as truth in Christian mega-malls. There are some Democrats who have gone so far as to temper their support of the theory of evolution.
Americans need to ask themselves what they want from a political party. Do they want campy little pop culture commercials which demean us and our politics? It seems Hillary Clinton believes the public wants a celeb-culture of Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan watch.
Democrats railed against Richard Mellon Scaife, the scion of the Mellon banking family, who has contributed millions to right-wing organizations. Today, the Democrats have their own version of Scaife, George Soros. Soros is one of the richest men in the world. Our economic system has rewarded him with an overabundance of wealth. However, was Mr. Soros satisfied by the legally obtained wealth he accumulated that wasn’t enough. Instead, he engaged in illegal insider-trading because his greed required even greater satiation.
The Left is not moribund. In Germany “Die Linke” has formed a coalition to tackle the right wing policies of Angela Merkels Christian Democratic Union. Similar political movements are taking hold not only in Europe but in Latin America as well.
These political parties are predicated on education. Their goal is to teach critical thinking skills rather than to manipulate their fellow-countrymen into a state of quiescence brought about by a commodity culture that not only is used as a propaganda tool to sell useless products but politicians as well. The totalitarianisms of the last- Century failed but whether a gulag is physical deprivation or mental manipulation in the end doesn’t matter.
Commoditization and concurrent propaganda has ripped asunder the notion of public, private space and community. If self-worth is measured solely by the accumulation of commodities and wealth, or a nano-second of personally demeaning YouTube video. When recognition is measured by Goggle hits and the Internet is used as a social pressure valve where critique and thoughtful analysis is swept away into the black hole of cyberspace stasis will mean the end of history.
Our society is in desperate need of transformation. This revolution should not only challenge our economic order but spark the realization of our full human potential.
The latter is the greatest fear and greatest threat to the status quo and the politics of stasis upon which it feeds. “Take Back America” is just another insidious slogan not unlike “Wonder Bread helps build strong bodies twelve ways” or do you suffer from “correctile-dysfunction.”
Democrats could use someone with a four-hour hardon.