SEARCH
Thank Your Senators…Or Tell Them to Stop Obstructing the People’s Will |
|
 |
|
A big THANK YOU to all the senators who voted 51-48 for cloture on the Employee Free Choice Act today: All the Democratics, both Independents and one Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.). And a special thank you to Sen. Edward Kennedy, who has championed this bill when it was first introduced in 2003, when many Capitol Hill pundits thought it didn’t have a chance. The union movement and our allies proved the pundits wrong, with a majority in the Senate for the first time in a generation voting for a bill that would level the playing field for workers seeking to form unions.
By voting for cloture, these senators supported efforts to bring the bill to a vote in the Senate. But the 48 Republican senators who opposed cloture basically slammed the door on legislation that would have strengthened the nation’s middle class—and on the efforts of America’s workers to improve their lives and working conditions through unions.
Take a minute now to thank your senators who backed the Employee Free Choice Act—or tell your senators to stop obstructing workers’ efforts to join or remain in the middle class.
As Bill Scher wrote immediately after the vote, the Senate action today ”adds to the growing list of attempts at progress from the new Congress stifled by the conservative minority,” including blocking efforts to empower Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices.
But the people have the majority on their side. Nearly 1,300 lawmakers in 60 state, county and city legislative bodies passed resolutions supporting Employee Free Choice; 16 governors signed on to a letter backing the bill, as did 115 religious leaders. Workers staged nearly 100 actions in the past week in support of Employee Free Choice, and middle-class Americans generated 50,000 phone calls to the Senate, 156,000 faxes and e-mail messages and 220,000 postcards, including 120,000 delivered to the Senate last week.
As Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) said at the 4,500-strong rally for the Employee Free Choice Act last week on Capitol Hill: the bill is really about the future of America.
The momentum is on our side.
6 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I am so sorry that my two Senators in Oklahoma chose to ignore worker’s right to form a union.
Gee, didn’t see this coming. Why don’t the Dems threaten to use “the nuclear” option or whatever they call it? The AFL-CIO needs to start going to the people to push the union movement. We need a populist movement and then we can get things passed in government. Quit wasting our money on these corporate-owned politicians, Republican and DLC Democrat alike.
While non-passage of the Employee Free Choice Act was pretty much expected by the big unions, the rest of America that isn’t in an union won’t be satisfied with a loss. We’re tired of executives getting outrageous bonuses for off-shoring jobs. And sick of seeing foreign car manufacturers destroy American owned factories that are unionized.
We want enforcement of the laws that make our country great. As our President says, “we are a nation of laws and we must enforce those laws.”
Shame on the big unions for advocating for an all or nothing bill. Card check would certainly eliminate government bureaucracy and streamline the National Labor Relations Board, but what America really needs is penalties for breaking the National Labor Relations Act. Then small unions could have a shot to organize without having to rely on the big warchests of the AFL-CIO.
So who lost when this bill failed? Not big business and not big unions. The non-union workers and the industries that can’t compete against third-world countries with even worse labor rights than our own. Big unions and the Union Busting industry won by keeping the status quo. And the NAM-bies helped kill American owned industry.
Reform is badly needed before we have no manufacturing capability at all!
Finally we have a move to support the working class folks in this country! What is our country coming to when most politicians are in favor of supporting law breakers ( Amnesty bill ), and fight to keep our honest, hard working class folks from getting security and a voice in their work place?
Frankly, I am puzzled by what agilepeople wrote. If the AFL-CIO had demanded nothing more than enforcement of current NLRB laws, accusations of asking for the sleeves off the vests of Congress would have come cascading down.
The “laws that make our country great”? Like pension laws that favor stockholders over working men and women? Like the bankruptcy bill that punishes employees and rewards big banks? Like continuation of the illegal war on Iraq? Like corporate-friendly “labor laws”? Like health care rules that leave over 47 million uninsured, and tens of millions more struggling to maintain the coverage they have? Like lousy, sell-out “trade agreements”?
Here is the problem: Less than 15% of those in Congress identify themselves as “blue collar Americans”. Congress was elected by we, the people. Congress, nonetheless, will keep doing what it has been doing as long as vox populi keeps letting elected representative get away with it.
Why the jab at “big labor”? If you recall, it was labor - big and small - that urged voters to support politicians advocating for working families. In the 2000 and 2004 elections the warnings of labor were ignored by too many people. Since then, the 90% of us who turn the wheels in the U.S. have been under attack. The 2006 elections were an improvement, but we still have a long way to go.
Instead of finding fault with organized labor, the people’s needs would be better served by organizing to defeat our enemies and instead electing individuals who will champion the cause of all workers.
The Employee Free Choice Act is exactly what we in labor should and did demand. Anything less would have been like going into contract negotiations asking for half of what is needed.
In 2008, let’s elect more of our friends and gain a veto-proof Congress. Then we’ll succeed in getting the EFCA enacted into law. That will benefit large and small unions, as well as all who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow as.
(By the way, I am part of a rank and file union numbering about 48,000.)
It’s not an amnesty bill rc, far from it. It’s called divide & conquer.