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550,000 Sign on in Million-Member Effort for Employee Free Choice
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| CWA members sign on to the million-member petition in support of Employee Free Choice. |
The union movement’s nationwide drive to get at least 1 million signatures in support of the Employee Free Choice Act is past the halfway mark and is growing rapidly.
In just five months, more than 550,000 people have signed postcards to tell the new president and Congress that working families across America want them to immediately enact the legislation.
The cards will be presented to the new Congress after the November elections in a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol. (You can show your support for the Employee Free Choice Act by clicking here to sign our online card.)
The Communications Workers of America (CWA) is among the most active groups building support for the bill. As of Aug. 20, some 37,101 CWA members had signed the postcards, as local unions and activists gear up for actions centered around the final two months of the 2008 elections.
This week, members of IUE-CWA Local 83761 sent more than 900 cards. Local union stewards had distributed the cards among members at a GE appliance plant in Louisville, Ky., where employers have threatened to close the plant. More than 40 percent of the local’s members have signed up.
Says William Spires, president of Local 83761:
Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act is key to helping us organize and build bargaining strength in our troubled industry. The Employee Free Choice Act would allow workers to decide freely how they want to choose a union without employer interference.
The AFL-CIO Executive Council voted in March to launch the Million-Member Mobilization. In a statement, the council lays out the urgent need to pass the bill:
America’s workers must regain their bargaining power to maintain and expand the middle class. The American middle class was created by the ability of workers to form unions and bargain collectively after the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935.
More and more Americans are beginning to understand that collective bargaining can promote broadly shared economic growth and prosperity, higher wages, better jobs, better and more extensive health care coverage, retirement security and respect for workers on the job.
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1 Comment
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I’m sorry, I am a past union member, I was forced to join when I took a job in New Egland, and the experience was awful. I was boxed in, not allowed to advance and discouraged from overachieving (boarderline threatend).
I always felt that I had no control over what happend with my Union and that I couldn’t advance based on my own merits.
Am I reading this legislation wrong? Is it saying that you don’t even have to have a vote before being forced into a union in a nonunion shop? Why is a vote such a bad thing? Just sign a card? This seems like to far to the other extreme.
A vote seems like the only way to me. I live in a Right to Work state now, and some plants have unionized, and some have not, but it is based on an election, not a “sign here” card handed out by a possible union organizer. If we vote for government, let’s vote for unions.