Candidates Hold Firm on Employee Free Choice Act Despite Attacks

by James Parks, Sep 25, 2008

Candidates for Congress are holding firm in their support for working people, despite a massively financed corporate campaign attacking them for supporting the Employee Free Choice Act. 

Workers have made passage of the Employee Free Choice Act a key priority in the upcoming elections. Nearly three-quarters of a million workers have signed postcards and petitions calling on the new Congress and president to enact the legislation when they take office in 2009. The Employee Free Choice Act would allow workers to freely decide how they want to choose a union—a decision that is now in the hands of the employer. 

El Tinklenberg, a labor-endorsed Democratic candidate for Congress in Minnesota, says the Employee Free Choice Act will help re-establish economic fairness and justice. (See video.)

The labor movement built the middle class in this country. There was a sense of economic fairness and justice that was the hallmark of the labor movement. We have to restore that. The Employee Free Choice Act will level the field and re-establish that sense of fairness and justice.

Tinklenberg joins Al Franken, the Minnesota Democratic-Farm-Labor candidate for the U.S. Senate, who is a strong backer of the bill. At the Minnesota AFL-CIO convention last week, Franken reiterated his support for the Employee Free Choice Act.

I believe the labor movement built the middle class and that’s why I will fight for an NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] that is not hostile to labor and why I will co-sponsor the Employee Free Choice Act.

The bill has the backing of Sen. Barack Obama and his running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, who have co-sponsored the bill. Sen. John McCain voted to block a vote on it by keeping a filibuster going. In fact, McCain voted FOR a bill that would have eliminated unions altogether.  

Campaigning in Virginia at a Mine Workers‘ fish fry, Biden said the Employee Free Choice Act would be one of the first items on the agenda of a new Obama-Biden administration. (See video.)

For the first time in the last five decades, we have the opportunity to broaden the labor movement. What’s happening is that white-collar workers who thought they were going to be treated fairly, who did everything by the numbers, got the education they needed—one day they showed up for work and their job was gone. We have to expand the labor movement [because] that would put incredible pressure on government and corporations to keep jobs here.

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