Holt Baker: Employee Free Choice, Health Care Key Priorities

by James Parks, Dec 4, 2008

The Obama administration should make labor law reform and affordable, available health care top priorities when it takes office in January, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker told two key members of the incoming Obama administration and community leaders from across the country.

Speaking at a roundtable today in Washington, D.C., on “Realizing the Promise: A Forum on Community, Faith and Democracy,” Holt Baker outlined the major changes needed to turn America around for working people. Roundtable participants included Melody Barnes and Valerie Jarrett, two top advisers to President-elect Barack Obama. Barnes has been designated as director of Obama’s Domestic Policy Council. Jarrett, who is co-chairing the transition, will be a senior adviser in the Obama White House.

Holt Baker told the more than 2,000 community leaders participating in the forum labor laws that deny workers the freedom to form unions and the high cost of health care are “undermining everything we need to be doing.”

She reminded the audience that passage of the Employee Free Choice Act is working people’s top policy initiative.

No matter what else we do, economic growth simply will never be broadly shared unless we give workers back the freedom to bargain with their companies for better wages and benefits.

Under our current laws, any company that wants to stop workers from organizing can. It’s unbelievable what they do. The Employee Free Choice Act will make it easier for workers to unionize by making it harder for employers to interfere with union campaigns and the rights of workers.

Affordable health care is as important as rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure, Holt Baker said.

We have to realize that our health care system is a cause of economic distress, not a symptom. It’s a huge drain on all our resources. We can’t afford to put health care reform on the back burner because of our economic problems.

To me, our health care system is a vital part of our infrastructure, right along with schools, roads, bridges, airports, and water treatment facilities and it makes sense to invest what we need to in order to make it work.

Both Jarrett and Barnes agreed that labor law reform and health care will be high on the new administration’s agenda.

Finally, Holt Baker pointed out that strong unions are key to building on the progressive victories in the 2008 election “to ensure that we never have to endure another brother like George W. Bush in the White House.”

The roundtable was sponsored by the Center for Community Change’s Campaign for Community Values and the Gamaliel Foundation.

Other participants included Reps. Chris Van Hollen and John Sarbanes, both Maryland Democrats; Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.); William McNary, president of USAction; Janet Murguía, president of the National Council of La Raza; United Food and Commercial Workers President Joseph Hansen; Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute; University of Southern California professor Manuel Pastor; and Ralph McCloud, executive director of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.

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