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Watch Mary Beth Maxwell Discuss Employee Free Choice on C-SPAN |
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On Friday, Mary Beth Maxwell, executive director of American Rights at Work, appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” for a great interview about the importance of quickly passing the Employee Free Choice Act.
In the half-hour interview, Maxwell described our badly broken system for forming unions, how it has undermined workers’ bargaining power and the economy, and how the Employee Free Choice Act will restore workers’ freedom to form unions without corporate harassment and intimidation, allowing them to bargain for a better life. Maxwell took questions from viewers around the country and cut through the misconceptions about the Employee Free Choice Act.
In response to the barrage of attacks from corporate anti-worker front groups, Maxwell said the groups’ arguments are:
simply not true, and spending millions of dollars in misleading attack ads, saying it over and over and over again, doesn’t make it true.
Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act falsely claim the bill would do away with secret ballots or open the door to coercion by unions. Neither of these claims has merit. The Employee Free Choice Act will allow workers (rather than bosses) to choose whether to form unions, either through majority sign-up or the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election process.
And claims of union intimidation are far from credible. According to AFL-CIO Associate General Counsel Nancy Schiffer, a study of NLRB decisions found only 42 cases of union fraud or coercion over more than six decades since the NLRB was established. Compared with the nearly 27,000 instances of company violations of workers’ rights in 2006 alone, it’s clear that corporate anti-union scaremongering is a ploy to disguise the anti-worker agenda.
Maxwell dissected the corporate disinformation campaign and outlined the intimidation, harassment and delay that are pervasive in our company-dominated system. The anti-worker campaign, Maxwell says, is fundamentally about trying to keep workers from being able to exercise the freedom to bargain for a better life.
Their opposition to this isn’t about them trying to protect anyone’s ballot. They want to make it more difficult for folks to form unions. We think it’s your American right to form a union if you want to, and it should be more straightforward. It should be fairer for workers….
It’s a case where the rhetoric and the propaganda about this just don’t match up to the facts. Over the last five years, half a million workers have formed unions through majority sign-up, in the private sector, in states…there really have been no problems. The coercion and intimidation that workers worry about is from their boss. Studies demonstrate that workers who use majority sign-up experience far less intimidation and harassment….The main point is, that choice should be up to the workers, and the Employee Free Choice Act puts that choice in the workers’ hands.
Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.), the choice of President-elect Barack Obama to be secretary of labor, is an Employee Free Choice Act co-sponsor and sits on the board of American Rights at Work. Maxwell says the nomination to Solis to lead the Department of Labor is a great sign of positive change for working families.
Maxwell is an eloquent and smart defender of workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life, and the interview is worth watching here on the C-SPAN website.
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I would propose: 1. Write new Indian Tribe treaty authorizing the Native Americans to have their own “Federal Magistrate Court”.
2. Their own Emergency Services with mutual aid funding.
3. Revenue sharing with Gaming Tribes MANDATED to go to NONGAMING TRIBES.
4. Since Treaties are FEDERAL Article THREE US CONSTITUTION; access to Federal Health care plans to get an ORGANIZED TRIBAL HEALTH CARE PLAN.
5, Do us all a favor and dissolve the Bureau of Indian Affairs and let Native Americans do what they do best Take care of our Bureau of Land Management Land with the stipulation of NO CASINO but Economic Developement promoting Tribal Traditions and use of GREEN Technolgy.
Aho sailorman: I am an unregistered Native who firmly opposes the BIA and like what you propose.
Our people were always the stewards of the Earth and know that when you harm the waters you harm the land, when you harm the land you harm all things that give life to everything.
I am a realist who also knows that everyone needs work and for sure with the Free Choice Act it will help not only our poeple but every person who works for a living to get a fare days wage for a fair days work.
So on one hand it is good to advocate for the benefit of the People we can not seperate ourselves from everyone else as we all are connected.
It may be beneficial to examine how an Organized Tribal Health Plan would work and use as an example where self insured Union Health Plans not run by those high overpriced Insurance companies who used to rape those union Insurance Funds are running at tremendous success rates.
We could use the way my Union in NYC: IUPAT DC 9 manages our funds and take that and apply it to the Tribe, Band or Nation.
Any Tribal member who is covered by another plan could use that plan as a secondary or vice versa. Either way Health Insurace is costly but needs carefull management: how it gets done and in effect gets administered to beneifit everyone is tricky. A union fund has the ERISA Act protecting it, but what protection will a Tribal Health Care Plan have if lets say the Casino or other business run by the tribe bellies up?
We are still in the same trap as the rest of the world: Health Care Plans work when the work picture is good and it goes bad when the economy lands on its head.
We need to stay focused and in the mainstream in step with everyone else while push for what we have been denied for so long: Our True Sovereignity, which I can say Brother I stand Tall with you on that.