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Biden to AFL-CIO: Employee Free Choice Act Key to Rebuilding Middle Class |
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Vice President Joe Biden told the AFL-CIO Executive Council today that returning our economy to health means restoring the basic right to join a union and bargain collectively. And the way to do that is by passing the Employee Free Choice Act.
He quoted President Obama saying: ‘”I don’t buy the argument that providing workers with collective bargaining rights somehow weakens the economy or worsens the business environment.”
If you’ve got workers who have a decent pay and benefits, they also are customers for your business. So let me add to that and say that I have a simple, basic belief, one that we’re going to work hard to put into action: If a union is what you want, a union you’re entitled to have.
The vice president quoted AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s recent remarks in his column expressing basic truths that should guide the AFL-CIO in 2009:
We can’t fix the economy by hurting workers. Rescuing the economy will require investments in jobs, infrastructure, health care. When you’re in a deep hole, you need a long ladder. Rebuilding our broken economy gives us the opportunity to get it right and reward workers. Progressive, pro-family, pro-worker candidates won. So isn’t it time that we have progressive, pro-worker, pro-family priorities that win, too?
Click here to read the entire Sweeney column.
Biden, who heads the White House Task Force on the Middle Class, told the council the Obama administration is dedicated to rebuilding the nation’s middle class.
You can’t have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement. We will judge the success or failure of our administration at the end of our four years, based on whether or not the standard of living of the middle class has increased or not. That’s the bottom-line measure. And guess what. Neither one of us believes it can get better without you getting stronger.
The people Teddy Roosevelt used to call the “doers of deeds”—the people who teach our children, protect our neighborhoods, protect our homes. The people who staff our hospitals, who work on the line—on the lines that a few are working on these days. The people who are our nation’s heart and soul, and I would add, our nation’s spine. They are the spine of the nation.
For too long, Biden said, we’ve failed to have a White House that puts families front and center in our economic policies. That’s why the Obama economic recovery program focuses on jobs, he said, and the administration is pushing for real health care reform. He also said the Obama-Biden team would never have won without the support of working families.
Biden’s visit to the Executive Council follows a two-day visit from Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who participated in a town hall forum on Sunday and met with the union leaders Monday.
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The card check bill is a violation of individual freedom to vote in secret. How can a person vote honestly with union goons standing over his/her shoulder to threaten the employees and their families. Why not do away with the secret ballot for presidential and congressional voting? Forcing someone to join a union under intimidation is unconstitutional and will be fought by every group that defends the rights of the individual, e.g., ACLU.
The Employee Free Choice Act, what you refer to as the ‘card check bill,’ will not take away the ballot election for workers considering whether to join a union. Rather, the Employee Free Choice Act will give workers, rather than management, the choice of whether to vote on unionization via ballot or to indicate their support to join a union via majority sign up (also called “card check.”)
Here’s the text of Employee Free Choice Act bill:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.800:
Can you point to where it says a ballot will be taken away?
Henry Ford of all people once said that he needed to pay his workers well enough to buy his products. That somehow is lost upon the genuises who came up with a global economy based on the lowest possible wages to be competitive. I hope you will take a look at my article on Philadelphia Progressive Examiner titled The Employee Free Choice Act ending the banana republic dictatorship called work. It contains my own story about what happened whenI tried to organize my work place.
It is under Tim McCown on that site
Henry Ford once said he needed to pay his workers well enough to buy his products. That idea is lost today. I hope you will read my article on my attempts to organize my work place on Philadelphia Progressive Examiner titled The Employee Free Choice Act ending the banana republic dictatorship called work under my name Tim McCown
JohnKar on 05.03.2009 at 18:40 (Reply)
The card check bill is a violation of individual freedom to vote in secret. How can a person vote honestly with union goons standing over his/her shoulder to threaten the employees and their families. Why not do away with the secret ballot for presidential and congressional voting? Forcing someone to join a union under intimidation is unconstitutional and will be fought by every group that defends the rights of the individual, e.g., ACLU
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Under the present system, workers already sign union authorization cards in front of their coworkers. And many times workers are already forming their unions by a card-check majority and are recognized by their employer under the current law. Be serious, no one threatens workers to sign cards, nor should they.
If you want to talk about “freedom of choice,” under current law, even if 100 percent of workers sign cards, the boss can still insist on a high-pressured secret-ballot election.
Finally, it’s not a fair comparision between union secret-ballot elections and publc secret-ballot elections. When you are deciding which candidate to vote for in a race for Congress or the president, you are not required to attend mandatory meetings by your company and told how you should vote because your job may be on the line.
This comes down to the liberty of “Freedom of Association” in America.