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Sweeney: We’ll Win Fight for Labor Law Reform |
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Despite speculative news reports today, momentum for real labor law reform is still going strong, and we can still be optimistic that a bill will be signed into law this year giving workers—not their bosses—the choice about how to form a union.
Speaking to The Real News during the America’s Future Now! conference last month, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney discussed the Employee Free Choice Act and described how growing corporate abuses have betrayed the purpose of the National Labor Relations Act. Sweeney said companies and anti-union consultants are exploiting weaknesses in our labor laws to prevent workers from exercising their freedom to form unions and bargain.
Sweeney added:
The changes that took place in our economy were significant…[the decline in union membership] was because of bad trade policies, a government that was not supportive of workers organizing, and a labor law that became weaker and weaker, allowing employers to be able to harass and terminate workers because of union activities….This was not the intent of members of Congress who put the National Labor Relations Act together.
It was intended to be an act that would allow a fair process for workers to organize, and for them to decide whether they wanted to be in a union, and whether they could have collective bargaining.
With a new president and Congress, elected through the efforts of working families, we have a chance to turn the economy around for workers, Sweeney said.
It’s now that we’re seeing a change taking place…we’re going to accomplish a victory with the Employee Free Choice Act.
Sweeney also discussed health care, trade and the relationship of the union movement to the administration of President Barack Obama. You can watch the whole video here.
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EFCA is apparently being seriously weakened according to this story:
Senate Democrats drop “card check” measure from pending bill
By Tom Eley
20 July 2009
A handful of Democrats in the US Senate have agreed to eliminate from a pending bill a “card check” provision that would have required employers to recognize a union as soon as a majority of workers sign union cards, without a secret ballot election.
The decision is a major defeat for the AFL-CIO and Change to Win. These organizations have plowed hundreds of millions of union workers’ membership dues into the election of Democrats in recent years. They had launched an intensive lobbying campaign to persuade “moderate” Democrats to support the card check measure, which the bureaucracy claimed was the most important labor legislation since passage of the Wagner Act in 1935.
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The battle over the card check will now be replaced by a struggle over another potential component of the Employee Free Choice Act—mandatory binding arbitration. The measure would require a government-appointed arbitrator intervene when a union entering a new workplace fails to settle on a contract with an employee. With a Democrat in the White House, union executives calculate that government-nominated arbitrators will tend to intervene to enforce new contracts.
Business interests, while celebrating the elimination of the card check measure, have announced they will fight against mandatory binding arbitration. “Binding arbitration is an absolute nonstarter for us,” Mark McKinnon, a representative with pro-business Workforce Fairness Institute told the Times. “We see it as a hostile act to have arbitrators telling businesses what they have to do.”
Read the full story here:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/dues-j20.shtml
What must the organized labor movement do, given the threatened gutting of EFCA by the Democratic Party controlled Congress, and considering the increasing destruction and impoverishment of all working people under the Obama regime, what can organized labor to fight back?
(The Republican Party, forever anti-labor and even anti-social in it’s glorification of war and greed, is not even considered here as an alternative party for working people.)
1. Start playing “hard ball”: Give notice to the Democratic Party that if EFCA does not pass as originally proposed, the organized labor movement will issue a call to form a new political party to represent the interests of all working people. This threat alone is a huge threat to both corporate controlled parties, it may be shake the political establishment so profoundly, that the EFCA bill may be “reconsidered”. But the threat will not hold, nor will labor’s influence in Congress remain, if the threat is hollow, and if labor does not “follow through”.
2. This new party will not simply be a “labor union party” but will be open to all working people, with corporate money and corporate agendas excluded.
3. That the new party will be devoted to furthering the economic interests of all working people. The vast control of corporate interests in looting the economy of the wealth created by working people must end. A platform to these ends must be developed, candidates in support of the platform must be selected and run at every level of government.
4. New media outlets must be developed, with programs on NPR, PBS to inform, educate and ultimately organize working people into the new political party.
Without such a new political movement of labor to seize power away from the gangsters that are looting the government, organized labor and working people will continue to be impoverished and destroyed.
I agree that it is becoming more and more obvious that the Democratic Party is not at all committed to working Americans apart from getting their votes. They accept as unassailable gospel the same prevailing economic assumptions that Republicans hold regarding trade, manufacturing policy and economic justice. The antidote is, I believe, the formation of a Labor Party which would truly represent the interests of all working Americans. Such a move would temporarily put the Republicans back in power by diluting the working vote. But in the long term, it would force the interests of working Americans back on the national agenda in a broad way. The alternative is to tuck our tails between our legs and accept 2nd class citizenship.
Jerry Wells is correct to say Labor should play hard ball with the Democrats - something that should have been done 20 years ago, or in 1990 when Tony Mazzochi started Labor Party Advocates. The AFL-CIO is still in bed with the Democrats who have betrayed us over and over and over again instead of supporting a Labor Party and running candidates to challenge corporate profiteers like Feinstein or Baucus. We will be screwed yet again by so-called progressives who will set us back another 20 years and tell us to be quiet, that the job is done. We’ll be forced to buy health insurance and get lukewarm reforms to labor election law, while the military budget continues to grow and jobs are outsourced. A call to repeal Taft-Hartley and push for Single Payer would have given us some negotiating space; instead we’ll get crumbs and the corporate fat cats will be laughing all the way to their bailed out banks.
As far as I’m concerned the AFL-CIO has been on the wrong side of working people for a very long time.I’m not sure who our worst enenmy is the Demcrats the Republicans or the AFL-CIO.An organization has given many millons to people that have lied to them and us most of my working life.I’m 60 now and joined the union at 17 and it’s been down hill ever since.I’m not sure the Indepenent Party is the what’s needed but it was my choice a couple of years ago.I believe a mass exodus from the Dems and Reps to any other party will wake some of them up,and maybe we should stop voting for the same fools over and over again,do we really expect anything to change?