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Traub: Workers Need Employee Free Choice Now More Than Ever |
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Amy Traub, research director at the Drum Major Institute, has a great piece on the economic crisis and why we need the Employee Free Choice Act.
Traub says the nation’s economic crisis is making workers feel powerless on the job—more willing to accept poor treatment, long hours and most crippling for the economy, cuts in wages and benefits.
What they need, she says, is the freedom to form a union and bargain so they no longer end up bearing all the pain from the economic crisis. Traub writes:
“Productivity is soaring as fewer workers get more work done. But working people are not seeing many of the benefits. And that’s bad news for the economy as a whole. Consumers aren’t likely to resume spending when wages are down, especially without the ability they once had to borrow against high home values. It’s a recipe for a vicious economic cycle.
“The way out should include additional public stimulus, but it must also involve shifting more power to employees—enough to push back and stop making America’s working families the single easiest target for every negative economic development.”
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A lot of American workers and their unions have turned into beggars. We wait for the government to come to our rescue - with health care, with stimulus money, with labor laws. What happened to Sam Gompers’ (the founder of the AFL) idea that workers should never rely on the government for anything? Or to Bill Haywood’s (leader of the IWW) determination to organize every worker in America so that WE can dictate what America will be like?