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Grad Students’ Struggle Shows Need for Employee Free Choice |
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In a big victory last week, more than 1,000 graduate students at the University of Illinois exercised their freedom to bargain and won a contract that includes what all workers deserve: fair wages and better working conditions.
Unfortunately, too many employees around the country are denied the freedom to bargain. Trying to come together with your co-workers, to form a union and fight for a better life, can get you threatened, harassed and even fired. In a new piece at the Huffington Post, Robert Naiman says the graduate students’ win shows that all workers need the Employee Free Choice Act, to make sure everyone has the chance at a voice on the job:
…there’s a political barrier that obstructs many private-sector workers in the United States from being able to taste the victory that GEO [Graduate Employees Organization] members tasted: the need for labor law reform. If the Employee Free Choice Act were law, currently unorganized private-sector workers from Miami to Fairbanks would have the same ability as GEO members to advocate collectively and effectively for their interests, largely free of the fear of retaliation.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case today.
Naiman says the Employee Free Choice Act is needed to create a level playing field between employees and their bosses. It’s about giving all workers an opportunity to get their fair share through their own efforts to bargain for a contract—improving their economic security and their ability to support their families and their communities.
Read Naiman’s full post here.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by RedReverend: RT @AFLCIO Grad Student @ui_geo struggle shows need for Employee Free Choice Act. #efca #p2 http://ow.ly/FkiQ #socialism #justice #comrade…
The AFL-CIO “leadership”, in order to justify it’s lucrative salaried existence, continues to “beat the drum” for policies that are opposed to the explicit demands of it’s members and interests of especially unorganized workinig people.
The “health care” reform of Obama is supported against the explicit demand of it’s members in the recent convention in Pittsburgh. As more is known about this corrupt corporate lobbied continuation of corporate profiteering it is obvious that this bill is diametrically opposed to the needs of the people for a universal single-payer system.
And now the EFCA bill. The EFCA probably will not pass because only about ten percent of Democrats are “pro-labor”, perhaps because of the slavish undemanding support of the AFL-CIO.
As the capitalist economy is in an economic depression, with millions of jobs already gone to overseas in the last 30 years, the EFCA will be seen by both Democratic and Republican parties, both captured by corporate interests to maximize profit, as a fatal impediment to starting labor-intensive businesses in the U.S. The demands for a “living wage”, employer paid for benefits, by simple trade union demands, would never be met under these dire economic conditions. Capitalists would never be able to make enough profit to even both to start a new private enterprise.
The “business partner to capitalism” philosophy that has destroyed the labor movement in the last thirty years must end now. All it’s adherents thrown out of the “leadership” role as totally corrupt and incompetent. Continuation of “business as usual” will mean the further massive impoverishment of working people in this country.
1. Any new strategy for organized labor must study the new economic realities of collapse of capitalism. Jobs growth, that first profits investors handsomely before payinug “living wages” and benefits, is simply not possible.
A transition to a new socialist economic system that fills the economic needs of the vast majority must be the goal of organized labor.
2. This means dumping the Democratic Party, and issue a call for a founding convention of a new anti-capitalist socialist poliical party that refuses corporte money (campaign contributions,etc.) and corporate agendas. Agendas such as privatizing government, unending wars for profit, corporate profit health plans, destruction of tax supported public education, destruction of the public commonwealth, etc.
3. New media must be developed to air programs on television and radio that reflect the economic needs and perspectives of working people.
Here is another article from WSWS that speaks to dire situaion that is being perpetuated by the Obama regime with the Democrats in full control of Congress.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/nov2009/pers-n24.shtml
Once again: Obama and the jobs crisis
24 November 2009
The Obama administration has flatly rejected appeals for the federal government to take any direct action to create jobs and alleviate the mounting toll of unemployment in the United States. Obama reiterated this position in his Saturday radio/Internet address, and it was echoed by top aides in media interviews over the weekend.
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told the Wall Street Journal, “There are two engines to our economic message, two ways to generate jobs. One is small business, the second is energy.” He implicitly rejected any suggestion of direct government hiring for public works projects in favor of tax credits or eased lending terms for private, profit-making businesses
…….
(for the above for full details)