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Attacks on NLRB Cut Into Heart of Middle Class
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The unprecedented Republican and corporate attacks on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) are a direct attack on workers’ rights and an effort to put the nation’s labor laws “into cold storage,” Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) said during a special AFL-CIO forum today examining the assault on the NLRB and workers’ rights.
This is the right wing on steroids….They went to work immediately after the 2010 elections—not on jobs—but on taking rights away from American workers.
Since January, said Kimberly Freeman Brown, executive director of American Rights at Work, congressional Republicans have made nearly 50 separate assaults on the NLRB, from bills to gut its power and funding to hearings and subpoenas.
In fact later today, the House will vote on a bill that would deny workers the right to fair union elections by blocking the modest changes proposed by the NLRB earlier this year in the way union elections are conducted. As AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler told the audience:
Make no mistake about it. Their goal is to reduce power of working people across the country and incapacitate the board.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said the real reason behind the effort to cripple the NLRB is to silence the voice of working people.
This is a political attack campaign on what they see as their No. 1 enemy—labor, the only group with the power to stand up to them.
But the attacks on the NLRB and workers’ rights go far beyond union members and impact the entire middle class, said David Madland, director of American Worker Project, Center for American Progress Action Fund.
There is a strong connection between the right of workers to form unions and collectively bargaining and the strength of the middle class….The inability to protect workers’ rights over the last 30 years is the biggest factor in the growth of income inequality.
Harkin and Madland both pointed to statistics that show in states and in other nations where there is a vibrant union movement there is also an economically strong middle class. AFL-CIO Organizing Director Elizabeth Bunn reminded the packed audience that it was no accident that Poland moved toward democracy after the union movement there took action to restore workers’ rights and freedoms.
Republicans are using the NLRB’s decision to issue a complaint against the Boeing Co., charging it with moving production away from its Washington State facility in retaliation for the workers exercising their right to strike as a central justification for their attempts to limit the NLRB’s power and cut is funding. Professor Julius (Jack) Getman, University of Texas School of Law, said:
This whole Boeing business is a fraud…this is not about the rights of Boeing or the heavy hand of the government, it’s an attack on workers through the labor board.
Panelists noted that while the assaults on the NLRB are being played out in the political arena, corporations and business groups have thrown their strong support behind the attacks. As Bunn said:
At the end of the day, this is about corporate and CEO control of the economy.
However, she said, working people have the ability to fight back and that working families, whether or not they are in unions, have shown they are united when it comes to issue like basic fairness and rights of workers to bargain collectively. Letting the audience finish her sentence, Bunn said:
In Ohio we had a vote on collective bargaining….We got more votes than [Gov. John] Kasich (R) did in the general election. We kicked ***.
The forum, moderated by AFL-CIO Associate General Counsel Nancy Schiffer, was sponsored by the AFL-CIO, American Rights at Work (ARAW) and the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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6 Comments
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And the Republicans tell us not to use the phrase “class warfare.”
But it is all right if they engage in it. The true mark of a hypocrite and a prude is to say that talking about sin is wrong but to go on sinning like a champion. What the Republicans are doing to the average worker in this country is nothing short of a sin and an injustice.
Well, I’ll reply to your comment and not to William’s. This has been the entire problem for which I have the utmost astonishment about our public.
The Repugnant mafia cult commercial-communist Party has always lied, always used “double-speak”, and always have been totally anti-Democracy to the detriment of our country’s reputation and well-being. YET… our damn public has overlooked all of that for over a half century… actually back as far as the Repugnant Party showed its true colors in commenting about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in private letters in our national archive saying “Thank goodness, now we can restore the Republican Party back to the way it was supposed to be!” And the elitist Repugnant conspiracy then set upon Vice President-become-President Andrew Johnson to prevent him from implementing assassinated President Lincoln’s past policies and policies Lincoln had planned for the future. But alas, Andrew Johnson did not have the public support that Lincoln had, and it was easy for the Repugnant mafia to sabotage Johnson so he became ineffective!
Just like O’Bam-ya is not a Democrat, Lincoln was not a Republican either, and that fact is documented.
I am a retired postal worker, so I am working class. For a while, I felt threatened by this, but now I am relieved to know that this attack only threatens the “Middle Class”, like my attorney or my doctor. That is ok, though – the middle class can still afford it – those of us in the working class, though, are tapped out.
We ultimately will have to decide in fact whether we fight for the working class, or the ‘middle class’. I agree with all of those who have said that it is high time for labor in the USA to join labor worlkwide in having our own independent union-based labor party – run by ourselves democratically based on principles of social justice for the working class. Unfortunately, that can never be done by a leadership which is pretending that it exists to represent the ‘Middle Class’, rather than the working class. The fact is, when the ruling class is on the attack such as now, it does not spare the middle class – we are all (the 99%), and expendable in times such as these, so naturally it is in the objective interest of many if not most of the middle class to support the working class demands and ally with the workers, where the real social weight lays.
There already are two capitalist parties which pretend to represent the ‘middle class’ – the Democrats and the Republicans. In fact, they are dominated by the superrich – especially the Republicans, a wholly own subsidiary of the superrich. If the Democratic Party were a middle class party, it would have been coopted and swallowed up by a larger party some time ago. It began as the slavemaster’s party and morphed into prowar, then ‘pro-labor’ in the thirties, when the ruling class turned to FDR to save capitalism by reforming it and diverting the working class uprising.
We American workers have never been represented by a party proudly saying that it exists to represent not the middle class, but the Working Class. That would be the only reason for a Labor Party, because the middle class already has two. Trumka and the AFLCIO leadership have no interest at the moment to even pretend that there could be any option but supporting Obama and the Democrats again, under basically the lesser evil argument. Just think, when we have our own party, no voter would ever have to settle for any kind of evil again.
williamrayson could you please give me the meaning of middle class.
To my mind, if many others work for you and you don’t work, you are a capitalist, or in the ruling class. If you work for yourself, or maybe a few others work for you, you are a small capitalist, or middle class. If you have to get by through selling your ability to work to a capitalist, or even a small capitalist, you are working class. The confusion, I think, began with the expression “middle class lifestyle”, which was what we workers are supposed to aspire to – a house in the suburbs, picket fence, etc. In the 50s and 60s gains in real wages were strong, and civil rights victories further expanded what has been called the ‘social safety net’. Many workers were able to take advantage of benefits available veterans and buy that house in the suburbs. Perhaps this helped foster in many of them a kind of middle class mentality, but that did not alter the fact that they were of the exploited, producing class – the working class. What the union should correctly defend is the right of the working class to leisure and family time and cultural opportunities and education and health care – just like a lawyer’s child or a doctor’s. We must also defend our natural allies in the middle class against our common enemy, such as when the government attacks science and scientists, raises tuition on students, or favors large agribusiness over small farmers.
More important than the nomenclature is the middle class mentality itself. It makes us timid and routinist. It puts us on the sideline, watching the powerful decide our fate. When we unite and realize our own true power, we will decide our own fate.