Tag Archives: 99%

65 Years Later: Time to Start Healing the Divide

  By Liz Iacobucci | November 21, 2012 - 11:55 am | , , ,
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Photo from Kheel Center, Cornell University via Flikr/Creative Commons

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy

It has been nine years since Sen. Ted Kennedy first filed the Employee Free Choice Act.

He filed the bill on Friday, November 21, 2003 – almost exactly 40 years after the death of President John F. Kennedy.

A coincidence?  Not likely.  Here’s the back story:

The Employee Free Choice Act would restore union organizing rights that had been effectively stripped by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act.  John F. Kennedy was a member of the Congress that passed Taft-Hartley.

“The first thing I did in Congress was to become the junior Democrat on the labor committee. At the time we were considering the Taft-Hartley Bill. I was against it, and one day in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I debated the bill with a junior Republican on that committee who was for it . . . his name was Richard Nixon.” [from a 1960 recording of President Kennedy reflecting on his career]

Both Kennedy and Nixon believed that Nixon won that debate.  Weeks later, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, overriding a veto by President Harry Truman.

President Truman was eerily accurate in his predictions of what the Taft-Hartley Act would do.

Photo from Kheel Center, Cornell University via Flikr/Creative Commons

Photo from Kheel Center, Cornell University via Flikr/Creative Commons

From his radio address to the country:

“The Taft-Hartley bill is a shocking piece of legislation.  It is unfair to the working people of this country. It clearly abuses the right, which millions of our citizens now enjoy, to join together and bargain with their employers for fair wages and fair working conditions. …”

“I fear that this type of legislation would cause the people of our country to divide into opposing groups. If conflict is created, as this bill would create it—if the seeds of discord are sown, as this bill would sow them—our unity will suffer and our strength will be impaired.”

From his veto message to Congress:

“When one penetrates the complex, interwoven provisions of this omnibus bill, and understands the real meaning of its various parts, the result is startling. … the National Labor Relations Act would be converted from an instrument with the major purpose of protecting the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively into a maze of pitfalls and complex procedures. … The bill would deprive workers of vital protection which they now have under the law…. This bill is perhaps the most serious economic and social legislation of the past decade. Its effects–for good or ill–would be felt for decades to come.”

Fast-forward through those decades, and read the testimony of former National Relations Labor Board Hearing Officer Nancy Schiffer:

“At some point in my career… I could no longer tell workers that the [National Labor Relations] Act protects their right to form a union. … Over the years, the law has been perverted.  It now acts as a sword which is used by employers to frustrate employee freedom of choice and deny them their right to collective bargaining. When workers want to form a union to bargain with their employer, the NLRB election process, which was originally established as their means to this end, now provides a virtually insurmountable series of practical, procedural, and legal obstacles.”

Read this report by researchers at the University of Illinois-Chicago:

“Each year in the United States, more than 23,000 workers are fired or penalized for union activity. Aided by a weak labor law system that fails to protect workers’ rights, employers manipulate the current process of establishing union representation in a manner that undemocratically gives them the power to significantly influence the outcome of union representation elections. … Union membership in the United States is not declining because workers no longer want or need unions. Instead, falling union density is directly related to employers’ near universal and systematic use of legal and illegal tactics to stymie workers’ union organizing.”

Read the report by Cornell University Professor Kate Bronfenbrenner:

“Our findings suggest that the aspirations for representation are being thwarted by a coercive and punitive climate for organizing that goes unrestrained due to a fundamentally flawed regulatory regime … many of the employer tactics that create a punitive and coercive atmosphere are, in fact, legal. Unless serious labor law reform with real penalties is enacted, only a fraction of the workers who seek representation under the National Labor Relations Act will be successful. If recent trends continue, then there will no longer be a functioning legal mechanism to effectively protect the right of private-sector workers to organize and collectively bargain.”

Now, go back and consider President Truman’s most serious prediction from 65 years ago: that the Taft-Hartley Act “would cause the people of our country to divide into opposing groups. If conflict is created, as this bill would create it—if the seeds of discord are sown, as this bill would sow them—our unity will suffer and our strength will be impaired.”

President John F. Kennedy 

Think about this past election.  Isn’t our country divided enough?  Isn’t it time to reverse the process started by the Taft-Hartley Act?

It’s been nine years since Sen. Kennedy first filed the Employee Free Choice Act.

A year from now, we will mark a half-century since President John F. Kennedy died.

 

Isn’t it time to yank the roots of discord, start ending the conflict, and heal the division that was created by the Taft-Hartley Act?

 

 

This Labor Day, Remember The Workers

  By Matt Murray | September 3, 2012 - 12:01 am |
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MattMurray

Matt Murray

For some, Labor Day is simply a date on the calendar marking the unofficial end of summer: a point where the seasons change, children are back in school, and the days start getting shorter.

For me, Labor Day is a time to commemorate the sacrifices and contributions of America’s workers.  Our country’s history has been shaped by the men and women who work for a living.  We are what makes America great, and Monday is our day.

This could not be more true after the roller coaster year we have had.  In New Hampshire we successfully fought back against Right to Work for Less and the attacks on our collective bargaining rights.  The Legislature tried to silence our voice and in turn made us stronger in our solidarity.

On Labor Day, we celebrate the great strides we have made over the last century. Today, every American has the right to a quality education, the right to organize or a join a union, and the chance to retire with security for a healthy future.   For generations, these basic rights brought millions of families out of poverty into the middle class.  These rights helped to fight back against segregation and nepotism – because it does not matter who does the work, all workers are entitled to the same wages.

The labor movement has accomplished many great things throughout the years: weekends, 40-hour work weeks, sick time, vacation time, safety regulations, and retirements.  Yet after all the work we have done, some people label us as ‘thugs’.  They push messaging to demonize workers who are struggling to make ends meet.  Across the country, people work and live paycheck to paycheck.  Some people have to work two and three jobs just to pay their rent.  There is not one state in our great nation where a person can work a 40-hour a week job for minimum wage and still be able to afford an apartment of their own.

This is because workers’ wages have been flat for nearly four decades while “the 1%” have reaped all benefits of our increased productivity.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Bread and Roses strike – and since that time, the gap between the working class and the “1%” has never been wider than it is now.

September 17th marks the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement – and the visions for America’s future have never been more different.

These anniversaries come in the heat of an election campaign that is pitting the ultra-wealthy against everyone else.

This could not be more evident than with Presidential candidate Mitt Romney,  who made his money by breaking companies into pieces and shipping jobs overseas. Now he is working to push for lower tax rates for himself and his ultra-wealthy friends.

We need political leaders who will stand up and say “no” to the policies that pushed our economy into recession in the first place.  We need to end the Bush era tax cuts and start requiring everyone to pay their fair share.  This is what we need to do to bring our economy back.  However, the corporations will not let this message get out.  A Supreme Court case two years ago allows corporations to use their vast amounts of money to drown out the voices of the working people.

This was evident in the recall election in Wisconsin, where the Koch Brothers and other Super PACs out spent the Democrats nine-to-one.  “The 1%” are dumping millions into secret PACs and “527 organizations” that use anonymous money to buy advertising and attempt to buy elections.

Why should corporate interests have greater “free speech” rights than you and me?  Why should “the 1%” have more pull with some of our politicians than “the 99%” of voters do?

Millions of American families are struggling to get by, living day-to-day while “the 1%” focuses on tax cuts for the rich.  Corporate interests are pouring money into campaign advertising, trying to drown out the voices of people like me, and you.

Martin Luther King, Jr. knew the history of workers’ struggles for economic rights.  “The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress,” he said in 1965.  “Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old age pensions, government relief for the destitute, and above all new wage levels that meant not mere survival, but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome.”

This election year, Mitt Romney and the other “captains of industry” are trying to take back all the rights that workers have fought for, and died for, since the Bread and Roses strike.  Are we going to sit back and let them do that?

I’m not.

I will continue to fight for all workers because it is the right thing to do.  I will continue to speak my message to all who will hear.  I will not let our country go back a hundred years to when workers were forced to work 80 hours a week for pennies while wealthy mill owners made millions.

This Labor Day, please take the time to remember how far we have come – and how much we stand to lose.

New Cross-Post from INZANE Times: Inequality Matters

  By The New Hampshire Labor News | May 30, 2012 - 7:32 pm | Uncategorized
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Inequality Matters

May 30, 2012 by aalpert
When Chuck Collins started United for a Fair Economy (originally called “Share the Wealth”) in the 1990s, some economists denied that economic inequality was growing.  That debate is over.  Speaking in Manchester May 29, Collins said the debate is now whether inequality matters and what can be done about it.
Here’s the short answer:P1000690
Inequality matters.
The trends which increased inequality are reversible.
We are in “a new period of extreme inequality,” Collins told more than 80 people at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Manchester, and it’s “trashing all that we care about.”  It’s not jut that some people are poor and some are rich, but that the growing gap leads to a breakdown in social solidarity as the wealthy stop investing in the social infrastructure .  Our children, our health, our culture, our environment, and our democracy all suffer.  
Collins outlines the problem and some solutions in his new book, 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It.  The prescription has three basic components:  invest in opportunity, raise the floor, and tax wealthy people and the corporations they own.  
While the 99 to 1 framework is a tad simplistic, he said, trade and tax policies really have been changed to benefit the wealthiest Americans at the expense of everyone else.  
As the great-grandson of Oscar Mayer (yes, that Oscar Mayer), Collins knows a thing or two about the 1%, including his former schoolmate Mitt Romney.   In addition to development of creative educational techniques to demystify economic issues, Collins has also worked to find allies for change within the ranks of the wealthy. 
A Q&A session that could have gone on much longer touched off an important discussion about whether solutions can emerge from the existing political system.    Collins is not ready to throw out lobbying or electoral politics, but sees the greatest potential in social movements made up of small groups of like-minded people working together on common projects.  He reminded the audience that Gandhi based his program not only on mass nonviolent resistance but also on the “constructive program.”
“Exercise your democracy muscles each day,” he said.
Collins’ talk was sponsored by the UU Church of Manchester, the American Friends Service Committee, Granite State Priorities, Occupy Manchester, NH Citizens Alliance, and the Granite State Organizing Project.  
P1000687
Occupy activists posed with Chuck after the talk.

Solid As Granite Series Part 4: State Employees’ Association President Diana Lacey

  By The New Hampshire Labor News | May 15, 2012 - 4:00 pm | Uncategorized
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The next video in our Solid As Granite series in State Employees’ Association / SEIU 1984 President Diana Lacey.

Diana has worked for the State of New Hampshire for over 17 years in the Department of Health and Human Services.  She talks about the continuing attacks on middle class families and all New Hampshire workers.