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MAINE LABOR UPDATE
Nation Lags Behind in Many Crucial
Areas
Every Labor Day organized labor and the public take a look back and
praise unions for what has been accomplished.
Many Gains Made
Unions have also been essential to a wide range of improvements in
the lives of all Americans - including programs such as Medicare,
Medicaid, Head Start - and more recently the preservation of Social
Security against attacks by the Bush Administration.
In dealing with it's workers the United States is not ahead, it is far behind other nations in a host of areas from allowing workers to be fired for going on strike (technically against the law but it is permitted by calling it "hiring permanent replacements") to the fact that we are a "No Vacation Nation" - the only one of 18 advanced nations that does not require employers to provide some form of paid time off. Some of us will have Labor Day off but tens of millions of American workers will have to work through the holiday - often without any premium holiday pay.
In 1898 Samuel Gompers, one of the original founders of the American Federation of Labor, called Labor Day the day when workers would have their rights and wrongs discussed. And today we have many rights and wrongs that can and should be discussed.
Many, if not all, of the problems workers face today are related to the years of the Bush Administration since 2000. Some, if not all, are related to money.
National AFL-CIO President John Sweeney put it on the line when he said, "For the same money that Bush has spent on millionaire tax breaks, he could have stimulated the economy and created jobs by building roads and schools, helped provide much-needed health care, sent urgently needed aid to the states and given tax breaks to the low and middle-income earners…"
Facing the most anti-labor national administration in a century (as well as the most incompetent) and facing crisis in our economy and the continuing loss of millions of American jobs, it is high time to revive the Labor Day tradition of solidarity, action, discussion and protest.
For organized labor there is great opportunity in the coming 2008 elections to move our nation away from the policy of "help the rich" and "vastly reward the super rich." There is a growing opportunity to confront the issue of corporate power and greed. Some of the candidates have begun to recognized the importance of this issue as underlying many other issues from health care and drug prices to fair wages and workplace safety.
Presidential candidate John Edwards outlined the current situation in the United States very well in a recent speech in Hanover, New Hampshire when he said:
"Real change starts with being honest - the system in Washington is rigged and our government is broken. It's rigged by greedy corporate powers to protect corporate profits. It's rigged by the very wealthy to ensure that they become even wealthier. "The system is controlled by big corporations, the lobbyists they hire to protect their bottom line and the politicians who curry their favor and carry their water. And it's perpetuated by a media that too often fawns over the establishment, but fails to cover the challenges we face or the solutions being proposed."
The results of this "rigged system" are easy to see: millions of workers forced to hold two jobs just to get by; millions who have lost well paid manufacturing jobs to take low paying service type jobs; millions of jobs at sub-standard wages that don't allow a full-time worker to support a family; millions of jobs moved overseas to improve corporate profits; 60 percent of corporations that pay no taxes at all; more than 46 million persons with no health insurance; a huge and growing multi-trillion dollar national debt; a huge and growing trade imbalance; a collapsing housing market threatening millions of persons with loss of their homes and threatening the entire U.S. economy as well.
We need a government and an economy that works to benefit all Americans - not just the elite "chosen few" one or two percent at the top. The economy is growing but salaries and wages have been locked in place (or fallen) for years. When the economy grows we should expect and demand that earnings grow as well.
Health care should be a right for all American families - not just a few at the top of the economic ladder or those lucky enough to have a job with good benefits and health care.
And this "rigged system" has hit unions hard as well as workers. More than half of American workers would join a union if corporations did not attack them (illegally) for doing so.
Thirty percent of employers fire pro-union workers - illegally but with little or no penalty. Forty-nine percent of employers threaten to close a work site when workers try to unionize. Eight-two percent of employers hire high-paid consultants to fight unionization. Ninety one percent of employers force employees to attend anti-union meetings with supervisors.
For more than twenty years corporate America has been conducting a war against the labor movement. Several decades ago unions were largely accepted as a valuable part of the American political and economic landscape. About 1980 corporations set out to weaken, break or block unions by whatever means necessary, legal or illegal. Firing workers engaged in union organizing became a standard and illegal practice.
Organized labor is working now with particular emphasis on creating a national health care program to make health care available to all Americans and allowing all employees the freedom to join a union without penalty - a basic right that should concern all Americans - by passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. While these are issues of top concern, labor will not neglect the host of other issues that benefit all Americans.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney summed it up well when he said, "Fortunately, in our democracy, every four years we have a chance to fix what is wrong - by electing leaders, including a president, who put working families first.
"We have a very busy time ahead of us, fighting together for health
care, good jobs and the freedom to form unions without employer
interference - and fighting for a government led by people committed to
make America work for working families." |
