United Professionals, Unite!

[marmar]

BLOG | Posted 09/23/2006 @ 10:41am
United Professionals, Unite!

In 2002, Barbara Ehrenreich and Thomas Geoghegan wrote in The Nation, "The underlying reason for organized labor's decline is that our labor laws do not let people join unions, freely and fairly, without being fired." The authors urged "a new approach to rebuilding unions – and to labor law reform….The first step…should be to create a form of membership accessible to any worker."

As the assault on labor continues, the need to strengthen labor rights remains more critical than ever. According to the labor advocacy group American Rights at Work, every year 23,000 Americans are fired or penalized for legal union activity. Our country is increasingly a place where, in Senator John Edwards' words, you can still work hard and live poor.

The urgency to think creatively and find other forms of worker protection couldn't be more clear. As Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says, "Given the level of churning and layoffs, there is a need for workers organizations that exist outside the workplace, industry, occupation."

Enter United Professionals (UP). Ehrenreich has now founded this nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization for white collar workers. UP's mission is to protect and preserve the American middle class, now under attack from so many directions, from downsizing and outsourcing to the steady erosion of health and pension benefits. For a besieged middle class, the arrival of UP is timely and welcome news.

"The rap among policy elites is that once you're college educated your problems are over," says Bernstein, who serves as an UP advisory board member. "You are now officially insulated from any of the pressures of the global economy, the health care problem, job insecurity. Unfortunately, that's wrong, and white collar workers recognize that these challenges no longer only befall those in the factory sector, who've been getting whacked by globalization for years."

In fact, according to PR Newswire, 31 percent of college educated workers have no employer based health coverage, and 39 percent have no employer-provided retirement plan. More than half of the non-union workforce tells pollsters they would like to be part of some type of collective bargaining entity. "While white collar workers may not have a union orientation," Bernstein says, "many recognize that forces such as global offshoring have diminished their bargaining clout."

The rest of the article is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?bid=7&pid=123681