A Labor Day Commitment to the Common Good - Jim Hightower

[housewolf]

A Labor Day Commitment to the Common Good
Thursday 09 September 2010
by: Jim Hightower, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

America's corporate chieftains must love poor people, for they're doing all they can to create millions more of them.

They're knocking down wages, offshoring everything from manufacturing jobs to high tech, reducing full-time work to part-time, downsizing our workplaces, busting unions, cutting health care coverage and canceling pensions -- while also lobbying in Washington to privatize Social Security, eliminate job safety protections, restrict unemployment benefits, kill job-creating programs and increase corporate control of our elections.

It's said that the poor and the rich will always be among us. But nowhere is it written that the middle-class will always be there. In fact, it is a very recent creation in our society (and an unavailable dream for most people in the world). America's great middle class literally arose with the rise of labor unions and populist political movements in the 1800s, finally culminating in democratic economic reforms implemented from the 1930s into the 1960s.

Social Security, wage AND hour laws, collective bargaining rights, unemployment compensation, the GI Bill, the interstate highway program, civil rights laws, Medicare, Head Start -- and more -- provided the national framework necessary to sustain a middle class for the American Majority.

This essential framework was not "given" to us by corporate executives and politicians -- indeed, they sputtered, spewed and fought every piece of it tooth and nail. Rather, it came from union-led grassroots movements, organizing for structural change.

read more:
http://www.truth-out.org/a-labor-day-commitment-common-good62889

[xchrom]

1. He speaks for me. Recommend. Nt

[Beartracks]

2. Word. n/t

[IndianaGreen]

3. Here is a commitment: repeal Taft-Hartley!

Repeal Taft-Hartley

. . . some in the labor movement believe that the rules governing labor relations have to be changed if unions are to become strong again. Specifically, they want to repeal the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which dealt a crippling blow to labor unions when it outlawed secondary boycotts, allowed management to work against a union-organizing drive, and allowed the president to force strikers back to work for up to eighty days when the nation’s “safety and health” were at stake, along with a series of other policies that fundamentally altered the balance of power in favor of business.

Cesar Chavez noted that when the Taft-Hartley bill passed over the veto of President Truman, labor leaders called it the “slave labor act.” Reflecting on how Taft-Hartley affected the United Farm Workers (UFW), Chavez stated:

“it seems to me that the capitalists are at least twenty-five years ahead of most of the unions in this country. Coming from a background of not knowing anything about injunctions and Taft-Hartley and so forth, it seems to me very difficult to understand. For instance, if I am on strike here, how come my brother, who belongs to this other union, cannot do something in direct action to help me or vice versa. . . . For instance, why do we have so many laws to control the activities of unions?”

http://www.solvingpoverty.com/Repeal%20Taft-Hartley.htm

Time to Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act

By Ralph Nader, Washington, DC

This year marks the 55th anniversary of the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, one of the great blows to American democracy. The Act, which was drafted by employers, fundamentally infringed on workers' human rights. Legally, it impeded employees' right to join together in labor unions, it undermined the power of unions to represent workers' interests effectively, and it authorized an array of anti-union activities by employers. Among its key provisions, Taft-Hartley:

• Authorized states to enact so-called right-to-work laws. These laws undermine the ability to build effective unions by creating a free-rider problem—workers can enjoy the benefits of union membership in a workplace without actually joining the union or paying union dues. Right-to-work laws increase employer leverage to resist unions and vastly decrease union membership, thus dramatically diminishing unions' bargaining power.

• Outlawed the closed shop, which required that persons join the union before being eligible for employment with the unionized employer. (Still permitted are provisions which require any member of a bargaining unit to pay a portion of dues to that union.)

• Defined "employee" for purposes of the Act as excluding supervisors and independent contractors. This diminished the pool of workers eligible to be unionized. The exclusion of supervisors from union organizing activity meant they would be used as management's "front line" in anti-organizing efforts.

• Permitted employers to petition for a union certification election, thus undermining the ability of workers and unions to control the timing of an election during the sensitive organizing stage, forcing an election before the union is ready.

http://www.thevoicenews.com/news/2002-08-02/Features/F01_Nader-Taft-Hartley.html