Working Together: Bargaining Rights and Movement Building

Larry Cohen, CWA President

This issue of the CWA News connects our core work of bargaining and organizing with the crucial need for a broad movement of 50 million people who will fight for economic justice and democracy for all.

In the best of times, this would be a big job.

For workers, it’s far from the best of times. The collapse of the National Labor Relations Board, caused by the failure of the Senate to adopt rules that would allow real debate and democracy on the Senate floor, means that some 80 million workers, both union-represented and non-union, have no path to workplace justice. At last count, 87 companies were challenging decisions issued by the NLRB and its regional offices. These include McDonalds and Starbucks, as well as CWA employers like CNN, Cablevision and West Penn Printing.

It all goes back to the Senate’s failure earlier this year to reform its rules. Not only are nominations to agencies and judgeships being blocked by the Republican minority, but programs that already were adopted by a majority of the Congress are being strangled, because of the minority’s determination to run over democratic process. Richard Cordray was named by President Obama in a recess appointment to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a consumer agency created following the corruption exposed in the banking industry following the 2008 financial meltdown. That appointment, along with three made to the NLRB, was invalidated by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in January. Now, Senate Republicans are filibustering Cordray’s nomination, just as they plan to filibuster President Obama’s nominations for the NLRB and general counsel position.

Senate Republicans and the corporate groups they answer to want it this way. Corporations now are saying “we’re not bound by the NLRB.” Management lawyers are looking to throw out some 600 NLRB decisions. They are telling their clients “you don’t have to obey anything.” They prefer that the NLRB isn’t functioning. And it won’t function because the Senate rules are broken.

How do we fight back?

By building a movement of 50 million Americans, with allies like Jobs with Justice, the Sierra Club, the NAACP, Greenpeace and many more, we can stand up for real democracy and achieve our longtime goals of good jobs, retirement and health care security, and bargaining and organizing rights.

If we don’t overcome the real barriers to democracy that we face, CWA members won’t make any gains. Each round of bargaining will get tougher and tougher, as employers pit non-union workers against union members, or take advantage of immigrant workers, or shift more good jobs overseas.

This isn’t the future we want for ourselves and our children.

So we join with allies to fix the Senate rules, to get corporate money out of politics, to increase voting rights and to make certain that immigrants, hard-working men and women and their children, have a path to citizenship.

About 100 groups so far have joined the Democracy Initiative, launched by CWA, Sierra Club, NAACP and Greenpeace, because we all realized that we can’t win on our own. We have to be there for each other’s fights.

We must not only work for a 21st-century democracy, but also build political organizations at the state and federal levels that link economic justice to democracy. We’ve connected the dots between immigrant rights, voting rights, Senate rules and election finance reform. We're going to fight unfair home foreclosures as much as we're going to fight for bargaining rights. We're going to fight for climate change just as much as we're going to fight to break the stranglehold of corporate America on our democracy.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has spent four decades scheming to strip workers of their bargaining rights. They’ve come a long way toward that goal. The result is the bargaining climate we face today. Working Americans, whether union members or not, will find justice on the job only as part of a bigger movement, a movement of 50 million Americans demanding democracy and economic justice.