Working Together: Reclaim the American Dream

Larry Cohen, CWA President

The United States is in the grip of an increasingly right wing economic and political agenda. It didn’t start yesterday. For decades, groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have pushed an agenda that today threatens working families.

Jobs keep going overseas, states keep looking to cut critical services, opportunity seems just about gone. Real wages were higher 35 years ago despite huge gains in productivity.

“All you need is markets.” That’s the 19th century business ideology that much of corporate America has adopted for the 21st century.

The Chamber of Commerce and its allies see the union movement as a political obstacle to these plans. That’s why, since the early 1980s, workers, bargaining rights and their unions have been under attack. It started with private sector workers but as we’ve seen this year, public workers are facing the same onslaught.

These attacks are coordinated and financed by some of the biggest companies and wealthiest families, and they’re getting a great return on that investment.

Is this a cynical view? Yes. Is it true? Yes.

It is a time of polarization in our nation, but also a time of great excitement. With all of labor working together, and with our allies in the progressive community, there surely is a way to turn this around.

CWA is partnering with green groups like Sierra Club, human rights groups, civil rights groups like the NAACP, citizen groups like Common Cause and others that, like us, want to keep a democratic society working for all families, not just the wealthy.

But as we know all too well, it’s a defensive fight.

We have four related strategies: legislative, electoral, organizing and movement building

We’re supporting campaigns to fight back with both defense and offense. In New Jersey, for example, we’re fighting to defend bargaining rights for public workers against Gov. Chris Christie’s refusal to bargain over health care and benefits for our 40,000 members.

But we also are building power by expanding our alliances with key allies, and that’s exactly what’s happening with thousands of CWAers joining the Sierra Club and NAACP.

In Ohio, CWA led in creating a new coalition — Good Jobs and Strong Communities — an organization of unions, green, progressive and other groups determined to fight back and win.

Working people want a path to bring back social and economic justice. That’s why our agenda remains good jobs, health care, retirement security, bargaining rights, and restoring democracy in America.

Changing the Senate rules and restoring democracy to the U.S. Senate is key to winning any real national change for working families. We’ve been working with Common Cause not only to fix the broken Senate rules but on real campaign finance reform that will restore democracy to our elections.

In America, elections aren’t supposed to be for sale. But the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision last year opened the flood gates to millions of dollars in spending that can be done secretly. Not only do corporations now have free rein to contribute directly to candidates and without any limits on those contributions, but they can hide behind phony front groups with misleading names to mislead voters about an issue or a candidate’s record.

We need total transparency in how election dollars are spent to restore democracy.

This issue of the CWA News lets us connect the dots, from the attacks on workers’ rights in the 1980s to the start of disastrous trade policies like NAFTA in the 1990s to tax policies that give the richest Americans a $477 billion tax break over 10 years while threatening the health care and education of our citizens.

It also celebrates some successes we’ve had in the state fights, but we know those fights aren’t over.

Remembering that “We Are One” will enable us, with our union and progressive allies, to reject the self-serving corporate agenda that has hurt our families and communities. CWA will continue to lead this fight. And we need all of us in it.