From Weekends to Retirement Security, Unions Make All Workers' Lives Better

The bumper sticker says it all: "Unions. The Folks Who Brought You the Weekend."

American workers who belong to unions, those who don't and even those who view unions with nothing but contempt have the labor movement to thank for the 40-hour workweek.

Workers literally died fighting for the work hours Americans enjoy today. In one of a wave of strikes for the eight-hour day across the country in May 1886, seven demonstrators were killed in Milwaukee when the state militia opened fire. Protesters and police alike were killed in the infamous Haymarket Riot in Chicago.

It would be another 50 years of unrest before the eight-hour day became law. Marches and strikes included a citywide walkout in Seattle, textile workers and telephone operators in New England, police in Boston, steelworkers in the Midwest and tens of thousands of other workers who risked their jobs and even their lives.

It became part of the Fair Labor Standards Act, championed by American unions and a president, Franklin Roosevelt, who genuinely believed that unions and workers' rights made the country stronger. Under Roosevelt, unions also saw the birth of the National Labor Relations Act and Social Security.

"Organized labor as a whole has become stronger in membership, stronger in influence, and stronger in its capacity to serve the interests of the laboring man and woman and of society in general, than at any other time in our whole history," Roosevelt told the 1940 Teamsters convention.

Twenty-five years later, under President Lyndon Johnson, unions pushed for passage of the Medicare bill, bringing health coverage to millions of elderly and disabled Americans.

Today, CWA and other unions are on the front lines of the fight to preserve Social Security as the Bush administration, Republican leaders and Wall Street push to privatize at least part of the system — putting a secure retirement at risk for all but the wealthiest Americans. CWA is a leader in labor's campaign to educate union members and all Americans about the threat to Social Security and is mobilizing them to take action.

In the battle for universal health care, unions are also fighting to strengthen and expand Medicare. Labor is also championing ways to fix the badly mangled Medicare prescription drug law, specifically calling for the government to negotiate with drug companies for better prices as the Veteran's Administra-tion has done successfully for years.

As for the hard-won laws protecting workers' rights, they are under assault as never before, with employers and business groups led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce taking full advantage of the Bush administration's hostility toward workers. In addition to the push to privatize Social Security, big business wants to roll back the Fair Labor Standards Act, Family and Medical Leave (see sidebars) and overtime rights, among other attacks.

CWA helped lead one of the largest mobilizations in recent labor history to fight the White House scheme to kill overtime rights for millions of workers, a battle labor waged even though most union members wouldn't have been affected. The Labor Department made some changes to the overtime language in the Fair Labor Standards Act, but union resolve stopped some of the most damaging of the proposed changes.

"We have millions of members to protect from the whims of greedy employers and legislative maneuvers that put business interests far above the needs of working families," CWA President Larry Cohen said. "But we are proud that we can use our clout, our power in numbers, to speak out for the voiceless, for the workers who aren't represented. And we will never stop doing that."