Human Rights Day Spotlights Fight for Employee Free Choice

Remembering International Human Rights Day by fighting to restore the rights of American workers to organize unions, CWA locals across the country distributed nearly 300,000 flyers to members Wednesday to promote the critically needed Employee Free Choice Act.

Local 1168 marked Dec. 10 with information booths on Employee Free Choice at Buffalo, N.Y., hospitals.

Local officers and Stewards Army activists greeted people at their worksites with the colorful flyers showing the flags of more than 70 countries that provide a fair way for workers to form and join unions. Conspicuously absent from the flag display is the United States' stars and stripes.

"We're not just talking about major western European nations," CWA President Larry Cohen said. "Countries such as Barbados, Ecuador, Sri Lanka, and Mongolia ensure the right of their workers to organize, yet the United States does not. These flyers are helping our members and other workers understand how far we lag behind much of the rest of the world when it comes to workers' rights, and I want to thank all the locals who worked hard to distribute them this week."

Cohen urged members to respond to the appeal on the flyers to call their U.S. senators and ask them to support the Employee Free Choice Act, which will be reintroduced in early 2009.

In Virginia, Local 2201 handed out about 1,000 flyers at call centers and technicians' garages Wednesday. "Our Stewards Army people were at major locations handing them out at the door," local organizer Chris Flock said. IUE-CWA locals in Virginia also handed them out, and one local is preparing a phone bank with 20 volunteers to make phone calls to Senator-elect Mark Warner's transition office.

Louisiana locals are already making calls to Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat re-elected in November, to ask for her continued support of the bill. Valerie Downing, the Employee Free Choice Act and health care coordinator for Local 3403 in Baton Rouge, asked each of the state's nine CWA locals to have about 20 members make personal calls to Landrieu's office.  Despite torrential rain that made it tough to stand outside worksites and hand out flyers on Wednesday, Downing said her local managed to get many of them to members and will continue to distribute them at meetings.

In Buffalo, N.Y., Local 1168 set up mobilization tables at five worksites where they represent nurses and other health care workers. Bob Andruszko, the local's area vice president for Millard Fillmore Hospital, worked one of the tables and talked to members about the bill.

"We need to join together to promote fair organizing rights for all workers," he said. "This bill will level the playing field for workers who want to unionize. As Barack Obama stated, 'If a majority of workers want a union they should get a union.' This is not a complicated idea."

Similar leafleting took place at CWA worksites in every region.  Locals also are continuing to collect postcards of support for the Employee Free Choice Act from members as part of the union movement's Million Member Mobilization. To date, CWA has collected 113,000 cards.  The goal is to display a million postcards in the U.S. Capitol once the new Congress takes office in January.