In My Opinion: Labor Reaches Out to Restore Rights

The labor movement will soon be reaching out to unorganized workers, along with union members, to help with sweeping new initiatives to restore organizing and bargaining rights in America and to mobilize voters against anti-worker policies of the Bush administration and the Republican leadership in Congress.

Such public outreach is quite fitting, because, in fact, one half of all non-union workers say they would like to be part of our ranks if they had a real opportunity to choose union representation, according to a survey this year by Peter D. Hart and Associates.

Moreover, as union bargaining clout has diminished in recent years, the lowering tide has affected the living standards of all working people:

• Employer-provided health coverage for working families is falling, especially for workers at small businesses, where 54 percent have no coverage at all. Of the 41 million Americans who are uninsured, a full 56 percent are in a family with at least one full-time worker.

• Pension coverage has dropped from 37 percent of private sector workers 25 years ago to just 19 percent today as employers - mainly non-union employers - have scrapped pension plans in favor of 401(k)s. Half of all workers don't have any retirement security at all.

• Real wages have stagnated. Yet compensation for top executives - who make sure to bargain contracts for themselves - continues to skyrocket.

To address the insecurity that is affecting working families, the labor movement is moving forward in an unprecedented, unified effort to restore workers' organizing and bargaining rights - and the real gains these rights provide - along with the effective voice working people need at all levels of government.

At its recent meeting, the AFL-CIO Executive Council endorsed a new initiative to enable workers to regain the collective bargaining and organizing rights that have produced a decent standard of living, improved health care coverage and opportunity for all workers, union members or not. (See story Labor Launches Revolutionary Program to Restore Collective Bargaining and Organizing Rights for Millions).

The campaign will mobilize the millions of union families and our allies, like Jobs with Justice and other groups, in making the public case for the benefits of collective bargaining and exposing the ugliness of employer retaliation against workers who want a union and a contract.

It also establishes an independent organization, the National Rights at Work Committee, to reinforce the right to join a union and bargain collectively as a fundamental American freedom. This group will be a positive counter to the propaganda spewed by the right-wing-supported National Right to Work (for less) Committee.

To build support in Congress and the White House, we will undertake a major effort of education and mobilization throughout congressional districts. We will expect that candidates for public office who seek our help and our votes endorse the principle that worker rights and collective bargaining rights are a public good and a fundamental freedom.

We will take this campaign to all working families, not just union members, through a new organization, The Partnership for America's Families. Working with our allies in the civil rights, women's and community movements, this organization will apply the very effective lessons we have learned in grassroots organizing and mobilizing union households to the broader working community. That's how we'll advance the interests of working families and restore worker and bargaining rights as a key part of our nation's public policy.

It wasn't so long ago - just before the days of FDR's New Deal - that our government's policy toward workers' rights could be characterized as "the law of the jungle." As Irving Bernstein wrote in his labor history volume, "The Turbulent Years," "a legal system under which government played a neutral role had the effect of tipping the balance of bargaining power in most American industries in favor of employees."

The New Deal and notably, the National Labor Relations Act, marked a real shift in the public perspective of the importance of collective bargaining. Inequality between "employees who do not possess full freedom of association and employers who are organized" burdened commerce, aggravated depressions, reduced wages and depressed the purchasing power of wage earners, as Bernstein summarizes the first section of the NLRA. It then became, and rightly we would argue, the policy of the United States to encourage "the practice and procedure of collective bargaining."

We've come far from those days, when government hearings, led by Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette, turned a harsh public spotlight on companies that spied, harassed and illegally fired workers. Or when the Supreme Court declared, as it did in 1933, that "a single employee was helpless in dealing with an employer; the union was essential to give laborers opportunity to deal equally with their employer. If he (the employer) interfered with their freedom of choice, collective action became a mockery."

Voice@Work, the National Rights at Work Foundation and the Partnership for America's Families are the tools we'll be using today and tomorrow to restore the principle that collective bargaining rights mean advancement for all working people.