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Thousands Picket White House, Rally Nationwide
Fed up with the erosion of workers' rights in the United States, thousands of chanting, sign-waving union members formed a giant picket line in front of the White House on Thursday to demand that the Bush administration and American employers recognize that workers' rights are fundamental human rights.
"America used to stand proud before the world as a land where the right of working people to have a union was respected. But today, that right has been destroyed," AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson told the crowd. "The right-wing politicians cut back the law to just about nothing, and the corporations trample on workers' freedom like it's their personal doormat."
CWA had a large presence in Washington and in Boston, the site of another enormous demonstration on Thursday, and is playing a leading role in events in many other cities across the country this week leading to International Human Rights Day on Saturday.
The events, which are getting both national and local media coverage, are focusing on what's happened to workers' rights to form unions and bargain collectively in the United States. Clyde Rucker, a CWA member in Maryland who was fired for organizing at Verizon Wireless, told his story at the Washington rally and other fired and unfairly disciplined workers spoke out across the country.
Rucker now spends his time fighting for workers' rights and enlisting other union members to do the same.
The Washington rally spilled out into the street in front of the AFL-CIO building and drew airline pilots, firefighters, teachers, bricklayers and government workers, among many other union members. Rucker, joined by CWA President Larry Cohen, Secretary-Treasurer Barbara Easterling and Executive Vice President Jeff Rechenbach, helped lead the crowd of 3,000 around the block and to the White House.
In Boston, about 5,000 union members and other activists staged a Worker Freedom Trail march, complete with Minutemen and a town crier, with stops at some of Boston's most notorious anti-worker businesses.
Kicking off the week of events, CWA helped lead rallies in Pittsburgh and New Jersey on Monday. In Pittsburgh, workers talked about Comcast's union-busting and followed up all week by encouraging area residents to pay their Comcast bills in person and attach stickers in support of workers' right. In New Jersey, speakers included Alexis Anderson, one of the leaders of CWA Local 1037's campaign to organize 6,000 state-paid daycare workers.
CWA will be active in more events Friday and Saturday in cities that include St. Louis, Mo., Jackson, Miss., Seattle, Portland, Ore., and Dayton, Ohio, where Cohen will speak at a rally in support of Delphi workers who are facing the loss of their jobs and pensions in the wake of the company's bankruptcy. Rechenbach will speak at the St. Louis rally, where workers will take on the anti-union policies of Gov. Matt Blunt and Peabody Energy.
Some of the events have highlighted Cingular Wireless, where a neutrality agreement has led more than 13,500 workers to join CWA since July. "Cingular is the most important organizing campaign in the last five years," AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff told reporters nationwide in a conference call Monday
On the same call, Cohen made the point that CEOs would never work without contracts, yet expect exactly that of workers. "You hire lawyers to bargain for yourselves multimillion dollar contracts, the most obscene the world has ever seen, then you hire a different bank of lawyers who make sure front-line workers never get a chance to bargain for themselves," he said, adding that fighting for democracy in America means "democracy in the workplace, human rights in the workplace."
Saturday marks the anniversary of the United Nation's adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which specifically addresses the fundamental right of workers to form and join unions.
But those rights exist on paper only in the United States today due to the combination of rollbacks in laws and state and federal policies, pro-business appointments to the courts and National Labor Relations Board and the NLRB's long delays in processing workers' unfair labor practice complaints.
Even Human Rights Watch has taken notice of the erosion of American workers' freedom to form unions. An HRW report points to the "culture of near-impunity" that pervades U.S. labor law and practice and notes, "Human rights cannot flourish where workers' rights are not enforced."
A new study released this week about union busting in Chicago, commissioned by American Rights at Work, is consistent with nationwide studies. It examined more than 60 organizing campaigns and found that 30 percent of employers fired union supporters, 49 percent threatened to shut down the worksite if the union came in and 91 percent forced workers to attend one-on-one sessions with supervisors bad-mouthing the union.
The study was conducted by the University of Illinois at Chicago's Center for Urban Economic Development. More details are available at www.americanrightsatwork.org.
One of the highlights of the week of action was a statement expressing grave concern about workers' rights around the world signed by 11 recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, including President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and former Polish President Lech Walesa. They urged all nations to vigorously protect and defend workers' inalienable human right to form unions free of discrimination, threats or harassment.
The AFL-CIO published the statement as an advertisement in the Washington Post, New York Times and International Herald Tribune, reaching an audience about 2 million readers.
"America used to stand proud before the world as a land where the right of working people to have a union was respected. But today, that right has been destroyed," AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson told the crowd. "The right-wing politicians cut back the law to just about nothing, and the corporations trample on workers' freedom like it's their personal doormat."
CWA had a large presence in Washington and in Boston, the site of another enormous demonstration on Thursday, and is playing a leading role in events in many other cities across the country this week leading to International Human Rights Day on Saturday.
The events, which are getting both national and local media coverage, are focusing on what's happened to workers' rights to form unions and bargain collectively in the United States. Clyde Rucker, a CWA member in Maryland who was fired for organizing at Verizon Wireless, told his story at the Washington rally and other fired and unfairly disciplined workers spoke out across the country.
Rucker now spends his time fighting for workers' rights and enlisting other union members to do the same.
The Washington rally spilled out into the street in front of the AFL-CIO building and drew airline pilots, firefighters, teachers, bricklayers and government workers, among many other union members. Rucker, joined by CWA President Larry Cohen, Secretary-Treasurer Barbara Easterling and Executive Vice President Jeff Rechenbach, helped lead the crowd of 3,000 around the block and to the White House.
In Boston, about 5,000 union members and other activists staged a Worker Freedom Trail march, complete with Minutemen and a town crier, with stops at some of Boston's most notorious anti-worker businesses.
Kicking off the week of events, CWA helped lead rallies in Pittsburgh and New Jersey on Monday. In Pittsburgh, workers talked about Comcast's union-busting and followed up all week by encouraging area residents to pay their Comcast bills in person and attach stickers in support of workers' right. In New Jersey, speakers included Alexis Anderson, one of the leaders of CWA Local 1037's campaign to organize 6,000 state-paid daycare workers.
CWA will be active in more events Friday and Saturday in cities that include St. Louis, Mo., Jackson, Miss., Seattle, Portland, Ore., and Dayton, Ohio, where Cohen will speak at a rally in support of Delphi workers who are facing the loss of their jobs and pensions in the wake of the company's bankruptcy. Rechenbach will speak at the St. Louis rally, where workers will take on the anti-union policies of Gov. Matt Blunt and Peabody Energy.
Some of the events have highlighted Cingular Wireless, where a neutrality agreement has led more than 13,500 workers to join CWA since July. "Cingular is the most important organizing campaign in the last five years," AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff told reporters nationwide in a conference call Monday
On the same call, Cohen made the point that CEOs would never work without contracts, yet expect exactly that of workers. "You hire lawyers to bargain for yourselves multimillion dollar contracts, the most obscene the world has ever seen, then you hire a different bank of lawyers who make sure front-line workers never get a chance to bargain for themselves," he said, adding that fighting for democracy in America means "democracy in the workplace, human rights in the workplace."
Saturday marks the anniversary of the United Nation's adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which specifically addresses the fundamental right of workers to form and join unions.
But those rights exist on paper only in the United States today due to the combination of rollbacks in laws and state and federal policies, pro-business appointments to the courts and National Labor Relations Board and the NLRB's long delays in processing workers' unfair labor practice complaints.
Even Human Rights Watch has taken notice of the erosion of American workers' freedom to form unions. An HRW report points to the "culture of near-impunity" that pervades U.S. labor law and practice and notes, "Human rights cannot flourish where workers' rights are not enforced."
A new study released this week about union busting in Chicago, commissioned by American Rights at Work, is consistent with nationwide studies. It examined more than 60 organizing campaigns and found that 30 percent of employers fired union supporters, 49 percent threatened to shut down the worksite if the union came in and 91 percent forced workers to attend one-on-one sessions with supervisors bad-mouthing the union.
The study was conducted by the University of Illinois at Chicago's Center for Urban Economic Development. More details are available at www.americanrightsatwork.org.
One of the highlights of the week of action was a statement expressing grave concern about workers' rights around the world signed by 11 recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, including President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and former Polish President Lech Walesa. They urged all nations to vigorously protect and defend workers' inalienable human right to form unions free of discrimination, threats or harassment.
The AFL-CIO published the statement as an advertisement in the Washington Post, New York Times and International Herald Tribune, reaching an audience about 2 million readers.