Unions Promise a Million Names, Faces for Employee Free Choice Act

When the Employee Free Choice Act comes up for a vote in early 2009, its lead sponsor Rep. George Miller wants the House and Senate chambers to be plastered with pictures of American workers whose faces will send the message loud and clear: Pass this bill now!

CWA and much of the rest of the labor movement are working hard to make the California Democrat's vision a reality. As part of the newly launched Million Member Mobilization to demand that the Employee Free Choice Act becomes law, unions will be collecting photographs of members as well as signatures on postcards that will be sent to the new Congress and president after the November elections.

CWA was the first union whose members signed postcards at the District 1 conference in Atlantic City last week just after the AFL-CIO Executive Council, meeting on the opposite coast, passed a resolution to kick off the campaign.  The signing campaign will continue at upcoming conferences and through an electronic outreach campaign and a special website.

So far, 32 AFL-CIO unions and Change to Win coalition unions SEIU and UFCW have pledged to take part and get at least 10 percent of their members to sign Employee Free Choice Act postcards. CWA has pledged to get 90,000 members to sign, about 15 percent of the membership.

The campaign will go hand-in-hand with labor's largest effort ever to elect pro-worker members of Congress and a Democratic president who will sign the Employee Free Choice Act. Unions will be reaching out to every ally and building new ties, from community and religious leaders to scholars and pundits who will talk about how the right to unionize and bargain contracts is vital to all American working families.

"The American middle class was created by the ability of workers to form unions and bargain collectively after the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935," the AFL-CIO Executive Council said in its resolution. "More and more Americans are beginning to understand that collective bargaining can promote broadly shared economic growth and prosperity, higher wages, better jobs, better and more extensive health care coverage, retirement security and dignity and respect for workers on the job."

The council, whose members include CWA President Larry Cohen and AFA-CWA President Pat Friend, said those issues are more pressing than ever as the economy crumbles. "Wages are stagnating, workers are losing their homes to foreclosure, health costs are skyrocketing and more and more workers are losing pension benefits.  Income inequality is at its worst since the 1920s.  America's workers must regain their bargaining power in order to maintain and expand the middle class," the council stated.

The campaign will aggressively counter the anti-worker, greed-based arguments of opponents that include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Right to Work Committee, Center for Union Facts, the Heritage Foundation and hostile employers. "The opposition will not win: The Employee Free Choice will become law," the AFL-CIO said.