Working Together - Turning the Promise of Change Into Reality

It was an historic election and probably the most important of our lifetimes. And CWA activists played a critical role as Americans voted for fundamental change on Nov. 4. Now comes the job of turning the promise of transformational change into reality — and that means continuing, and building upon, our political activism.

Let me congratulate the thousands of volunteers who participated in the most widespread grassroots election effort we have ever fielded. As you see from the photo spread here, CWA volunteers throughout key battleground states and elsewhere focused on direct member-to-member educational efforts — phone banking, leafleting worksites and visiting members' homes in support of worker-friendly candidates.

Our post-election polling showed that nationwide, 68 percent of CWA members voted for the Obama-Biden ticket, and that figure was well over 70 percent in several of the swing states that ultimately decided the election. You made a difference. You made history.

A more worker-friendly White House and Congress gives us an opportunity to achieve our key goals of good jobs and fair trade, restoring bargaining and organizing rights and enacting universal health care — and we have to do it!

The current economic crisis has been compared to the period following the Great Depression. That was a time of bold action under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. It was also a time when working people marched and rallied by the hundreds of thousands, conducted sit-down strikes and built a movement that gave us social reforms like the National Labor Relations Act to foster collective bargaining, Social Security and the 8-hour day.

There are remarkable parallels with our situation today. President Barack Obama had only moments to savor his election victory before turning to the most important transition since…yes, that of FDR. A mountain of challenges awaits him in the Oval Office on Jan. 20.

He and Joe Biden and many friends in Congress are with us on our key issues. They already have embraced the points in CWA's prescription for economic recovery for working America (click here). But they will need massive popular support to deliver on those promises.

The new White House and a congressional majority agree with us that expanding bargaining and organizing rights for millions of Americans is the key to shoring up our middle class and stabilizing the U.S. economy now and long-term. But big business interests are going all out with millions in misleading ads and an army of black-suited lobbyists to fight us on the Employee Free Choice Act (click here).

Big Business knows what this issue means to maintaining not just their iron-fist control in the workplace but everywhere — trade deals for cheap labor, a market system that values Wall Street investors over Main Street production workers and families, government based on corporate cronyism.

The biggest fear of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce et al is their knowledge, based on poll after poll, that 60 percent of American workers would chose to have union representation and a union contract if they had a chance. (Only 12 percent currently have a union.)

They can envision how allowing even 25 percent of working Americans to win bargaining rights — as we had in the 1950s and '60s — would rebalance the scales and refocus American priorities toward things like health and retirement security, job creation here at home, a good middle class living standard, safer workplaces.

Their nightmare is our dream — but it's one we can achieve. To get there, we have to decide to seize the moment. We have to commit to rekindling the kind of activism that fired up a generation that built the labor movement, that won World War II, that created a prosperous and growing middle class as the engine of American economic strength for decades. With good reason, some have called it the Greatest Generation.

We've begun to fight back. We saw what we can accomplish by working together, member-to-member, workplace-by-workplace, on Nov. 4. We need to keep mobilizing and building a mass movement for change. You will all have many opportunities to get personally involved as CWA rolls out our campaign for Employee Free Choice, good American 21st century jobs and a solution to the health care crisis.

With your active support, I'm convinced that this is our moment. We can truly take charge of our future and transform America.