Working Together: Our Labor Movement is Fighting Back

Larry Cohen
CWA President

The 2006 elections were a turning point for our union movement. We helped to change the political direction of our country — it couldn't have happened without us. We are indeed "Fighting Back," as the theme for this issue declares.

Now we need to create more turning points — and one of them must be passage of the Employee Free Choice Act in the House of Representatives.

While Democratic control of the Congress doesn't guarantee achieving all of our goals, one thing it means is a new leadership setting a progressive agenda and chairing key committees. It means people like Rep. George Miller heading the House labor committee, who has declared he will lead the fight to pass the Employee Free Choice Act by this spring.

That will truly make a statement that we are standing up and engaging corporate America head on, committed to win back the bargaining and organizing rights that our enemies have stripped away over the years. And to follow through and keep fighting back, we must build a new movement, an army of stewards and activists in every union ready to take on battles like the Goodyear strike, where health care is at stake for all of us.

We all need to understand the direct connection between bargaining rights and our health security, retirement security and job security — and it's all on the line today. The squeeze on the middle class — working families' health care, living standards and good jobs — is no accident.

Take a look at the photo at right. It shows 60,000 labor activists marching in New York in 1947 to protest the Taft-Hartley Act. Hundreds of thousands of CIO and AFL activists mobilized around the country, because they knew Taft-Hartley would begin the erosion of bargaining rights and weakening of union power — and they knew that would impact wage and benefit standards for working families.

I'm looking at a Retail Clerks union pamphlet from 1948 and here's what it says: "The Taft-Hartley Act is aimed at you. It's aimed at your wages, at your hours and working conditions, at your job security. Its target is your pocketbook — your standard of living. It strikes at you through your union — by crippling your right to organize and maintain a union…."

This mass movement of activists came close to beating back the Taft-Hartley assault, but in the end, an anti-union Congress narrowly overrode President Truman's veto of the act.

Look what's happened since. Union membership in America declined from 35 percent in the private sector to less than 8 percent with bargaining rights today — the lowest of all the world's democracies. Union representation is 90 percent in Sweden, 55 percent in Germany, 40 percent in Great Britain.

Workers' rights are even on the rise in countries that were dictatorships a few years ago like South Korea, and Brazil and South Africa, where 30 percent of workers have bargaining rights. Brazil even has a union leader as its president today.

Meanwhile, we've been going in the opposite direction in the United States — and that's a disgrace. But we can draw inspiration from workers in those countries who threw off systems of apartheid and repression; they fought back, and we can too.

We can't enact the Employee Free Choice Act into law entirely until we elect a president who will sign it and not veto it — our top goal for 2008. But we can start the groundswell for reclaiming our rights by passing it in the House this year.

And coupled with building our Stewards Army, mobilized and ready to take on major bargaining and organizing fights in every industry, we will send a message to corporate management:

We're fighting back, and we're coming after your greed! The Employee Free Choice Act is aimed at your greed. It's aimed at the terror you inflict on workers, it's payback for all the people you've fired for trying to exercise their rights to organize and bargain.

We're reigniting the spirit and grassroots activism of our movement 60 years ago. We're coming back.

Taft-Hartley Stops Union Momentum

The Taft-Hartley Act, rammed through a Republican Congress by corporate interests and passed over Pres. Truman's veto, added severe restrictions on workers' organizing and bargaining rights to federal labor law. 

Among other things, it limited strike and picketing rights, outlawing such activities as "secondary boycotts" against major suppliers and business partners of struck employers, restricted union security agreements and allowed for so-called "right to work" laws whereby represented workers can refuse to join and support their union.

The act effectively smashed labor's organizing momentum. In the previous 15 years, 10 million workers won representation and negotiated contracts in industries where there had been no bargaining.  Afterward, the percentage of workers with bargaining rights steadily declined.