"If a majority of workers want a union, they should get a union. It's that simple. We need to stand up to the business lobby and pass the Employee Free Choice Act. That's why I've been fighting for it in the Senate and that's why I'll make it the law of the land when I'm president of the United States." --Barack Obama
Nobody is making it the law of the land. Nobody is fighting for it. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) has drifted down to the bottom of the AFL-CIO's website, buried beneath good economic proposals which, however, do nothing to build a labor movement. EFCA is not to be found anywhere on the front page of Change to Win's website at all. The media's not smearing EFCA with U.S. Chamber of Commerce lies anymore. Congress and the White House are silent. Any escalation of pressure on senators from union members has never materialized, the polite letter-writing campaigns having drifted away rather than ramping up into pickets or sit-ins.
I just got back from a country where everybody seems pretty happy with their health care system, Canada. It was a little weird to hear people talking about dealing with health care without anyone bitching about insurance companies, or being warned about what would happen to their health care if they switched jobs or had a pre-existing condition.
I was in Vancouver to give a speech and sign some books at a meeting of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW). I have a great fondness for the Machinists because their President when I was coming of age in the early 1980s was a fire-breathing, hell-raising trade unionist named Bill Wipinsinger, who gave some of the best speeches I have ever seen in my life, and who never backed down from challenging authority; and also because my greatest political mentor was an Iowa Machinist named Bill Fenton, who was the hardest drinker, best organizer, and most fearless political rabble-rouser I ever knew. When I was a young community organizer, I organized a union for my organization, and it was an easy pick to affiliate with the Machinists.
At the Machinists meeting, we of course spent a lot of time talking about health care and the fight for a public option, but the other big topic of the meeting was the fight for mere jobs, especially manufacturing jobs. I firmly believe that without a more aggressive focus on creating good jobs in manufacturing and infrastructure, which have a bigger multiplier effect than any other kind of jobs, that our economy will continue to sputter, and that Democratic politics will be in a world of hurt.
The big industrial unions with the most at stake in terms of the issue of manufacturing jobs - the IAMAW, UAW, Steelworkers, Teamsters - do not by themselves have the political power right now to force the Democrats to go down this path, to do more investments in creating these jobs, to stop being pansies with other countries so often on trade issues, to invest in the manufacturing sectors with the most promise. Hopefully, they can get the broader progressive movement to join in this cause. But Democrats would be very foolish not to see the economic and political wisdom of doing this ASAP.
We are seeing glimmers of this with Obama. The investments made by the stimulus bill and his first budget proposal made were decent starts, and finally standing up to the Chinese on the tire issue was very welcome. But we are going to need to see a lot more in the way of serious job initiatives if this badly wounded economy is going to start producing jobs.
On the occasion of Labor Day, I wanted to share some of my own brief thoughts on the labor movement.
I grew up in a union household in suburban Buffalo. My parents are both career-long members of United University Professions, which represents about 34,000 faculty and staff across all of the 29 State University of New York (SUNY) schools. It's a part of the American Federation of Teachers. Growing up, that meant I was a little luckier than other kids. It meant very good health insurance, and procedures like my juvenile kidney surgery were fully covered; my trip to the emergency room was covered when I fell running around a shoe store and cut my ear open; my replacement tooth when I tried to ride a bike over a basketball (bad idea) was also nearly fully paid for. I also got both glasses and contact lenses per year growing up because both my parents were on the vision plan negotiated by UUP.
When I finished undergrad, I planned to attend graduate school, but I didn't have a job at that point in time. I wouldn't have any health insurance. My mom told me that as long as I took a certain minimum number of credit hours in grad school, UUP would cover me up until I turned 25. Kaiser Family Foundation just released a study showing the highest percentage of the uninsured were people in that exact age range- 19 to 24 year olds who are either in college or just graduated and had no job or employer-provided coverage. I still have friends on their own a year or two behind me, out of college, without health insurance. I was lucky UUP was there for me.
I remember one day being worried my my dad would be fired for a misunderstanding with his boss. He had been working at Buffalo State College for years already. He didn't commit any gross incompetent violation or anything- they just didn't get see eye to eye on something. I asked him, a little worried, if he would be fired, and he responded "I'm tenured and union. I have representation for things like this." And so he did. There are a lot of places where longtime employees like him would be fired on the spot for just looking at the boss the wrong way, but he had someone to speak up for him.
I got involved in the labor movement at a very young age, when Gov. Pataki took office in 1995 and UUP's contract was up. He promptly proposed a three-year deal with annual raises of exactly 0%, 0%, and 1%, respectively, over the three years. He also pushed to make New York a right-to-fire state. I remember picketing with signs outside Rockwell Hall, one of the flagship buildings of my parents' college. We eventually beat him and got a much better deal. He later refused to negotiate a contract at all, but because my parents are public employees, they were required to work. So we had "working without a new contract" buttons made up to wear and continued the pressure.
UUP also fought back when my mom's job was at risk. She works at the Educational Opportunity Program, known as EOP, or HEOP in private schools. The program accepts underprivileged students who don't quite meet the academic standards for acceptance, but are accepted with the requirement to accept academic counseling my mom and her colleagues provide. They come from schools with 45 kids in a classroom and no textbooks and gangs in inner-city Buffalo, and would normally not go to college at all, but because of EOP, they go and enter the workforce with a good degree. Pataki and the Senate Republicans had been cutting EOP for years and then finally zeroed it out of the budget for the entire SUNY system altogether. My mom would have literally lost her job. But UUP fought back and, with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's help, got most of the cuts restored.
I recently read that in a new Gallup survey that just 48% of Americans in a new survey approve of labor unions- an all-time low. 51% of those surveyed say unions "mostly hurt the economy", up from 36% in 2006. But still an overwhelming majority (66%) say unions mostly help the workers in them. I'm sure that's for reasons such as those I laid out above. People get that part of it. Our challenge as a movement is to convince people that unions lift people up, in terms of wages, health care, fewer accidents on the job, and that is good for productivity and the economy as a whole. I was lucky enough to be in a union household, and for those who need it, we face a challenge of not just organizing problems (which is one reason the Employee Free Choice Act is so important) but in out-messaging our opponents.
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