Of course Congress should pass the Employee Free Choice Act, but beyond that the Obama Administration should get behind its original campaign promise and pressure Congress to pass the Act.
But that is only the beginning for real labor law reform. Next, all the provisions of the Taft Hartley Law still in force should be repealed.
That would include legalizing common situs picketing and legalizing all of the following types of strikes:
wildcat strikes
jurisdictional strikes
solidarity strikes
sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts
political strikes
Also, the so-called "right to work" provisions allowing some states to outlaw union shops should be repealed.
The right of the federal government to enjoin strikes should be repealed.
The right to unionize should be extended to supervisors, lower management personnel, agricultural workers, independent contractors such as cab drivers and all other workers not presently covered under the National Labor Relations Act.
The minimum wage law should be changed to a living wage law, guaranteeing all workers the right to a livable income pegged to the cost of living.
Free birth to grave medical care, including pharmaceuticals, eye care, psychiatric care, dental care and alternative treatments such as chiropractic should be made available to every resident of the United States. Everybody in, nobody out.
Free public education should be available to every resident of the United States from infancy through graduate school.
Comments (5)
You have a right to work and belong to a union, why would you want to remove another's right to work and not belong? You are removing freedoms. EFCA will remove the right to a private ballot also. Why are you against that right? How about if I remove your right to vote for president, you wouldn't like that would you. So why do you want to remove others rights?
As an employer, the jobs I have are mine to give out as I see fit, not yours. It is my sweat and time that created my company, not you so back off. You don't own the job, I do.
You are an idiot in talking about "free" medical care. There is nothing that is free. Someone is paying for it, just not you. If you want it, pay for it. Don't steal from me to get it. There isn't "free" public education either. It is paid for by taxpayers. Without taxpayers there is nothing. The government doesn't have money. Witness the bailout, it is borrowed. So is TARP, borrowed. All from us and our children. It is immoral.
First EFCA is very important to have as long as employers can hire goons(Union Busters) to quell the voice of the workers. when a group of employees decide to go union they first must sign cards to say they want a union then they must wait and scheduale a vote. at this time the employer can either oppose it(most do) or they can volunterily reqognize the union. most times during this time the emploer does everything they can to stop it usualy trompling on the rights of the employees. EFCA just insures that when an employee says i want a union that ends it.
The unions are the ones that send out the "goons". Violence during union talks is always the union faction not the employer. How is one going to sign a card not to have a union with everyone looking over his shoulder? Once the cards are more than 50% there is no vote. That is the way EFCA reads. So there is never a vote. AND if negotiations don't reach an agreement, the feds send in their union support people and force a solution on the owner. If you don't want to work in a non-union place, leave.
It was my understanding that this list was set up by the Obama Administration in order to get some feedback about the sort of legislation or executive actions people were most concerned with.
From that point of view it doesn't seem to be working very well.
The general response doesn't seem to be all that great. This could be a shortcoming of the Administration or it could be intentional. As from the beginning of his campaign Obama made very few uncorrected or uncorrectable mistakes, I suspect it is the latter.
The site seems to have generated few responses and a lot of kibbitzing. All the posts regarding the President's birth certificate are an example of the latter. If the posters on that issue were serious they would have made one posting and tried to get as many people to sign onto it pro or contra as possible. Instead they deluge the site with hundreds of posts making it extremely difficult for people who want to seriously participate to do so.
Regarding this particular posting, according to most reliable statistics about 60% of the unorganized workers in the nation say that they would join a union if they had the opportunity to do so. So the fact that this particular contribution is so far in the negative is very suspicious. Either the polling was in error, which seems unlikely as these polls were conducted by bonafide polling outfits, some of them quite hostile to unions. It would seem more likely that the sample responding to this suggestion is not especially scientific.
But regarding the substance....The hostility to unionism does seem rather peculiar given Obama's own stated views. Let's face it. He won. That being the case one would hardly expect him to thumb his nose at his own base, which including virtually the entire American labor movement.
As I said above, I thought the point of this site was to give Obama suggestions. Unless those suggestions showed some overwhelming support one would hardly expect them to be fundamentally contrary to Obama's own views. After all, again, he won.
Had McCain won and set up a similar site, I'd probably try to find some issues on which I agreed with McCain, urge him to follow through on his campaign promises and follow through on the logic of his positions as to where it might most likely lead next.
That is exactly the spirit in which I originally posed this suggestion. The central theme of the Obama campaign was change. While he was often vague about exactly what that meant, one could infer certain things from previous positions he had taken. He said he was opposed to the war in Iraq. He was on record in favor of universal health care. He was on record in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. It is reasonable to expect him to either follow through on these campaign promises or offer some public explanation as to why he is choosing not to do so.
Frankly, he most certainly seems to be back peddling on the question of the Employee Free Choice Act. Most probably, if it reached his desk, he would sign it. But he isn't doing anything to shepherd it through Congress. This apprently is not so much to placate Republicans as it is to placate the conservative Congressional wing of the Democratic Party and certain business interests who were among his major campaign contributors.
In urging him to get behind this legislation, I am simply asking Obama to be Obama, and to continue to support legislation that he actively supported when he was in the legislative branch.
I did suggest that he might go further within the logic of that position. That would include recinding the remaining provisions of the Taft Hartley Law as well as enacting living wage legislation and enacting other provisions which would increase the social wage such as tuition free public higher education. This would all be of a piece with the Employee Free Choice Act, which Obama nominally says he supports.
As to the points raised above, I hesitate to respond to them, not because I want to avoid a debate, but frankly because they seem inconsistent with Obama's own world view, not a perspective that he buys into.
That said, it should be pointed out that the Employee Free Choice Act does not prevent employees from voting in or out a union. What it does is take that provision out of the hands of employers where it currently rests, and puts it in the hands of employees.
Regarding the rights of employees who oppose belonging to the union, certainly I am for minority rights. But minority rights do not include depriving the majority of its rights. And all the statistical evidence shows that unionized workers are paid better and have better working conditions than do nonunionized workers. Certainly it is reasonable to expect all the workers who benefit from unionization to pay for that benefit, even if they are skeptical about it.
After all, we all pay taxes and nearly everyone is opposed to some aspect of what our taxes pay for. Some people want a lower defense budget. Some people want cuts in various aspects of domestic spending. But we live in a democracy. We accept the fact that in a nation of over 200 million people nearly everyone is going to be opposed to this or that aspect of government spending.
On a much smaller scale the same is true of unionized workers. Undoubtedly nearly every union member would take issue with some way or other that his or her dues money is spent. But that's the nature of democracy. Of course there should be minority rights, but such minority rights ought not extend so far as to negate majority rule.
With regard to issues such as free tuition or free medical care, of course they have to be paid for and the way such social benefits are typically paid is through taxes. But there are all kinds of government sponsored social benefits that are paid for through taxes that nobody complains about and are looked upon as basic rights. Once upon a time all education was private. As a consequence the poor and working people were kept in ignorance and often illiterate. But it was found that providing education for the whole society through taxes had enormous social benefits. I'm simply arguing that it would benefit the society as a whole to extend such benefits through college and graduate school.
I hear very few complaints from anywhere on the political spectrum regarding the federal highway system yet this was a tremendous social benefit, not only to individuals, but in particular to the trucking industry and was probably the single greatest factor in the trucking industry eclipsing the railroads. But in the 19th century the railroads themselves never would have gotten off the ground without huge federal subsidies, including especially massive land grants. This was wealth essentially taken from the American people and given to the railroads, just as the taxes for the federal highway system were a gift to the trucking industry.
I would most certainly agree that the TARP is unjust and immoral, but socialism it is not. It does nothing to help the middle class or working people, much less the poor, though it is a great gift to the major financial corporations and as such it is hardly socialism.
The strength of any democracy can be measured by the strength of its institutions in civil society, especially religion and the labor movement. It is a corporate myth that American unions are particularly powerful. In fact the United States has one of the weakest labor movements of any industrialized democracy in the world. The United States is the only industrialized democracy in the world that does not have a mass labor party. Today only about 10% of the work force is organized while in the other industrialized democracies it is more typical that 60 or 70% of the work force belongs to unions.
Of course we live in a democracy. That being the case, much of the weakness of American unions can be laid at the door of American unions themselves. It is not the job of government to organize unions for working people. But government can make it easier or harder for working people to organize themselves. I'm simply arguing that government make it easier, which is consistent with Obama's stated position, though not particularly consistent with is actions.
Regarding the issue of labor goons, I've been in the work force nearly 50 years. In that time I've been in a number of different unions. I certainly don't consider myself a tough guy. In fact, I suspect most people would consider me something of a milque toast. In all that time, very seldom have I been confronted by what I would consider union goons, though I have frequently felt intimidated by employers. I'm not suggesting that corruption and even gangsterism is nonexistent in the American labor movement, only that it is a very marginal tendency seldom encountered buy most workers.
Union democracy is another matter and most unions leave much to be desired in terms of democratic practice, though in comparison to most institutions in American society they are paragons of democracy.
I find it curious that for all the ranting in the previous messages, virtually none of them have anything to say about my suggestions regarding recinding those provisions of the Taft Hartley law still in force, which was the main part of my message.
Gabrielsky
What you stated was essential human rights in a democracy (although I do not say we live in a democracy).
I do not understand the antipathy in the responses. Was this orchestrated by someone?