(EFCA ain't dead yet, thanks to Senator Specter's slow moonwalk to the left side of the aisle on the issues. - promoted by ryan)
Last year, Louisiana had the fifth lowest median household income of any state in our nation. Not coincidentally, it also had the fifth lowest union density - only 4.6% of the workers in Louisiana are in unions.
Typically, union workers make about 25-30% more than their non-union counterparts. For many hospitality and service sector jobs, the difference between a poverty-level wage and a family-sustaining liveable wage is a union contract. Given these statistics, and the importance of the hospitality and service sector to the economy of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana, it is clear that increasing rates of unionization would lead to a growing shared prosperity - in Louisiana and in our nation.
That is why passage of the Employee Free Choice Act is so important in Louisiana and all over America. The Employee Free Choice Act will make it easier for workers to form unions and bargain collectively, and harder for corporations to intimidate and fire workers when they organize.
Passing the Employee Free Choice Act is critical right now. Our economy is in the worst crisis we've experienced since the 1930s. One of the most important reasons for this crisis is 30 years of stagnant and declining wages. While our productivity has gone up 75% since the mid-1970s, our wages have stagnated, flatlined, even declined during the Bush years. For the first time, wages were de-coupled and de-linked from productivity increases. So working families borrowed to keep up, incurring mortgage debt as we took out second mortgages on our homes, insidious credit card debt, healthcare debt as more and more of us lost health insurance, and education debt as higher education became more and more expensive.
All that debt created a bubble which has now burst. Our economy is sinking. Economists across the discipline agree that our economy needs a stimulus because there is not enough demand or buying power to drive the American engine.
Those 30 years of stagnant and declining wages and subsequent economic crisis are directly related to a withering assault by corporations and their radical rightwing Republican servants on the freedom of workers to form unions and bargain collectively - one of the fundamental freedoms in a Democratic society.
Indeed, the U.S. is the only democracy in the world that does not protect the freedom of its workers to organize and bargain collectively.
It is now a routine part of a corrupt corporate culture to do everything and anything to stop workers from organizing. Last year 30,000 workers in America were illegally punished for exercising legally protected union activity. Each year for the last 15 years, more than 20,000 workers were punished for legally protected union activity. Union busting is now a $4 billion a year industry. When confronted by workers who want a union, 90% of corporations hire these union busters to intimidate their workforce and fire the worker union leaders. Under the training and supervision of these union busters, corporations put workers through one-on-one supervisory sweat sessions, threaten to close or move the work elsewhere, and fire union organizing leaders.
This 30 year assault has been remarkably successful in transferring the benefits of worker-generated productivity to CEO pay and corporate profits, squeezing the middle class, increasing poverty, reducing healthcare coverage, and making life harder for the majority of Americans.
In 1980, the average CEO made 40 times as much as the average worker. Today, the average CEO makes 400 times as much as the average worker. There are 20% more Americans living in poverty today than when George Bush took office. We have at least 47 million Americans without healthcare - more than in 1965 when we created Medicare and Medicaid.
Clearly, shared prosperity and a sustainable and growing economy require free access to unionization and collective bargaining.
That is precisely what the Employee Free Choice Act is designed to do. The most effective and efficient economic stimulus would be to immediately pass the Employee Free Choice Act and restore to workers collective bargaining so we can negotiate for a fairer share of the wealth we create.
The Employee Free Choice Act will do these simple, common-sense things:
- Impose real penalties on corporations that violate the law and workers' rights. Today federal labor law is the only federal law for which there is no effective penalty for its violation.
- Provide a real incentive for corporations to bargain in good faith, because today 40% of all workers who form a union never get a first contract. That incentive is to allow workers or corporations to request mediation and arbitration after four months if progress is not being made.
- Allow workers to join a union like the boss joins the Chamber of Commerce, or like we join any other organization in America - simply by signing a card. Then, if 50% plus one sign-up, the union is established. For 74 years both majority sign-up and corporate-dominated elections have been legal. But today the corporation gets to choose which method is used.
Corporations typically choose a corporate-dominated elections because it is during the six week time period between when an election is requested and when one is held that the corporation unleashes union busters and life becomes hell for workers.
For shared prosperity, a growing, sustainable economy, and a vibrant democracy, Louisiana and America need the Employee Free Choice Act. |
