Last year, Senator Mary Landrieu campaigned hard on the slogan:
But, ever since the election, she's been fighting for the health insurance companies and her allies in the business sector, rather than the people who actually VOTED to send her back to Washington.
Granted, she's done a fantastic job fighting for our interests when it comes to rebuilding our state from the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Gustav, in addition to the destruction wreaked by the Federal Flood in the New Orleans region.
So she's making sure that we can continue to live in the state we all love. But how about making sure we can continue to LIVE, Senator?
The health care plan you're currently supporting will mandate that all Americans buy into private health insurance plan, and have government looking over us every time we interact with it. Not to mention that such a mandate will be a boon to the health insurance industry - more premiums they can stick in their pockets while denying individuals the care they need. On top of that, if the Wall Street Journal's opinion page - the paper for Wall Street - has anything good to say about that plan, then you can bet your bottom dollar, Senator, that it is NOT in the best interests of Louisianans, let alone the American people.
EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND (pdf alert) of your constituents, Senator, are currently living without health insurance, either because they are uninsurable due to being a survivor of a serious illness, or because they simply can't afford the premiums.
And yet you think some government regulations will squeeze enough savings out of the health insurance companies to lower the cost enough to ensure that all Louisianans will be able to afford to purchase a health care plan? We are talking about an industry that engages in despicable practices like rescission:
If you worked for a company that offered insurance, if you carried your family's insurance, next year your insurer would slap a million dollar surcharge on the company policy for carrying a leukemia patient. The company would get the bill and someone in accounting would question "what is this extra million dollars we are being billed?"
The insurance company would explain to them that the million is for you, and it is yearly, but is, ahem, "fixable." They will say "as long as she is on your insurance (wink, wink) this charge will be there. So what you have to ask yourself (more wink, wink) is whether this employee is worth a million dollar a year salary on top of what you are already paying her."
Social worker said she had seen small business owners go almost broke trying to cover this charge, and had even heard of one who defiantly did go broke, throwing all of the employees out of work. But more usually, she said, they just fire you.
"Wait, wait!" say you, "Isn't it illegal to fire someone for their health history? Suppose I'm all well and working?"
She looks at you with more pity, says yes, so of course they will have to find "cause" to fire you, which any employer can always do.
"But I am a very, very good employee!" you protest.
"Yes," she says, "but they can always find some cause." The real problem she goes on to explain, is that you will find a new job, that company's insurer will slap them with the surcharge, they will take their turn at firing you, until you've been through six or seven jobs in a year, fired "for cause" from all of them, which of course looks very, very bad to a prospective employer.
"So in a year or so of this, you will not just be uninsurable, you will also be unemployable."
She asks who your husband works for, since they'd probably try to do this to him too. You say he is a cop working for a municipality, which pleases her. "They have all sorts of layers of officials, elected and otherwise, to work their way through to get to the decision, then once they do they have to get past his union, so it will take much longer to get him fired." She also, though, offered sympathy for the fact that what with the police union and the municipality fighting out whatever "cause" they got him on in such a public profession, it was sure to end up in the local papers and disrupt all our lives - including the children's - when they did get that far.
You remind her you seem headed for divorce, and she says, well, okay then, just carry the COBRA to the limit and keep on working for small not-for-profits that don't offer insurance.
You ask her what you are supposed to do for health care and she says sooner or later the insurance companies would force you onto Medicaid - either by means of making you unemployable and broke, or by means of you being uninsured and going through any and all assets you have paying medical bills until you are broke and sick enough that you can't work, and end up on Medicaid.
It's high time for you get back on that saddle. Perhaps then you won't be afraid to face your constituents. After all, you've canceled two appearances - one at The Healing Center's grand opening and two weeks ago when you didn't participate in a scheduled Q&A at a Small Business Committee field hearing in New Orleans. On top of that, it is comical that your staff seems intent on making sure that no bad press emerged from that event by tailing known provocateurs, one of whom just happens to be a former intern in your New Orleans office.
(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.
(This was sent to me by an interested observer, who also sent it to Swamp Fox, which is a research and communications firm that works with political candidates and groups. - promoted by ryan)
While it appears that the Employee Free Choice Act has been given a much tougher row to hoe in the Senate thanks to Senator Spector's decision to effectively end his political career by announcing that he will vote against cloture when EFCA comes up for a vote, opponents of EFCA are taking no chances.
SINator Vitter tells folks on this conference call - mostly local Chamber of Commerce folks - that they need to lobby Senator Landrieu personally:
The Employee Free Choice Act has been introduced in the House as H.R. 1409 and in the Senate as S. 560.
The corporate lobbies of America are prepared to spend $200 MILLION to defeat EFCA. I've had many conservative friends (they hate being identified as Republicans these days), and some Democratic friends express concern that EFCA will "do away with the secret ballot" with respect to the choice of deciding whether to join a union.
Unfortunately, they are all repeating the lies from the corporate propaganda machine. Right now, if you were to try to unionize your workplace ... your employer has the right to decide which process you use to decide whether y'all unionize or not - you sign a card or you have a secret ballot. Not surprisingly, companies often choose to force their workers to endure a secret ballot. Labor lawyer Gordon Lafer explains why:
When employees want to form a union, they have to go through a process that looks more like the discredited practices of rogue regimes abroad than like anything we would call American.
For an election to be "free and fair," both sides must have equal access to media and the voters. But not under labor law. Anti-union managers are free to campaign to every employee, every day, throughout the day; but pro-union employees can campaign only on break time. Furthermore, management can post anti-union propaganda on bulletin boards and walls - while prohibiting pro-union employees from doing the same.
By law, employers can force workers to attend mass anti-union propaganda events. Not only are pro-union employees not given equal time, but they can be forced to attend on condition that they not ask any questions. Recent data show that workers are forced to attend between five and 10 such one-sided meetings."
And yet you never hear about that part of union organizing from the corporate interests. All you hear is that the secret ballot will go away. Again, it's NOT TRUE. With respect to elections, the bill simply puts the choice of HOW TO VOTE ON WHETHER TO UNIONIZE where it belongs ... with the workers.
"Funny how the free-traders and deregulators suddenly want the government in everyone's face again when it comes to whether or not regular people should be able to decide for themselves how they want to tell their friends and coworkers that they'd maybe like to get together and cooperate on some stuff.
If I want into a union and feel like saying so, get the hell out of my way, boss. Nobody asked you. It shouldn't be up to you how I get to express that any more than you get to decide how I invite people out for beers after work."
Now ... we've got nine representatives up in Washington. Six of 'em are going to vote "NO" no matter what - Vitter, Scalise, Fleming, Alexander, Cassidy and Boustany.
The other three ... Representative Cao, Representative Melancon and Senator Landrieu are going to be slammed with phone calls from nervous folks here in Louisiana telling them NOT to vote for EFCA. So ... call them, and tell them to stand up for Louisiana's working families by voting for EFCA:
Every time I speak to any Republican about the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), they express the horror that workers will be allowed to band together to negotiate better working conditions, better pay, and better benefits. When you hear CEO's and their water boys (and girls) in Washington talk about it, you hear things like those in this web video that the SEIU, one of the nation's largest (and growing) unions put out today:
If you think that the CEO's and their water boys (and girls) up in Washington are protecting the yachts, the fancy jets, and luxurious lifestyles of these obscenely wealthy CEO's by opposing this bill, sign up here.
If you think allowing workers to join a union to negotiate better pay, better working conditions, and better benefits is a GOOD thing, then sign up here to send a message to the clowns that pay the bills of today's Republican Party that the game is up. It's high time they started acting responsibly and paid their workers for the increased productivity they have given their employers for the past 35 years without a pay raise that kept pace with inflation.
Still haven't signed up at the SEIU website? Click here to do so!
