The American dream is under attack, and in state houses across the country, America’s working families are fighting back. We’ll fight to keep jobs at home and to be paid fairly for our work; for affordable medical care for all Americans; and for our right to hold accountable the Wal-Marts of this country that make billions in profit while fueling the exodus of good American jobs and brazenly shifting costs to taxpayers, all the while stripping workers of decent working conditions and dignity. And we’ll fight for the most venerable and vulnerable civil right of all: the right of all Americans to make their voices heard at the ballot box and on the job. We will stand up for each other, and for our families: enough is enough.

Make Trade Laws Work for Us:

Governors—not state legislatures—have decided to bind their states to the terms of various international trade agreements after the United States Trade Representative (USTR) asked them to send in letters of consent. These critical decisions should only be made with the involvement of state legislatures, and only after the public has been adequately informed and has openly debated the issues involved. States should not give away their power to reward companies that play by the rules by paying workers a living wage and following standards that protect worker and human rights, or to avoid doing business with companies that ship U.S. jobs offshore, often to countries with sweatshops and substantial labor and human rights violations. Also, legislators and the public require information to inform policy and employers and workers need assistance to respond to illegal trade practices.

• The “Jobs, Trade and Democracy Act” requires the consent of the state legislature in order to bind the state to international trade agreements, and establishes State Legislative Points of Contact to serve as official liaisons with the Governor’s office and the Federal Government on trade policy.
• The bill establishes an Office of Trade Enforcement to collect, analyze and disclose information about impacts of trade and proposed trade agreements on the state and to provide technical assistance to workers, firms and communities on trade matters.
• The bill also establishes a Citizens’ Commission empowered to hold public hearings and make recommendations to the legislature on trade policy. The Commission will be made up of equal numbers of representatives from business, labor, community, and government.

Assist Workers and Retain Jobs: Mass layoffs and closures undermine the economic stability of communities and leaves workers in the lurch. Dozens of states and communities have implemented early warning systems—Pennsylvania’s Strategic Early Warning Network (SEWN)—to trigger rapid response strategies that stabilize troubled companies and save thousands of jobs. When these strategies fail, however, workers need a safety net. Workers who lose their job to trade-related layoffs and closures need full access to Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) to receive the appropriate training and education to transition to new employment.

• “The Industrial Retention and Worker Development Act” expands the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act by requiring 90 days notice before a mass layoff and requires employers to identify the actual reasons for the layoffs and or closure. The bill also strengthens enforcement by imposing penalties – including back pay and benefits—when employers fail to give workers and the state adequate notice of a mass layoff.
• The Act would establish a statewide strategic early warning network (SEWN) to identify and provide assistance to small and mid-sized manufacturers at risk of mass layoffs, plant closures or relocations.
• The Act would ensure workers who suffer job loss as a result of international trade and foreign competition receive the assistance they need by enhancing the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) Program. The bill would require the state to file much earlier for benefits and to conduct much broader outreach to eligible workers.

Stop the Export of American Jobs: More than 40 states are destroying jobs by contracting out work done by state residents to companies that ship the jobs overseas. According to a recent study by University of California-Berkeley, the United States could lose as many as 14 million white-collar jobs as a result of the new outsourcing trend, and workers fortunate enough to hold on to their jobs will see decreasing wages and benefits as companies try to keep pace with low-wage countries.

• The “Keep Jobs in [State]” Act will make sure that taxpayers’ dollars are used to create jobs by prohibiting states from contracting with or providing economic development assistance to companies that ship jobs offshore.
• The bill also requires unethical contractors that take taxpayer dollars and then ship these taxpayer-funded jobs offshore to pay the money back to taxpayers. Violators would be ineligible to receive contracts or development assistance for five years.

Protect Consumers’ Medical Records: Outsourcing raises critical privacy issues as financial, credit, personal identification, and medical records are sent across borders. While our confidential information is routed offshore, our legal protections and recourse do not follow. In October 2003, Lubna Baloch, a Pakistani woman doing cut-rate clerical work for UCSF Medical Center threatened to post patients’ confidential files on the Internet unless she was paid the money that was owed to her. To show she was serious, the woman sent UCSF an e-mail earlier in the month with actual patients’ records attached, saying, “Your patient records are out in the open....So you better track that person and make him pay my dues (San Francisco Chronicle, 2/06/04).”

“The problem…is that strict U.S. privacy laws have no jurisdiction abroad. An overseas worker who misuses U.S. consumers’ data can't be prosecuted like an American worker.”David Lazarus, San Francisco Chronicle, 2/06/04)

Similar incidents will continue unless consumers are allowed to control the flow of their confidential medical information.

• The “Health Care Consumer Protection Act” would require health care businesses that transmit patients’ information offshore to disclose that fact to patients, and obtain patients’ consent before transmitting their medical information offshore.

Provide High Quality, Accessible Health Care For All: America is facing a true health care crisis. As it stands, 45 million Americans do not have health insurance, and rapidly increasing costs will soon put quality health care out of reach of a majority of the American population.

• Nearly every employer is confronted by health insurance premium increases in double digits; many are facing increases well over twenty percent annually.
• Most employers try to shift these costs to their workers, workers who either can’t afford to pay these additional costs or else experience a declining standard of living in order to maintain access to health care.
• Every significant labor-management bargaining conflict or strike these days has health insurance costs at its center, and because non-union workers have no protections, they are affected just as much—if not more—than union workers. Workers and their unions are regularly forced to trade wage increases for health care benefits.
• Good employers are affected too: those that offer good health insurance to their employees are undercut by competing firms that don’t meet their responsibilities to their workers, while the costs of uncompensated care for the uninsured are shifted to the cost of insurance as well. And high health insurance costs are making it increasingly difficult for American firms to compete in global markets.

Protect Workers’ Rights To Have A Voice At Work: When workers seek to form a union—whether at a construction site or in an office, hospital or manufacturing plant—their bosses almost always obstruct their efforts through threats and harassment. Some employers even fire workers for trying to form unions, which is against the law.

• Pass resolutions in support of the federal Employee Free Choice Act, providing for majority verification, first contract arbitration and better remedies for NLRA violations
• Allow Majority Verification or “card-check” for public sector workers. When a majority of workers decide to form a union, employers should respect their decision. Instead, many state labor relations laws, modeled on the National Labor Relations Act, include the NLRA’s delay-ridden representation process, with its debilitating obstacles to employee free choice. This process doesn’t work; it does not provide workers with freedom to choose whether to be represented by a union. Workers are not only forced to wait months and years, but also to endure harassment and discrimination while legal wrangling keeps them from enjoying the benefits of unionism. Card Check allows employers to recognize a union if a majorityof employees has signed valid written forms authorizing union representation. Democratic card-check procedures are necessary to avoid anti-democratic employer coercion.
• Expand collective bargaining rights: State, county, and municipal employees, teachers, university workers, and fire and police officers in many states do not have the right to representation and collective bargaining and/or their mandatory subjects of bargaining are limited by statute. In addition, many groups of workers are excluded from collective bargaining coverage because they are considered “independent contractors,” instead of employees.

Raise the Bar for Employers that Receive State Contracts and Subsidies: Every year billions of taxpayer dollars are turned over to private companies in the form of contracts for goods and services for their citizens and as subsidies and incentives for economic development. Contractors and developers who receive public money should play by the rules and be held accountable when they don’t. States must make sure that taxpayers get their money’s worth by holding contractors accountable for the way they spend taxpayer dollars.

• Companies that receive government contracts should raise, and not lower, the living standards of working families. They should be required to comply with applicable federal, state and local laws and ordinances, including laws regarding health and safety, wage and hour laws, and employee licensing requirements. Companies that routinely break laws, misclassify workers as independent contractors, pay poverty wages, or fail to hire and retain a skilled workforce should not win lucrative government contracts over responsible, capable, law-abiding companies.
• Economic development subsidies and incentive programs for companies and developers should be transparent, with regular public disclosure of the amount and nature of subsidies/incentives received. States must demand that the jobs created with this public money be quality jobs which meet acceptable labor standards; and that companies be required to repay the money when promised commitments have not been met.

Protect Workers from Employer Indoctrination and Confinement: Increasingly, employers are using their workplaces to force their political, religious and union viewpoints on workers. Employees should not fear retaliation for expressing views in opposition to their employer’s and they should not be required to attend closed door meetings where they are subjected to indoctrination about their employer’s views on non-work related issues.

• The Worker Freedom Act would prohibit employers from coercing workers into attending or participating in meetings designed to influence workers’ political or religious decisions, including their decisions about whether to support a union.

Expose Corporations—Like Wal-Mart—That Shift The Cost Of Providing Health Care For Their Employees Onto Taxpayers: Wal-Mart pays its workers such low wages that they qualify for government programs for the poor and near poor, which means that taxpayers are picking up the cost of health care coverage instead of the employer. In Georgia alone, more than 10,000 children of Wal-Mart employees were enrolled in the state public health insurance program for children, PeachCare, according to a 2002 state government examination. The number of Wal-Mart employees’ children enrolled in the program far exceeded the number of children of any other employer. Publix Super Markets had the next highest number, 734. Wal-Mart’s failure to cover these children cost federal and state taxpayers an estimated $6.6 million.

• The “Health Care Disclosure Act” will allow states to determine which corporate freeloaders are shifting their responsibility to provide health care coverage for their employees onto state taxpayers. The bill requires the state to collect and disclose the names of the employers of applicants for publicly funded health care programs or uncompensated care in a hospital, as well as the cost to state taxpayers.

Protect Workers From The Harmful Impact Of The Bush Administration’s Overtime Pay Cuts: The Bush Administration’s final overtime regulations went into effect August 23, 2004. Although some of the proposed regulations’ most outrageous provisions were cut from the final rules, many white-collar workers have had their overtime pay eliminated. The Bush Administration’s final regulation restricts overtime eligibility for workers earning as little as $23,660. The Bush Administration claims that no workers earning between $23,660 and $100,000 will lose their overtime rights under the final regulation, but this claim does not account for numerous changes to the eligibility rules that strip overtime rights from workers earning as little as $23,660 per year. These include: “team leaders”, working supervisors and assistant managers, chefs, computer employees, registered nurses, insurance claims adjusters, funeral directors and embalmers, and workers in the financial services industry.

• The “Overtime Protection Act” will protect the overtime pay for workers’ whose pay has been cut as a result of the misguided Bush regulations. At the same time, the provisions preserve the salary threshold established by the new regulations, below which employees, regardless of their job duties, must earn overtime.

Protect The Right To Vote And Eliminate Practices That Suppress Voter Turnout: The past two presidential elections have exposed the flaws in the nation’s voting system: conflicts of interest among elected state officials responsible for ensuring fair elections but working for a candidate, voting machines that don’t work properly, voters who have been intimidated and harassed while trying to exercise their basic rights, poorly staffed polling locations and poorly trained poll workers. We must take action to prevent a repeat of the past two election cycles’ mistakes.

Modernize Outdated Unemployment Insurance And Workers’ Compensation Laws: The current unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation systems have failed to keep pace with America’s changing workforce, leaving large numbers of unemployed or injured workers without enough money to make ends meet.

For more information, contact:

Naomi Walker, State Legislative Issues Coordinator, AFL-CIO

202-637-5093 or nwalker@aflcio.org

Join the State Legislative Issues website at http://resources.aflcio.org/stateaction.