Silver Spring, Md.
AFL-CIO General Board statement
Over the past three years, the unions of the AFL-CIO have prepared for a national fight to restore working people’s freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life. We worked with Congressional leaders to introduce the Employee Free Choice Act in the past two sessions of Congress, put members of the House and Senate together with workers to hear their personal stories of struggle, and built a surprisingly strong level of bipartisan Congressional co-sponsorship even before the momentous elections of 2006. We reached tens of thousands of our members with training and hundreds of thousands more through worksite communications, online activism and rallies in support of International Human Rights Day, December 10. We placed this issue on the agenda of Democratic Presidential candidates in 2004 and Congressional as well as other candidates in 2006. We drew and applied lessons from new research into public attitudes. We recruited support from allies in academia, civil rights, the religious community, Democratic Party institutions, community organizations, state legislatures, city halls and more.
Now the fight is upon us.
The need for the Employee Free Choice Act is more vivid than ever. Economic inequality is the hallmark of our time. Working men and women say they are just scraping by, worried about the scarcity of good jobs, health care, retirement, affording college—and just as troubling, the standard of living they expect their children to enjoy. Only 38 percent of Americans say their families are getting ahead. And less than a quarter say they expect the next generation’s standard of living to be better than today’s. The free choice to join a union and bargain for better wages and benefits is the best chance working people have to achieve individual opportunity, restore economic fairness and rebuild America’s middle class. But the current system is broken. Not only does it fail to protect workers’ freedom to organize for a better life, it is a tool to dishonor and destroy that freedom.
The 110th Congress provides an historic opportunity to pass the Employee Free Choice Act in the House, build the momentum to gain a filibuster-proof majority of 60 votes in the Senate, and elect a President who will sign it into law.
But opposition from the corporate community will be fierce.
Winning the fight for the future of America’s working families requires a nationwide grassroots campaign that harnesses the full, unequaled force of our 10 million members and 2.5 million retirees—a campaign that projects the voices, struggles and hopes of all working men and women. And it requires an unprecedented commitment from every corner and every stratum of a united, active labor movement.
This is a fight that must involve the members and leadership of every union in every sector. Although not all our members are covered by the National Labor Relations Act, we all have a stake in enacting the Employee Free Choice Act and rebuilding our union movement. Without a strong and thriving labor movement, there will be no construction unionism, no public employee unionism, no transportation unionism and no professional employee unionism.
The Employee Free Choice Act will restore effective collective bargaining in the private sector and strengthen our advocacy for collective bargaining in the public sector. Passing it will require unprecedented unity among workers who are organizing and those who are trying to hold the line in bargaining for health care, retirement, employment security and our standard of living.
Commenting on the role of the labor movement as the industrial age gave way to the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress.”
We will once again be the principal force for a new era of hope and progress as we commit the full potential of our movement to action. To restore the freedom of every working person to bargain for a better life, we therefore resolve:
- Every national and international union and every part of our federation can play a unique role, and we will. This campaign is about changing the culture of corporate impunity in the workplace and re-establishing the principle that every employee—public or private sector, in every industry—must have a free choice to make his or her own decision to join a union and bargain for better wages, benefits and a voice on the job. This work represents the highest priority of the AFL-CIO leadership, staff and Executive Council. It combines the major elements of our work—legislative action, political action, organizing and communications—under the leadership of these committees of the Executive Council.
- Every national union, state federation, central labor council, trade department, constituency group and allied organization will take up the job of educating and mobilizing our members—at our worksites, on the Internet and in our Congressional districts and communities—for this historic fight.
- We will build, train and mobilize an army and a network of worksite leaders, activists and stewards to win this fundamental reform. Our worksite activists and leaders defend our members at the worksite, enforce contracts and fight for fair contracts; there is no power greater than the power of these activists knitted together to fight for a better future for working people in our country.
- Every segment of our movement will engage and cultivate more allies, academics, think tanks and pundits to speak out about the importance of restoring the freedom to form unions to build a just society.
- Beginning with public meetings with members of Congress during the district work period February 19-23, we all commit to help educate lawmakers at every level about the obstacles to workers’ freedom to pursue their dreams. We will reach out to state and local elected officials as well as federal officeholders to build support for workers who are organizing and for the Employee Free Choice Act. We will hold elected officials accountable and convert supporters into warriors who will help lead this fight.
· We commit to work together to educate 2008 Presidential candidates about the aspirations and thwarted dreams of working men and women and to do everything in our power to elect a President who will join together with us to restore hope, progress and the promise of America for working families.