Executive Council Statement | Better Pay and Benefits

The September 2nd Mobilization

Chicago, Ill.

For America’s working families, the stakes in this fall’s presidential elections are the greatest of a lifetime, and the outcome of the election may well determine the shape of basic economic and social protections and benefits for decades. That is why the American labor movement is launching its largest mobilization ever, with the goal of electing a President who will put the needs and interests of America’s working families first.

The labor movement knows—firsthand—that George W. Bush is not the person for the job.

Already, President George W. Bush has presided over the greatest sustained jobs loss since the Great Depression. Our manufacturing sector has been decimated: under Mr. Bush, we have lost more manufacturing jobs than in the entire 22 years before he took office. Real incomes have fallen, the ranks of the uninsured have grown by nearly five million, and three million more Americans have slipped into poverty. 

President Bush has not been a mere bystander in the decline in fortunes for America’s workers and their families—he has been an active participant in the deterioration of jobs and working conditions. Among other things, Mr. Bush and his appointees have:

  • Dictated the largest take-away of overtime pay rights in the history of the nation’s wage and hour law and have refused to support an increase in the minimum wage.
  • Led an all-out assault on the collective bargaining rights of America’s workers, intervening preemptively in airline disputes, rolling back civil service and bargaining guarantees for numerous federal employees, reversing legal precedents and siding with employers in efforts to undermine the freedom to form unions.
  • Pursued trade and tax policies that promote and reward the offshoring of good American jobs.
  • Cut funds and staff for job training and worker protection programs while increasing funds and staff to audit and prosecute unions and eliminated reporting requirements for union-busting consultants while imposing onerous new requirements on unions.
  • Converted the huge budget surplus they inherited from President Clinton into an equally huge budget deficit, a breathtaking $10 trillion turnaround in just three years that chokes our capacity to make needed investments and will saddle our children with mountains of debt. 

As bad as it has been, things will only get worse if Mr. Bush is re-elected. Already, he has proposed an even more drastic rewrite of the nation’s overtime laws, allowing employers to replace guaranteed overtime pay with comp time. He is touting private accounts under Social Security, threatening further depletion of the trust fund and further economic uncertainty for retirees. His only remedy for the nation’s devastating health care crisis is more unaffordable and ineffective tax breaks. He has pledged to make his budget-busting and grossly inequitable millionaire tax cuts permanent. He supports shifting public monies into private school vouchers.  And his long-term budget plans contemplate steep future cuts in domestic programs.

Enough is enough. America’s working families cannot afford another four years of Mr. Bush’s policies and practices. We need the leadership of John Kerry and John Edwards, two men whose entire careers have been marked by their support and advocacy for America’s workers and their families. That’s why the AFL-CIO has endorsed the Kerry-Edwards ticket, and that’s why America’s unions are more unified than ever before in seeking the election of these two friends of working families.

The American labor movement is mounting a massive grass roots effort to elect the Kerry-Edwards team and to win a worker-friendly congress. Our work is well underway, but we will jumpstart our fall campaign with an exciting member-to-member march in key electoral states in the hours before the president accepts his party’s nomination on September 2nd. That evening, thousands of union members will knock on the doors of hundreds of thousands more, making sure union members know what’s at stake in this election, what four more years of George W. Bush will do to working families, and what we must do to elect John Kerry President of the United States.

In support of this historic and exciting September 2nd walk, the AFL-CIO Executive Council urges national and international unions to ensure that at least one-half of one percent of their members participate in the walks. In addition, we call on staff of national and international unions, state labor federations and central labor councils to join the walks. And, we urge union leaders, staff and members around the nation to do all they can between now and November 2nd to ensure the election of John Kerry and John Edwards.

We know what’s at stake with four more years of Bush policies. And we know that the responsibility of winning the presidential election rests with us.

We can do it. We will.

This portion of the website is paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education - Political Contributions Committee, with voluntary contributions from union members and their families, and is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.