Chicago, Ill.
The Bush Administration and its congressional allies have combined forces to advance the most anti-worker and anti-union agenda in recent memory. The attacks on workers’ living standards and rights range from eliminating basic overtime protections for 8 million Americans to denying collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of federal employees. They include siding with big business to weaken health and safety job standards and ship U.S. jobs overseas with flawed trade deals, as well as enacting massive tax cuts for the wealthy that have saddled state and local governments with historic levels of debt.
The American labor movement must respond to these attacks with every weapon at our disposal, including a sustained grassroots issues mobilization initiative. This initiative will not only help slow down or defeat attacks on workers by anti-worker leaders in Congress, they will educate our members and the public about what is at stake on Election Day.
Since 1996, the union movement has devoted considerable energy to informing union members about the choices they face at the ballot box and engaging them in the electoral process. Our unions understand that when workers know about the unprecedented threats to their living standards and their rights, they will hold accountable their elected officials who stand for re-election.
But less energy has been invested to inform and engage our members in grassroots legislative campaigns. We must work diligently to involve our members in our grassroots issue mobilization efforts to combat the attacks of a right-wing congressional leadership.
When workers are informed of these threats, they will respond. They will make phone calls, write letters and send faxes to their elected representatives in Congress. They will attend meetings and rallies to protest anti-worker, anti-union attacks. And these activities will lead to a level of engagement in politics that will help create the army of volunteers needed to unseat an anti-worker president and an anti-union majority in Congress.
Despite a general decline of public interest in political parties and politicians, working families can be counted on to respond to issues relevant to their lives. This year, in response to congressional attempts to repeal basic Fair Labor Standards Act protections, more than 240,000 messages from union households were sent to Congress within a three-month period protesting the bill that would have allowed employers to substitute comp time for paid overtime. More than 400,000 messages subsequently have been sent to oppose the Bush Administration’s effort to eliminate overtime pay. And just two weeks ago, dozens of retired union members were arrested at Senate offices protesting Bush’s effort to privatize Medicare.
In a period when the White House is driving attacks on working families, a robust issues mobilization program is particularly important to inform union members about the anti-worker actions of this president. America’s working families will hold President Bush accountable, but only if they are informed and engaged.
The AFL-CIO is already on record in support of active internal communication on key legislative issues, aggressive public advocacy for a working families agenda, and the establishment of a corps of volunteer union member coordinators to lead a program of grassroots education and mobilization. Today we reaffirm the need to engage in issues mobilization work and set out four specific goals and plans:
Grassroots Lobbying: In-state grassroots lobbying is effective when AFL-CIO bodies coordinate lobby visits among affiliates, and when individual unions conduct their own lobby visits with rank-and-file members on key legislative issues. Therefore, the AFL-CIO calls on each affiliate to facilitate a grassroots lobbying meeting for each of their locals with more than 100 members with their congressional representative at least once a year. This approach to grassroots lobbying will produce more than 12,000 in-state lobby visits annually. In addition, AFL-CIO bodies will step-up the frequency of coordinated lobby visits among affiliates and conduct at least one lobby visit per year with each member of Congress.
Internal Communications: Worksite leaflets have been used effectively in the AFL-CIO political program. Unions customized and downloaded leaflets from a special AFL-CIO website that connects issues with electoral activism. This year, the AFL-CIO began using the same system for legislative action, designing worksite leaflets on issues around which the labor movement is mobilizing. The AFL-CIO calls on each union to create a system that enables them to reach no less than 10 percent of their membership with worksite fliers on key working family issues.
Internet Activism: Internet activism is the newest and a uniquely exciting organizing tool available to activists and organizations. The AFL-CIO urges all unions to use the online Working Families Network system created by the AFL-CIO to engage union activists or to set up a similar system by the end of 2003.
Issues Mobilization Coordinators: A key to successful issues mobilization is rank-and-file leadership. Coordinators disseminate information and organize activities. The AFL-CIO urges all unions to identify issues mobilization coordinators in every congressional district in which it has more than 100 members, and to begin to do this in 2003, focusing first on the battleground states for the 2004 election.