Unions Turning a Corner As Election Year Looms

President, Texas AFL-CIO

You can usually tell how the labor movement is doing by examining the top agenda items for working people in Congress.

When things are going badly, Congress considers more restrictive laws governing when overtime has to be paid, partisan “paycheck deception” laws that would impose heavy bureaucratic requirements on unions for engaging in lobbying and political advocacy, prison labor expansion, privatization of governmental functions and trade treaties that sell out American workers.

When things are going better, Congress adopts a minimum wage increase, considers expansion of health care for children and shows a majority in support of making it easier for a workplace majority to achieve collective bargaining.

On Labor Day in 2007, the union movement is turning a corner and showing potential not seen since before the days when President Reagan busted the air traffic controllers union.

In our darkest hours (1994? 2001? 2004?), union leaders kept saying that the political pendulum would swing, and it finally has. Nationally, voters began scouring out an overreaching Republican majority in 2006, and the portents for 2008 suggest more of the same lies ahead. In Texas, which always seems to run a few years behind the rest of the nation politically, the change is arriving from the ground up – progressive gains in the Texas House, political turnovers in the big urban counties, signs of life in the suburbs – and the significance of anti-union initiatives and attacks on job security has penetrated to the masses.

The two issues most on organized labor’s agenda in 2007 also figure to be on Congress’s mind in 2009.

First, we believe the American people overwhelmingly want to find consensus on a plan that will deliver health care for all. The AFL-CIO has announced a new drive to obtain high quality, cost-efficient health care for everyone.

We’re not locked into the specifics of how to get there yet. But unlike the “Harry and Louise” fiasco of 1993, we believe many business leaders will be on board and the American people will have a real chance to obtain a practical contract that addresses a major national problem without reaping political victims in the process.

Second, we believe millions of American workers who have repeatedly said they would like the benefits of unionization should have a fair chance to achieve it. The U.S. House approved the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workplace majorities to proceed straight to collective bargaining and set time limits for negotiation of a first contract. The U.S. Senate cannot pass the measure because of a Republican filibuster, but consider how far we have come from a Congress that threw this idea in the trash without a hearing. By 2009 we believe the political pendulum will have swung further and more Americans will again recognize that unions are part and parcel of democracy. (Repeat again: Democracies have free and independent labor unions; totalitarian states do not.)

Many in our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations shed blood for workplace rights we take for granted but commemorate every Labor Day, such as the 40-hour work week, paid holidays and vacations, and Social Security. Too many American workers have forgotten that their ancestors routinely worked long hours for long years with little leisure or dignity, only to find themselves in poverty upon retirement.

The hunt for ever-cheaper global labor and the right-wing turn in American politics have threatened to re-create those conditions, but the pendulum is swinging for organized labor. For millions of workers who want a voice in their future, the best democratic vehicle yet devised for gaining that voice is the same one that changed America when Labor Days were first celebrated.

Enjoy the holiday.