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Monday, Jan. 19, 2009 | 2 a.m.
Beyond the Sun
Unions, so integral to the Democratic victory in November, are staying in high-energy campaign mode, hoping to ride the momentum of their election efforts to win support for what they’ve identified as working-family priorities, such as changes in labor law and health care.
The Service Employees International Union, for example, is dedicating thousands of staff and 30 percent of its budget to the effort. Locals in 35 states, including Nevada, are being asked to match the commitment.
The SEIU campaign, “Change That Works,” calls on the power of its membership to hold the officials it helped elect accountable.
The question is: Can unions effectively harness their influence beyond the ballot box?
Eve Weinbaum, director of the Labor Relations and Research Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said the answer will come down to how well unions are able to mobilize their members behind a policy agenda — something that is much more abstract than electing or defeating a candidate.
Although there are no longer the tangible, immediate tasks, such as registering voters, the tactics unions employed in turning people out for campaigns will be instructive in keeping the pressure on officials, she said.
Unions are newly committed to keeping up campaign-level efforts beyond November and to show that “just because our guy is in, we’re not going away,” Weinbaum said. “The message is that if the agenda we agreed to isn’t carried out, we’re paying attention and there will be repercussions.”
It’s a broader ambition than previous legislative efforts that focused on a specific issue, such as the free trade agreement of the 1990s and privatization of Social Security during President George W. Bush’s second term.
Eddie Burke, executive director SEIU’s local chapter, said it will hire a campaign director by the end of the month to organize the effort in Nevada. The director will have a staff of at least six.
“The plan has a national mission, but it drops right into Carson City, too,” Burke said. “That’s the exciting part from my vantage point.”
SEIU’s immediate focus is the stimulus package and how that money is used in the state. The union is paying particular attention to Medicaid dollars.
Another priority for SEIU locally is protecting public employees and services, Burke said.
“We know we’re going to be attacked on those fronts,” he said, adding there are many who would like to use the current economic situation as an “excuse to dismantle benefits for public employees.”
Also, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid emboldened by a larger majority, “the bull’s-eye on him is enlarged” and he will need all the help he can get, Burke said.
Reid’s efforts to shepherd bills such as the pro-labor Employee Free Choice Act will face tough opposition from the business community in Nevada as he prepares for a brutal reelection campaign in 2010, said Steven Law, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s chief legal officer and general counsel.
Burke said SEIU and others hope to garner the support Reid needs in Nevada to feel comfortable going to bat for labor issues. The union is still working out how to best accomplish that.
Law said the chamber is gearing up its own grass-roots campaign to oppose much of what the unions support.
“I think what unions have done very well is they have cultivated a significant swatch of members of Congress to support almost reflexively what they want,” Law said. But with many of the labor goals now an actual possibility because of the Democratic majority and not just a theoretical concept, “can they hold all these members to every vote?”
The dynamic is different from the unions’ successful preelection get-out-the-vote effort. Passing legislation comes down to persuading those in the middle, a more nuanced task than motivating the converted.
Their skill at this will be evidenced on the federal level by the success or failure of the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that will make it much easier for unions to organize workers. There will be a protracted fight in the Senate, and should the bill be introduced and defeated again, as happened in 2007, that could very likely be the end of it.
The U.S. Chamber, which opposes the bill, focused its energy during the election on highlighting how the bill eliminates secret ballots — a concept easily digested by the voting public. But the organization is switching its strategy to focus on the binding arbitration aspect of the bill — a more complicated issue that makes better fodder for discussions with congressional aides than for TV commercials.
There is a sense that unions need to capitalize early or they could miss their window.
“Now is the time when the unions are at their strongest,” said John Willoughby, professor of economics at American University. “With anger over executive compensation and such, there is a lot of popular sympathy.”
How does the Union adgenda help America?
Every industry they infliltrate can not compete on price and is going broke.
The Unions want the rest of the people to pay their public employee salaries with the Stimulus package.
The Unions want to be able to hit any business with their "enforcers goons" obtaining card check signitures.
They want to get rid of the bargining process and be allowed to demand what ever they want for work rule and wages.
Union Plan: Reduce choices for American consumers, laborers, and taxpayers.
American University also has a Marxist economics department but the professor is right. There is a lot of sympathy toward big government - thanks to a big government Republican who promised limited government but delivered nothing of the sort. Its the old bait and switch and it tricked a lot of people (especially the media).
The Employee Free Choice Act, For Economic Recovery
Sun Jan 18, 2009
In his excellent series of posts on the Employee Free Choice Act, Daily Kos' own Trapper John has articulated a multitude of reasons that the Act must be passed and signed into law, and without hesitation.
The Employee Free Choice Act is not simply about protecting and ensuring workers' rights to organize. Rather, it's about the economy writ large - it is an absolutely essential step into creating a high-wage economy - and as a result, a high level of consumer spending.
It will rebuild the middle class and fix broken labor laws. As Trapper John has written, perhaps the surest way of expanding the middle class - of giving working families a substantial income, a sustainable retirement package, affordable health insurance, and the other trappings of a middle-class life - is to protect and ensure their right to collective bargaining:
Union workers earn significantly more money, enjoy more significantly more retirement security, are significantly more likely to have health insurance, and have significantly safer workplaces than similarly situated non-union workers. It's not close.
For More Information on EFCA please visit our website and blog
http://www.employeefreechoiceactnow.org
http://efcanow.blogspot.com/
http://www.LaborUnionResources.Org
What they are fighting for Employee Free Choice with -- what all of us have at our disposal and should be using -- are the facts. The SEIU has broken down some of the bill's economic benefits:
New research makes a solid case as to why the Employee Free Choice Act would be a "stimulus" that gets our economy back on track. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that if 5 million service workers join unions:
5 million workers would get a 22 percent raise on average, or an additional $7,000 a year;
$34 billion in total new wages would flow into the economy;
900,000 jobs would be lifted above the poverty wage for a family of four ($10.22/hr); and
Between 1.8 million and 3 million dependent children would share in these benefits.
The economic impact on individuals would be about four times as large as the recent federal minimum wage increase, and allow nearly six times more in new wages to flow into the economy.
Now, given that consumer spending accounts for well over two-thirds of the American economy, it's pretty evident that Employee Free Choice would create a dramatic increase in middle-class spending power, which would provide a substantial economic stimulus -- at no cost to the cash-strapped federal government. Moreover, the re-concentration of wealth in the hands of working Americans would lead to a long-term buoying effect on the health of the economy, and would help smooth out any future
downturns. That's why Congressional Democrats are looking to move the Act in the first wave of legislation after the inauguration.
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For More Information on EFCA please visit our website and blog
http://www.employeefreechoiceactnow.org
http://efcanow.blogspot.com/
http://www.LaborUnionResources.Org
You can count on even more massive lay-offs and downright closures if this bill gets enacted. You can't pay people more if you don't have it to start with.
If you really want to help labor in this country then stop the export of jobs to other countries by going back to reasonable tarrifs. One of the worst things to ever come along was NAFTA. How hard is it to understand that as long as we send more money overseas than we take in we will eventually have NO money here?
Great, great just what we need, more union low-lifes sitting around and collecting money for doing substandard work at a premium pay.
If the unions have so much money that they can lobby, why don't they spread it out among the working poor.
The reason is, unions keep the power, and that is all this is about, power. It's not about the worker, its about the power.
The union workers are sheeple that cannot think or vote for themselves without the union telling them when to $hit or get off the pot.
Substandard work?????
They did excellent rebar work on that City Center project.
Yep, ALL the usual suspects have gathered here to bash unions. Nice!
Hey gmag39, thanks for posting. You obviously are union, probably a steward in charge of bullying the sheeple to work slower and increase the sloppiness. What a hack. I was a union worker for three years(culinary) couldn't stand the favoritism and cronyism. If you were an individualist or a hard worker (or heaven forbid both) you were outcast from the useless clique the sheeple formed to protect one another.
Worthless !!
getalife; I am NOT a union worker. But I have worked at both union and non-union jobs. What you describe is happens in about equal proportions at both. What do you mean by "individualist"? That's a red flag to me that you are perhaps a "problem" worker that would have trouble assimilating in any workplace, union or no. Having worked at both myself, I can't fatham what a dedicated employee would have against the support & protections of a union.
And when you use silly buzzwords like "sheeple", it's another red flag that you may have issues unrelated to the workplace environment. Good luck!
p.s.
I've been around awhile, and I have never worked at a job ANYWHERE, union or not, where ANYONE advocated working "slower" or "sloppier".
Wherever I've worked, the majority of employees
have been diligent and hard-working folks that just want to do a good job and get paid.