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| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Tags: 13th amendment, Congress, the employee free choice act, the nation, unions
The labor movement’s decline started 61 years ago with Taft-Hartley, but the movement’s current state is in dire straits.
In 2002, Bush appointed three Republican members to the five-member National Labor Relations Board. This past September, the Board passed sixty-one sweeping decisions that impaled all working Americans; the AFL-CIO labeled these decisions “the September massacre.”
How can the movement be revitalized?
Max Fraser in last week’s Nation argued for increased lobbying efforts around a little known interpretation of the thirteenth amendment which bans "slavery and involuntary servitude" in an effort to legitimize workers' rights to organize and strike.
Another hopeful catalyst is the The Employee Free Choice Act. The Act would amend the NLR Act and “assist in labor organizations, to provide for mandatory injunctions for unfair labor practices during organizing efforts”.
The bill doesn't stand a chance against the Republican filibuster and Bush's veto threat.
The current state of unions in the US gives too much discretion and power to businesses and leaves the workers out of the equation; it behooves the Democractic Congress to lobby enough Republicans to overturn Bush's inevitable veto--workers' rights depend on it.
Today less than 8 percent of private-sector workers belong to a union.
!
This should tell you something. Private sector workers are free to affiliate with unions if they so choose, yet again and again they vote against union attempts to organize their workplace. Much of this has to do with the corruption, ties to organized crime, etc. that have been associated with some large labor unions in the past.
Of course, it doesn't help the falling union membership rate that some prominent unions are up to no good. The teacher's unions in California, for instance, have done incredible damage to the educations of our poorest and most vulnerable children -- they're the number one obstacle to education reform here. As a Democrat, it breaks my heart to watch how they buy and sell politicians in the state legislature.