Tag: working families

Home>News>working families
Robert Kerley

By Robert Kerley
UTU International Vice President

America’s soldiers and their families are sacrificing to preserve liberty and ensure justice throughout the world.

As labor unionists, we can follow their example of service by remaining resolute in our struggle against injustice and the denial of human rights and dignity here at home.

Liberty means freedom from tyranny at home. Justice must be demanded in corporate boardrooms and the workplace.

Working men and women are under attack in states throughout America. It is an attack on all that unions have fought so long and hard to achieve — the right to organize and bargain collectively for good wages and safe working conditions.

The attack is by those who cannot make their case at the bargaining table.

Working families, whose purchasing power sustains our economy, absolutely did not cause the economic collapse that has driven states into the red.

Yet those families are now told that their breadwinners don’t deserve a seat at the table when the elimination of their jobs and a reduction in their negotiated wages and health care and retirement plans are discussed.

A half century ago, Americans of every color, creed, faith and age stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the fight against racial and social injustice, and made America a better place for us all.

We must renew that spirit, reaffirm that message and reignite that flame of righteous indignation against this denial of democracy and dignity in the workplace.

We must reach out to young people for whom the American dream is becoming a legendary paradise lost, and to the unorganized, because their future depends on our success.

Without strong labor unions and labor laws, America’s middle class will disappear into a nation of masters and servants.

America is better than that. Our cause is just. Our motives and our actions must be honorable, but unequivocal.

We must prevail, because the loss of these precious rights will dishonor all who came before us, and resign the generations who follow to lives of meager toil without the just rewards of honest labor.

Say it ain’t so, governor.

But it is.

Maine Republican Gov. Paul LePage has ordered removal from the Maine Department of Labor of a 36-foot, 11-panel mural depicting the state’s and nation’s proud labor history.

Gone will be World War II icon Rosie the Riveter and other artwork depicting the role of the American worker in Maine and in U.S. history.

If that’s not sufficiently shameful, Gov. LePage ordered also that a Maine Department of Labor conference room, named for the nation’s first female secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, be changed.

Perkins, who helped guide New Deal policies, which included passage of the National Labor Relations Act, had, earlier in her career, encouraged workplace safety reforms following the deaths of 146 garment workers in the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York in 1911.

Gov. LePage says he wants the state’s Department of Labor to be more “business friendly.”

The Maine Sun Journal newspaper reported that the governor acted after “some business owners” complained the mural and conference room name were hostile to business.

It is not known what the Perkins conference room will be renamed. But given the hostility of Maine’s governor toward working families and organized labor, it could well become the Ebenezer Scrooge Conference Room.

Good grief.

WASHINGTON — Speaking to labor’s rank-and-file via an AFL-CIO electronic town hall meeting last week, Vice President Joe Biden warned of “barbarians at the gate” of working families as attacks on collective bargaining and union membership move forward in numerous state legislatures.

“The only people who have the capacity — organizational capacity and muscle — to keep, as they say, the barbarians from the gate, is organized labor,” Biden said.

“And make no mistake about it: The guys on the other team get it. They know if they cripple labor, the gate is open, man. The gate is wide open.”

Encouraging organized labor to continue the fight against extremists who would destroy labor unions, Biden said, “You built the middle class. We don’t see the value of collective bargaining, we see the absolute positive necessity of collective bargaining.”