Building Trades News

by Richard Slawson, Executive-Secretary

On Nov. 7, the Democratic Party was given a great opportunity to change America on behalf of working families. Progressives across the country are planning for two years of challenges to the corporate control of Washington, D.C.

As the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi said Democrats want to return to their roots and support middle class America. That can be true if returning to their roots includes strengthening the two “pillars” of the New Deal that President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted.

The Wagner Act, its legal title is the National Labor Relations Act, giving workers the right to organize and Social Security were to change everything in America. They are the pillars of the New Deal and the roots of the Democratic Party. The election gives new leadership the opportunity to reinforce the intent of the National Labor Relations Act and Social Security which provides solutions to many of the economic issues facing working families today.

Congress has been gathering signatures on the Free Choice Act over the last three years. The Free Choice Act is meant to re-establish worker rights that were legislated with the Wagner Act in 1935. It would recognize the rights of the majority who want a Union through a card check. With both Democrats and Republicans having signed on to support the bill, the Democratic leadership should have no argument with bringing legislation forward.

The workers in America need the right to have Unions to fight for a broader middle-class. We can all see what has happened in this country with weakened Unions: wages down, benefits eliminated, job site safety and conditions eroded. The Corporate bosses have had free reign over the last 50 years to pick away at the Wagner Act so that it has become a roadblock to Unionization instead of legal protections for Union rights. The first attack came in 1947, when a right-wing congress over road President Truman’s veto to institute the Taft-Hartley Act, which amended the Wagner Act and for the first time established a list of legal limits on Unions’ organizing. >From there, there has been a steady and continuous list of courtroom decisions that have made it easier for business bosses to kill workers’ incentive to organize. I have personal experience with the National Labor Relations Board, as do thousands of union organizers and workers, that refuses to investigate businesses that violate workers’ rights. It needs to be cleaned out of all of the agents that are anti-union and will not actively respond to workers’ organizing needs. Only with a renewal of the law and the staff will it work as originally intended.

Social Security is the basis for a stable economy and yet so-called conservatives and business bosses want to destroy it because they can’t control it and they have to pay a fair share of its funding. The American economy created havoc for workers and their families over our history with booms, recessions and depressions.

Only the very wealthy could withstand this roller coaster mostly unaffected. Social Security, as its name describes, for the first time gave workers some sense of protection from total economic ruin. Social Security and the Wagner Act were passed without one Republican Congressional vote, elected Republicans who were being directed by corporate interests as they are today.

The Nov. 7 Election has provided workers with a chance not only to save Social Security, but to strengthen it so that every working family will be able to have at least this “safety net” during their lifetimes. America’s economic future depends on Social Security as that “safety net.”

Even though the Country has been following a “free” economy economic theory for the last thirty years, which has caused the boom and bust cycle to surface again, there are still those who support this economic policy as posed by Milton Friedman, who passed away recently. The “free economy” supporters had a champion in Ronald Reagan, who introduced his administration’s “trickle down” theory, which pushed the idea that if the rich became richer the economy would benefit as those benefits would “trickle down” to workers. I don’t think it worked, because the rich got richer all right, but the middle class has suffered. At least with a strong Social Security Program there is a bottom.

A strong America depends on the economic “pillars” legislated by Congress and signed by a Progressive President. We must demand that our newly elected Congressional leadership, Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives and Harry Reid in the Senate, move immediately to strengthen our economic rights. As the 1st Amendment of the Constitution of the United States declares: “Congress shall make no law...abridging ...the right of the people peaceably to assemble; and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”; we have a right to petition the government. We can “petition” them with letters and telephone calls to re-establish our Union rights and to secure Social Security for “ourselves and our posterity.”