Opinion: Fight for working America

Mass mobilisation must defeat an administration intent on destroying the lives of working people, says Terence O’Sullivan...

In the United States the administration of President George W Bush has been a disaster for working families, for our economy and for our trade union movement. President Bush suffers from the arrogance of power and the ignorance of history. We, in the US labour movement, feel like we are trapped in a time warp. It is the first time since Herbert Hoover was President of the US in 1928, that the Republican Party has been in control of Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court all at once.

Unfortunately, we all know the results. While we are not on the edge of a depression, our situation is certainly depressing. The recession ended nearly two years ago. But workers’ wages are stagnating again. Employers are laying off tens of thousands of employees every month and are squeezing more out of the workers left behind.
We have a national job crisis of, literally, historic proportions. In fact, some three million jobs have been lost since President Bush took office – a record job loss for a so-called recovery. If that was not enough, we are also facing a relentless assault on job standards, on wages and healthcare, on retirement, on job safety and on workers’ freedom to form unions to improve their lives.

The biggest current threat is to our overtime pay standards. At the behest of corporate supporters, the Bush administration is proposing so-called reforms that will cut eight million workers out of overtime pay benefits. President Bush gave away our national treasury with enormous tax breaks for the rich. Because of that, we do not have enough money to pay for our social programmes and safety nets. Meanwhile, our unions continue to suffer a decline in membership. We cannot seem to organise new members fast enough to offset those lost to the economy.

We have about 13 million members in AFL-CIO affiliated unions. But a recent poll showed that more than 40 million Americans would join a union if they could. The biggest block to their joining is the determination of employers to violate both the spirit and the letter of our labour laws to defeat union campaigns. Some of those are employers from other countries.

Our brothers and sisters in the teamsters union, for instance, are facing a bitter anti-union campaign adopted by National Express Group plc. In Great Britain National Express is heavily unionised. It speaks proudly of its relationship with the affiliated unions of the TUC. In our country, the company has refused to agree to union security for school bus drivers, has failed to provide reasonable healthcare and has provoked decertification petitions among its union employees.

When confronted with an organising drive, employers in our country do everything they can to delay union elections and to delay certification once the election is held. They stall for months and even years on bargaining a first contract and they stop at nothing to frighten and intimidate the workers who want to organise.
In September, organised labour in the United States celebrated Labour Day by launching three national campaigns simultaneously.

The first is to defend the freedom of workers to join our unions; the second to reverse our horrific job losses under the administration and leadership of George W. Bush. The third campaign is to implement the most aggressive voter registration and get-out-to-vote campaign our country has ever seen, in order to defeat President George Bush in this year’s election.

We are also forming a new organisation called “Working America” – a new national union that will reach out to workers who are not members of organised labour to give them a way to join in the effort to create more well-paid jobs and to protect the ones that we have.

There are millions of working people who would like to be part of the AFL-CIO’s efforts for social justice and who want a voice with which to speak out, to change the direction of our country. Working America will give them that chance. We will recruit communities nationwide. We will go door to door to build even more support for legislation and policies that help working families.

We will organise the largest political mobilisation of working people in our history. We will hold elected officials accountable for their inaction on the trade and job crises, and for the war that the President has declared on working families and our unions since the day he took office.

Terence O’Sullivan is Vice President of the American trade union federation AFL-CIO.