Think Progress

By Pat Garofalo on Sep 3rd, 2009 at 11:40 am

Yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) promised that no Republicans will vote for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), should it come to the Senate floor. In order for the bill to pass “the Democratic members will have to do it,” he said.

In a speech before the business organization Commerce Lexington, McConnell explained that the reason for such uncompromising opposition is that workers don’t actually want to join unions due to the “very enlightened management in this country now”:

McConnell said the AFL-CIO wants the measure approved because “private sector union membership has declined from a high of 35 percent in the 1950s to 7.5 percent now.” That has happened “because we have very enlightened management in this country now, treating employees better and employees have decided they don’t want to pay the dues.”

Source

Sam Stein

Bloomberg.com

By John Lippert and Holly Rosenkrantz

May 7 (Bloomberg) — Three Chicago billionaires who helped fund President Barack Obama’s election campaign are fighting legislation he backs that would make it easier for unions to organize hotels they own.

Penny Pritzker, Obama’s campaign finance chairwoman and a director of Global Hyatt Corp., has told the president she is opposed to the measure, known as card check, said a person familiar with the situation. Neil Bluhm, a partner in Walton Street Capital LLC, also opposes the bill, the person said. Lester Crown, chairman of Henry Crown & Co., criticized the proposal in an interview.

For the city’s business leaders who nurtured Obama’s White House bid, card check is a gut check on support for their hometown president. Labor, which spent $100 million on Democratic campaigns last year, made it a top priority to enact a bill giving workers bargaining rights based on signing cards instead of winning a secret-ballot election.

Voting privately is “an American prerogative and shouldn’t be overturned,” said Crown, 83, whose family holdings include the Ojai Valley Inn & Spa in Ojai, California, and the Little Nell hotel in Aspen, Colorado. “The recommended legislation is absolutely the wrong thing to do.”  Source Article

Courtesy Religion Dispatches.

If you know anything about politics, it is a game changer. It is a total game changer for the next 40 to 50 years if the Democrats are able to get this legislation.

- Sen. John Ensign, R-Nevada

We like driving the car and we’re not going to give the steering wheel to anybody but us.

- Lee Scott, former Wal-Mart CEO

once worked professionally in the labor movement, and I often say that I have never felt the slightest discontinuity in moving from labor organizing and labor strategizing to ordained ministry. To me all of it has been the Lord’s work—and here is why.

All the people straining at the gnats in biblical interpretation—namely, what God may or may not think about various forms of sexual expression—consistently miss the big theme within the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. That theme is deliverance from bondage and God’s call to build just community—to resist Egyptian ways of oppression and sweated labor. As many have pointed out, the Bible has far more to say about economic justice than any other subject, to the point that right worship of God is directly equated with dealing justly with one’s fellow humans (witness the Isaiah 58 text used by the Sharon Watkins, who preached at the national prayer service held on the day after Barack Obama’s inauguration). The biblical Sabbath and Jubilee keynotes—keynotes also struck by Jesus right at the start of his public ministry—contain within them God’s main message to us about maintaining just community. And what “proclaim liberty throughout the land” means, in practical terms, is abolish debt peonage and correct corrosive imbalances in wealth and social power.

Does this land of ours suffer from debt peonage and corrosive wealth imbalance? Is that even a question??

I was moved beyond measure to see the inauguration-related concert at the Lincoln Memorial open with Bruce Springsteen’s “Come On Up To The Rising” and end with Pete Seeger leading the multitude in singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” Bringing Seeger up there wasn’t corny. It connected this moment to the last great economic crisis of 75 years ago. And I was glad that Pete made sure to include this little-known verse of Guthrie’s anthem:

In the squares of the city, in the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I’d seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?

It’s not 1934, and we’re not at the point of mass hunger quite yet. But to pretend that working families haven’t been hit really hard—and with many more blows to come—is delusional.

The Employee Free Choice Act

For more than three decades U.S. policy actively facilitated the corporate/conservative agenda of concentrating wealth at the top. We’ve seen where that got us. And there is no better engine than the power of workplace democracy and collective bargaining to put more money into the hands of regular people—and also to restore some of the dignity that creation theology says rightly belongs to those who labor honestly. That is why progressive religious leaders need to get behind the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which will come before the new Congress within the next few months.

EFCA would strengthen the labor movement, and I should acknowledge from the get-go that religious progressives historically have had mixed feelings about trade unions. Catholics and Jews have generally had much more favorable views of unionization than white Protestants, in part because of the vast number of Catholic immigrants to the U.S. who benefited significantly from their union membership but also because of the impact of Catholic and Jewish social teaching. White Protestants (my peeps) have too often tended to cling to a by-your-bootstraps ethic of individual achievement, joined to a suspicion that there is something slightly sinister and foreign about union leaders and about the union concept of class solidarity.

I grew up ten miles from the Kohler Company’s sprawling furnaces and factories in Eastern Wisconsin during the seemingly endless and ultimately victorious struggle by the UAW to unionize those facilities. The Dutch Calvinists I grew up among—those who worked at Kohler—were mostly strikebreakers. It was a religious conviction among many that the owners should be able to operate their works without union interference.

But I am here to argue that at this moment in American life, all clear-thinking people of faith should be rallying around the union banner. If we’re going to draw analogies between Obama’s challenge and FDR’s challenge, we would do well to recall that what drove the New Deal and significantly re-made American politics during the Roosevelt years was the tripling of U.S. union membership that took place over the ten years following 1935—the year that workers first got real bargaining rights under the Wagner Act.

-Article continued @ Sourced Site.

Editorial Comment: See subsequent comment for a full link to full article, if the above link fails to open. -Shinai.