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WARNING!
Gore/Bush
Coming ... |
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On
Workers’ Rights,
Bush Doesn’t Care,
Gore Doesn’t Convince
The Bush Camp has nothing to say
about workers' rights. Gore has made
some promises ... but ...
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When Bill Clinton and Al Gore were elected in
1992 along with a Democratic-controlled Congress, the labor
movement hoped we would finally get new laws passed to make it
easier to organize. Eight years later, despite the renewed
energy many unions have put into organizing, the unionization
rate has slipped from 15.8 percent to 13.9 percent. Yet
surveys show nearly half of workers would join a union if they
had the choice.
The Labor Research Association recently
calculated that if we wanted to raise the percentage of
private sector workers who are organized by just one percent
— to 10.4 percent — we’d have to hold more than 26,000
NLRB elections. Last year, there were 2,976, and if you’re a
union person, you know how slow and painful they were. Many
unions have gotten creative about circumventing NLRB
elections, but even so, organizing in the face of fierce,
government-sanctioned employer resistance will never be easy.
THE CLINTON/GORE
RECORD
We may not be able to hold the Clinton-Gore
administration entirely responsible for this state of affairs,
but we can hold them responsible for what they did and did not
do to the push for workers’ rights during their
administration. What they did do was appoint an
academia-dominated panel, the Dunlop Commission, to study the
issue, effectively putting it on the table for years. By the
time the Commission issued its meek recommendations, no one
was paying attention.
Many unions pinned their hopes on the 1994
bill that would have banned permanent replacement workers in a
strike. It went down to defeat in the Senate while Clinton was
off on a European excursion.
Would Al Gore be different? He and Lieberman
have promised to "fight for a new national law banning
permanent striker replacement workers" and to
"reform labor laws to protect workers’ rights to
organize into unions by providing for a more level playing
field between management and labor during organizing drives
and facilitating the ability of workers to organize and to
bargain collectively."
That’s better than the Bush camp, which has
nothing to say about workers’ rights and is anti-union
almost by definition. But there’s no reason to be sanguine
about the Gore-Lieberman offerings. At the very least, we
should hold them to their promises if they are elected.
DEMANDING CIVIL
RIGHTS AT WORK
The Labor Party believes we must go much
further. Why should workers leave their constitutional and
human rights at the workplace door? We need to build support
for a concept of workers’ rights founded on the broad
constitutional guarantees of free speech and assembly. We
should have a third constitutional right, to labor freedom
(the right to bargain, strike, and boycott). We must demand
enforcement of our civil rights at work.
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