Unions Bid For Resurgence

[boomerbust]

Source: The Daily Reporter

.Article

The Daily Reporter

Unions bid for resurgence
Published - Sep 07 2009 04:48PM CDT

By Diane Petryk, The Daily Item, Sunbury, Pa.

If you are working this Labor Day, chances are you are younger than 35, have no health insurance and are not able to meet daily expenses.

If you are low-income, chances are even better you're on the job today.

That's what the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the U.S. and Canada, discovered in a recent national survey.

Labor Day, a national holiday signed into law in 1894, was designed to be just that, a holiday from labor. It came to be following a series of worker strikes for better wages and working conditions, culminating in the brutally repressed Pullman strike in Illinois the same year.

Most workers, however, didn't win the legal right to collective bargaining until the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935. It covered workers only in the private sector, and much of the protection it offered was watered down by the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which gave employers avenues to avoid collective bargaining.

Now, for the first time in more than 60 years, unions see an opportunity to regain strength.

"If we can get the Employee Free Choice Act passed, it will close a lot of loopholes," said Jimmy Little, of Sunbury, president of Teamsters Local 764 in Milton. The act is before Congress.


Read more: http://www.rr.com/news/news/article/rr/4473267/8854771/Unions_bid_for_resurgence/1

[pattmarty]

1. The EFCA isn't a cure all for ALL the problems of the poor, middle class..........

.........and workers, but it'll sure make a huge dent in the status quo.

[Winterblues]

2. I wish it wasn't the teamsters that were trying to speak for the UNIONS

In 2000 the Teamsters built their new Union Hall in Houston Tx with SCAB Labor and the reason given was that Union Labor was too expensive. The teamsters also sided with Bush* over Democrats in the 2004 election. Fuck the Teamsters. They lost me completely.