COHEN DEMANDS PROGRESSIVES
BACK EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT

Using typically direct language, Communications Workers President Larry Cohen is demanding progressives nationwide back workers and their unions and massively mobilize to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

Speaking to a keynote luncheon at the Take Back America conference in D,C,--a gathering of 2,000 progressives representing groups ranging from unions and womens’ rights to anti-war, pro-privacy and environmental causes, Cohen said labor would do its share to mobilize its members for the bill, but “we need you to help us to be in the fight.

“We can’t do this ourselves,” he added, speaking of passing the law in the next Congress to help level the playing field between workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining. Cohen, the AFL-CIO’s Organizing Committee chair, flourished the “million-member” signup cards labor is distributing to its members for the cause, asking delegates to sign them and send them back to CWA.

The Employee Free Choice Act, which passed the Democratic-run House last year by a 241-185 margin, fell victim to a Senate GOP filibuster. It would help workers by outlawing management’s “captive audience” meetings where workers must listen to anti-union harangues under threat of discipline if they don’t.

It would also impose larger fines and triple damages for labor law-breaking, make it easier to get court orders against violators, write card-check recognition of unions into labor law and mandate arbitration when labor and bosses can’t agree on a first contract.

“We have 12% of our workers having bargaining coverage. That’s the lowest of all the industrial democracies,” he said. Referring back to one of his predecessors at the podium, leader Jack Layton of Canada’s pro-labor New Democratic Party, Cohen added that “much of the difference between Canada and the U.S., in issues like health care, has to do with the fact that three times as many workers in Canada have a union.”

Canadian labor law includes card-check recognition and more. Canada also has government-run universal health care. Canada is 32% unionized. Other developed nations range up to France (95%) and Sweden (92%).

Cohen linked the lack of workers’ rights and unionization in the U.S. to the wider issues the delegates discussed in their three days of sessions,, including universal health care, good jobs and fair trade.

Passing the law “is not a test between the corporate lobby and the labor lobby. Whether you’re union or not, when workers have unions and have a real voice on the job, we change our own lives and we can…really change America,” he said.