PROGRESSIVE ROCKLAND

Wage Theft in America - A Presentation by Author Kim Bobo

The Justice For All Speakers Forum and the Hudson Valley Area Labor Federation are presenting a discussion with Kim Bobo on Sunday, October 11th. Bobo, of Interfaith Worker Justice, will be presenting on Wage Theft in America. Wage Theft in America isn’t just the title of her recent book, but also a growing problem throughout the country. Millions of workers are being cheated while employers continue to take advantage and profit off of workers in almost every industry. Bobo has outlined what we can do to prevent these injustices and will be in Poughkeepsie to discuss it with us.

When: Sunday, October 11th, 4:00pm

Where: Poughkeepsie Friends Meeting

          249 Hooker Avenue, Poughkeepsie

 

Please visit our website for more information: http://www.hvalf.org

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney On the Pope's Encyclical

Pope Benedict XVI's commitment to the cause of working people worldwide shines today. In the new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate or Charity in Truth, Pope Benedict XVI offers an ethical critique of the global economic crisis and proposes concrete elements for policies anchored in moral values that enhance the dignity of all, especially the poor and working people.  The encyclical levels a strong critique at the forces of unfettered free-market capitalism and globalized greed.

Particularly, the new encyclical offers a much-needed reminder that to create an economy that works for everyone it is critical to protect workers' fundamental right to join together as a union and bargain for a better future. As the Pope makes clear, it is not only working people, but also entire communities - -  nations even - -  that stand to benefit when workers exercise this right.  In the document, the Pope reaffirms the Church's longstanding position that labor unions play a vital role in efforts to build a more just economy—one in which even the most marginalized workers are guaranteed basic dignity and respect.

As the gap between the wealthy and the poor continues to widen, and workers around the world are denied the dignity and freedom they deserve, the union movement stands with the Catholic Church in its call for a global economy that works for working people.  Now, more than ever, we must rally to protect the rights of workers—at home and worldwide—to come together in unions and build a better future for us all.    

Fair Share Tax Reform Meeting

The Rockland County Working Families Party
presents
A Forum on
Property Tax Reform / Tax Fairness
with
State Senator Thomas Morahan
Assemblywoman Ellen Jaffee
Assemblyman Kenneth Zebrowski

Discussing the Galef ( Assembly ), Little ( NYS Senate) and the Working Families Party’s Circuit Breaker Property Tax Plans and the Governors Tax Cap Plan:  Differences, similarities and goals to be achieved

THURSDAY, APRIL 23rd, 2009 at 7:30 PM
at the Fellowship of Reconciliation
521 North Broadway, Upper Nyack

WORKING FAMILIES PARTY - ROCKLAND COUNTY CHAPTER
POST OFFICE BOX 604 - NYACK, NY   10960
wfprockland@verizon.net - 504-220-3766

How do we create real solutions that give relief to working families who need it most without jeopardizing essential public services such as hospitals, schools and public safety?

Rally Against the Budget Cuts - March 19, 2009

Speak out against the Governor’s budget cuts and stand up for a better solution!

Thursday, March 19, 2009 12:00 p.m.

Steps of the County Office Building, 11 New Hempstead Rd, New City

 

Devastating cuts threaten our communities, our jobs, our neighbors and our families. Speak out for a fair solution! There is a better way.

 

Join us at the Rockland County Office Building in New City on Thursday to urge Governor Paterson to meet New York's budget shortfall by raising state income taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers instead of slashing health care, education and other vital services.

Check out www.fairsharereform.org for more information

Call Renee at 917-686-5927 for more details on the event

ACORN Fights Foreclosures

I have an amazing story to share with you - a story of a community coming together and, through collective action and civil disobedience, saving the home of a family of renters in Oakland caught up in the foreclosure crisis. And not just save the home, but help them buy it from their foreclosed landlord!

The reason I'm sharing this with you is because we are going to be doing this exact same thing in cities around the country  and I wanted to invite you to join in the fight to end the financial crisis and save the homes of individuals caught in the storm.

But first, here's the story of Eddie and Martha Daniels of Oakland, California.

At 6:00 am on Wednesday, February 4, more than 30 members of ACORN gathered at the home of Eddie and Martha Daniels in West Oakland, armed with prayers, cell phones, and the hope that Wednesday would not be a day in which yet another family who had done no wrong was claimed as a victim of the raging foreclosure crisis. 

Since 2006, the Daniels had paid their rent each month to their landlord, who had not told them that he was not, in turn, paying the mortgage on time. The landlord's lender had foreclosed on the property and terminated the lease, and on Wednesday the sheriff was scheduled to come to their home and evict the Daniels, a family on the verge becoming another statistic in the national economic catastrophe.

ACORN members rallied their neighbors, spoke with local media, including one radio station that broadcast live from the home, and flooded the sheriff's office with calls urging compassion and forbearance of the scheduled eviction.  At the same time, ACORN Housing Corporation was working furiously behind the scenes with the lender to negotiate a stay on the eviction, which successfully came through. 

This alone would have saved their home, but what happened next was unique: ACORN Housing Corporation was able to counsel the Daniels and help them apply for a VA loan that would enable them to purchase the very property from which they were almost evicted earlier that day!

Maud Hurd, ACORN's President, said, "This shows the power of communities coming together to fight back against the foreclosures that are taking our homes and ruining our neighborhoods."

Amen. And that's why I wanted to write to you. Today ACORN is launching a national effort modeled on what happened yesterday in Oakland: the ACORN Home Defenders.  The Home Defenders gives everyone an opportunity to stand in solidarity with families like the Daniels as they face the economic maelstrom engulfing our country. It is designed to help keep families in their homes and put pressure on our elected officials to address this root cause of the economic collapse.

The Home Defenders program links members of local communities with families who have taken the bold step of refusing to cooperate with the foreclosure process. It responds to the desperate calls for help found in the grim foreclosure statistics (2.3 million families faced foreclosure in 2008) and echoes the sentiments of leaders like Toledo, Ohio-area Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur who recently said, "Stay in your homes. If the American people, anybody out there is being foreclosed, don't leave."

The urgency of this crisis demands immediate action. So the Home Defenders program is rolling out in two stages. The first stage will include eight "Tier 1" metro areas: Baltimore, MD; Contra Costa County, CA; Houston, TX; Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Oakland, CA; Orlando, FL and Tucson, AZ. Initial trainings for people located in these metro areas will take place during the second week in February, with kick-off events scheduled to occur during the 3rd week of the month.

The second stage will include 16 "Tier 2" metro areas: Albany, NY; Boston, MA; Bridgeport, CT; Broward County, FL; Cincinnati, OH; Cleveland, OH; Dallas, TX; Denver, CO; Detroit, MI; Durham, NC; Flint, MI; Minneapolis, MN; Pittsburgh, PA; Raleigh, NC; San Mateo County, CA; and Wilmington, DE. Trainings and kick-off events will occur a few weeks after those in the Tier 1 cities.

New cities are continuing to join this campaign, so if you do not live near any of the metro areas listed above, you can still participate in actions to save the homes of families in your community as they come on-board. For people who live in areas that will not have local organizers helping drive this program, ACORN is creating Home Defender Tool-Kits that help you fight back against the crisis in your neighborhood.

I urge you to take this step in helping local families fight back against the crisis caused by reckless financiers who made billions in bonuses in equity-stripping schemes designed to set homebuyers up for failure.

By showing that communities are refusing to participate in their own decimation, we will force elected officials to finally shift their emphasis from bailing out Wall Street to bailing out Main Street.

Join with me.

In strength and solidarity,

Bertha Lewis
ACORN CEO and Chief Organizer

EJ McMahon's Prescription: Economic Death

EJ McMahon just can't help himself. The Manhattan Institute's "Director of the Empire Center for New York Policy" proves in a series of op-eds that he's more far-right ideologue than economist and more worried about pushing his agenda than the facts. Last week it was the Daily News, today it was the New York Post, but the message was still the same: taxes and spending=bad, cutting services=good.  

So while President Obama is fighting to save our economy through a massive stimulus package, McMahon is intent on pulling New York in the opposite direction, and straight off an economic cliff.  And he isn't going to let any "facts" get in the way. 

Let's take it from the top. Like McMahon said last week, 41% of New York's income tax revenue comes from the richest 1% of taxpayers. Seems like a lot, until you consider just how rich they are.  That same 1% earns more than two and a half times the total income of the bottom 50% of New Yorkers. (1) In fact, New York has the widest income gap between the rich and the middle class of any state in the nation (2). 

Turns out, New York's wealthy pay less of their income in state taxes than the rest of us - the top 1% of New Yorkers pay 6.5% of their income in state taxes, while the middle class pays a whopping 11.6% of theirs. (3) How's that possible?  New York State's income tax hits its top rate at just $40,000 of family income - which means Donald Trump pays the same tax rate as his doormen and limo drivers. Combine that near-flat tax with regressive sales and property taxes, and being a wealthy New Yorker turns out to be a pretty sweet deal. 

McMahon is right about one thing, spending in New York has gone up. But he doesn't say why. We made a conscious - and millions of New Yorkers would say wise - choice to provide millions of uninsured children with healthcare coverage, invest in our future by instituting universal Pre-K, and finally begin to fully fund underprivileged school districts that have historically been denied their fair share.

Eviscerating the budget as McMahon proposes would undo those efforts, and set New York back a decade. 

Finally, McMahon's favorite myth is that raising taxes on the wealthy would cause them to leave the state, and damage our long-term economic prospects.  But he seems to have forgotten what happened the last time the state raised income taxes on the rich in 2003.  The economy recovered, the rich got richer and more numerous (there were more high-end taxpayers when New York phased out the tax increase in 2006 than when it began), and we were able to prevent billions in devastating cuts to healthcare, education, and hundreds of crucial public investments. (4)

In fact, hundreds of economists led by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz warned in a letter to the Governor this fall that reducing critical spending would only deepen New York's recession.  What's more, as the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman points out, slashing our way out of the fiscal crisis would have the effect of weakening the economic stimulus President Obama and Congress are poised to put in motion.

There is a way out of the fiscal crisis. But it will mean asking everyone to pay their fair share, including the wealthy New Yorkers who could most afford to do so.

Why Were Workers Fired for Organizing in Newburgh?

Cross posted from www.jasongooljar.com

A friend of mine recently recruited me to join a Facebook group called “Support Workers in Newburgh Fired for Organizing!” Naturally this made me curious to find out why this happened and so I went to the Times-Herald Record’s account to learn more.

Teamsters Local 445 says it will ask a federal court to force Concept Packaging owner Jeffrey Fanning to give back pay to workers he allegedly fired for supporting the union and to post conspicuous notices of the workers’ rights to unionize.

The factory, which employs 62, most of whom are Latino women, is the country’s second-largest bottler of nail polish.

Local 445 filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board on Oct. 8, claiming Fanning harassed, threatened and ultimately fired at least 10 workers for signing a petition to join the Teamsters.

Ah, so there you have it this is a case of your typical nasty boss worker harassment. The owner claims he laid people off because of lack of work and seniority which are proven false in the article.

But, “I know for a fact he did not lay off in order of seniority,” said Local 445 officer Adrian Huff. “There were workers who were there four years who were fired, and others with less than six months who remained at work.”

Of course the owner’s attorney failed to give a comment to the Times-Herald Record. There also appears to be two OSHA inspections ongoing at this factory.

In a separate action, the Workers Rights Law Center recently filed complaints with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration citing unsafe conditions at Concept Packaging, where employees describe poor ventilation, noxious fumes, broken toilets and dead rodents.

In August, one worker collapsed, suffering respiratory arrest and partial paralysis of his arm and face, according to Phoebe Schell of the WRLC. She said when the employee tried to return to work, he was fired.

Can Labor Revive the American Dream?

By Esther Kaplan

Research assistance for this article was provided by Sarah Arnold and Lucas Mann.

The financial markets are in tatters, consumer spending is anemic and the recession continues to deepen, but corporate America is keeping its eyes on the prize: crushing organized labor.

The Center for Union Facts, a business front group, has taken out full-page ads in newspapers linking SEIU president Andy Stern to the Rod Blagojevich scandal. The Chamber of Commerce is capitalizing on the debate over the Big Three bailout to claim that "unions drove the auto companies off the cliff," while minority leader Mitch McConnell and other Republican senators insist on steep wage cuts.

A December 10 Republican strategy memo revealed their central obsession: "Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor," the memo read. "This is a precursor to card check"--a clear reference to the Employee Free Choice Act.

This simple amendment to federal labor law, which would, among other things, allow workers to unionize when a majority sign cards rather than requiring a bruising election, has galvanized the business community in a way even the $700 billion bailout couldn't.

 

"I get the sense that this is more important to them than even taxes or regulation," says the AFL-CIO's director of government affairs, Bill Samuels. "This is about power. And the business community is not going to give up power willingly."

Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott said as much to a meeting with analysts in October. "We like driving the car," he told them, "and we're not going to give the steering wheel to anybody but us."

In the lead-up to the election, the co-founder of Home Depot, Bernie Marcus, called Employee Free Choice "the demise of civilization." Wal-Mart summoned store managers into mandatory meetings to warn them against it.

 

Industrial launderer Cintas launched a website to oppose it.

 

The retail industry associations paid blue-chip lobbying firms to block it.

 

The Chamber of Commerce hired Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao's chief of staff to run its opposition campaign, which trashed the bill as antidemocratic because it allows workers to bypass a formal election.

Business groups spent tens of millions on ads attacking Democrats in tight Senate races, including $5 million targeting challenger Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a supporter of the bill who was smeared with a mailer accusing him of doing the bidding of corrupt labor leaders and trailed at every campaign appearance by a grim reaper claiming "Merkley kills democracy." "I've never seen anything like it," says Merkley's campaign manager, John Isaac, "where a group spent so much money to insert their issue into a campaign."

At first glance, Employee Free Choice looks like little more than a technical fix. In addition to allowing unionizing through majority sign-up, it stiffens penalties for intimidating or firing union supporters and imposes arbitration when a company refuses to bargain a first contract.

But as the leading corporate lobbies recognize, the bill could have far-reaching effects. By reviving unions, it could push up wages, realigning the broken economy so that company profits are spread beyond CEOs. It could help rein in corporate power and, perhaps most threatening to a business community that has enjoyed decades of deregulation, sustain a progressive majority in Washington in the years to come.

If progressives aren't doing the math, conservatives are. "Unions don't spend money to elect Republicans," Senator John Ensign told a group of executives this past fall. "They spend money to elect Democrats. From our perspective, this would have devastating consequences."

Throughout his run for president, Obama was explicit in his support for Employee Free Choice and his understanding of the forces arrayed against it. "If a majority of workers want a union, they should get a union; it's that simple," he told union members in Pennsylvania in April. "Let's stand up to the business lobby."

 

Since his election, he's sent other friendly signals: supporting a factory takeover by pink-slipped glass workers in Chicago and tapping Representative Hilda Solis as labor secretary. While her predecessor stacked the labor department with experienced unionbusters and gutted regulations and workplace safety inspections, Solis has been a regular on Los Angeles picket lines and pushed a minimum-wage hike into law as a state legislator. Significantly, she made an impassioned plea from the House floor for the Employee Free Choice Act.

But the business lobby Obama once railed against is now giving him a taste of its wares. The Chamber denounced the bill in op-eds as "payback" to "union bosses" that would signal the end of "workplace democracy" and the advent of "Soviet-style thuggery." All the big industry associations called press conferences to declare war. "This will be Armageddon," one top Chamber official said of the battle ahead. Another pointedly warned Obama against "picking a fight right away on a major, titanic clash."

Obama's advisers got the memo. At a November gathering of CEOs, Rahm Emanuel refused to answer a question about the bill, and that same month economic adviser Jennifer Granholm called it "divisive." Obama recently restated his commitment to ending the "barriers and roadblocks" to unionization but avoided any reference to the bill itself. "The Chamber is fanning the flames on this, saying this is the epic battle between labor and business," says a key strategist working to pass the measure, "and it scares the shit out of the Obama people and some of the Democrats."

For a snapshot of how current labor law works, you could do worse than to travel to McComb, Ohio, a small town a half-hour south of Toledo, where, one Wednesday in early December, Bill Lawhorn showed up for his job as a forklift operator for the first time in six years. He and six other workers were fired in 2002 after leading a campaign to unionize Consolidated Biscuit, a massive industrial bakery in McComb that produces popular snacks for Nabisco such as Oreos, Nutter Butters and Ritz crackers. The workers started out with "a fire in their belly," recalls an organizer from the bakery and confectionary workers union, with more than 650 of 800 signing cards of interest.

But after Consolidated Biscuit hired a unionbusting firm and started threatening workers with firings or deportations or shuttering the plant altogether, the union lost the election.

 

In 2004 an administrative law judge found the threats and firings to be illegal, but the company appealed to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and then to a circuit court. It wasn't until mid-November that Consolidated Biscuit was finally forced to bring Lawhorn back and allow a fresh vote.

Consolidated Biscuit is one of the few big employers in northwest Ohio, and after eleven years earning around $12.50 an hour there, Lawhorn was stuck hunting for work in a region where jobs are scarce. He estimates that he applied for more than a hundred, including security guard positions paying only $7 an hour, but he says he never got a single call. Eventually he borrowed money from his kids to buy a truck to haul garbage for his neighbors, which brought in a little extra cash until gas prices got too high.

 

He and his wife skated along on her wages from a retail distribution center, but then she developed heart trouble and ended up out of work herself. "Times really, really got hard," he says. "I'm 52 years old. At 52, you shouldn't borrow from your children; you should loan to them. You shouldn't wonder how do you buy your grandchildren a Christmas present." Though Lawhorn received a paycheck in time for Christmas last year, Consolidated Biscuit is still contesting the order to give him back pay.

At least Lawhorn got his job back; one of his fired co-workers died before the case was resolved.

 

Nationwide, some 86,000 workers have been illegally fired over the past eight years for trying to unionize (countless others have been threatened), and only a fraction of these get reinstated by the NLRB.

 

So Lawhorn's return to the forklift is what passes for a victory these days, under the shredded protections of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, whose intent was not merely to protect the right to collective bargaining but to "encourag[e] the practice."

That, says Cornell University's Kate Bronfenbrenner, is long gone. According to her research, employers fire workers in a quarter of all campaigns, threaten workers with plant closings or outsourcing in half and employ mandatory one-on-one meetings where workers are threatened with job loss in two-thirds. All of these tactics are illegal.

 

Unions, meanwhile, are consigned to getting out their message off the clock and off the premises. "The fact that our labor law has no penalties for employer violations, no punitive damages, no financial penalties, that the worst thing that happens to employers when they commit egregious violations is a slap on the wrist, has emboldened employers to break the law at an extreme that is really astonishing," says Bronfenbrenner.

The crisis is so deep that in a rising number of campaigns, unions have abandoned board-certified elections altogether, instead using public pressure to secure union recognition from employers when a majority of workers sign cards. Over the past decade, the number of election petitions has fallen by 41 percent.

Take the Communications Workers of America: within a year and a half of pressuring management at Cingular (now AT&T) to recognize card check, CWA had organized 30,000 new members. But CWA recently lost three elections in a row at Comcast worksites, despite enjoying majority support--the result of antiunion threats from Comcast. With Employee Free Choice in place, CWA could have used card check even with this sort of intransigent employer.

Likewise, with Employee Free Choice in effect, Consolidated Biscuit workers would have had a union since May 2002, when a majority first signed cards. With the threat of arbitration, a contract would have been signed before the end of the year, likely boosting pay to $20 an hour. And the penalty for firings may have been stiff enough--triple back pay plus penalties--that Lawhorn and the others might never have lost their jobs.

What would its passage unleash now? Though union membership has slid to 12 percent in recent decades, the desire to unionize has grown--from 30 percent of nonunion workers in the mid-1980s to 53 percent of them now. "Look, the bill will not stop corporate unionbusting," says the AFL-CIO's head of strategic research, Kenneth Zinn, "but it will level the playing field for workers to join a union."

 

If the bill passes, says Change to Win campaign director Bob Callahan, his federation's unions--including the Service Employees, Teamsters, and Food and Commercial Workers--are poised to organize on a massive scale. He predicts 5 million new members in the first eighteen months after passage--meaning, he says, 5 million workers winning a double-digit raise, nearly a million of them lifted out of poverty. Zinn imagines whole industries, and even the "right to work" South, possibly opening up to unionization.

With the concentration of wealth approaching 1929 levels, there is a forceful case to be made that unionization holds the best chance for a reversal. Corporate profits have doubled since 2001, while real wages have flatlined and the number of workers earning poverty wages has risen to nearly a quarter of the workforce. Unionized workers earn between 15 and 28 percent more than their nonunion counterparts and receive far better health and retirement benefits, and when unions reach a high enough density in a particular industry, wages in nonunion shops tend to rise to meet the new standard.

But unionization rates have been crashing for decades. "Historically, unionization basically created the middle class," says economist James Galbraith. "First, by its direct effect on the wages and benefits of unionized workers; second, by its indirect effect on the wages of workers who weren't unionized; and third, by the impact unions had on the creation of the social institutions that underpin the middle class, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid--the very structures of the New Deal and the Great Society." A line tracing the rise of wealth inequality and one tracing the decline in unionization make a perfect mirror image of each other.

The business community's massive campaign this past fall to defeat candidates who supported Employee Free Choice focused on the misbegotten claim that the legislation would take away workers' right to choose a union by secret ballot election.

 

Actually, labor law allows either a secret ballot or majority sign-up, at the discretion of the employer; the bill would simply put that choice in the hands of the workers.

Still, the Chamber, betting on its trumped-up prodemocracy message, dumped millions of dollars on ads with this message in nine battleground states, some using a Sopranos actor to play the union tough who just might kneecap you if you vote no. Interestingly, the gambit failed. Voters in these states told pollsters that secret ballot in union elections ranked last on their list of concerns; many more said they were troubled by the excessive power of big corporations than said they were troubled by the power of big labor.

Since the election, the business community has savvily retooled its campaign. In a November 21 letter to Congress, the Chamber wrote that passage of the bill "would have a particularly devastating impact on small employers who, as the primary source for new jobs, would be counted on to reverse the current economic downturn." The bill, the letter went on, "is an awful idea in good economic times and a catastrophic idea in the difficult economic times now upon us."

Days later, the Chamber presented new research claiming that unionization is a drag on GDP--an assertion that Galbraith and other economists find laughable. And the Chamber used negotiations over the auto bailout to claim that unionization bankrupted the industry.

 

In fact, labor makes up a tiny portion of a car's production cost, but in a tense economic environment with spiking unemployment, such talking points easily gained traction in the media.

If the rhetoric doesn't work, the business lobby is ready to threaten retaliation. "They'll promise to dump money to oppose supporters of the bill in the next election," says Mary Beth Maxwell, director of the pro-union American Rights at Work. The Chamber of Commerce has been aggressively educating its local chapters so that business leaders can buttonhole senators in their home districts.

When Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat who counts Wal-Mart among her top donors, met with the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce in late November, she tried to talk about healthcare and the economy, but the businessmen in the room hammered her on Employee Free Choice.

 

A Rove disciple, former US Attorney Tim Griffin, publicly mulled over a run against her if she repeats her 2007 yes vote. Weeks later, the senator hedged her bets, saying the reform is perhaps "not necessary." "We have the most ideological business community in the world," says economist Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, "and they enforce it."

According to the AFL-CIO's Samuels, "We're seeing heavy pressure from the retail world, the chain drugstores, Wal-Mart, the retail federation, the nonunion building contractors and some of the low-wage employers like Tyson's, the ones who have spent twenty years trying to create a business climate that isn't friendly toward unions, and from the several-billion-dollar-industry of antiunion consultants." Wal-Mart, he says, is at the top of that list. "They're flying their forces into DC already." Wal-Mart sent a shot across the bow in October, when the company shuttered an auto shop in Quebec within days of the workers there voting to organize. "It will be very tight in the Senate," says one Democratic Congressional aide. "We're not kidding ourselves."

One of the many ironies here is that the Employee Free Choice Act already has majority support--the bill just needs to get a vote on the Senate floor. In 2007 the bill passed overwhelmingly in the House and garnered fifty-one votes in the Senate, but when Democrats failed to achieve a filibuster-proof majority, the business press was quick to assert that this put "a question mark" over labor law reform. The real question, says SEIU president Stern, is, "Are we willing to say if we can't get sixty votes we won't fight? We will lose as progressives if we concede that idea."

Other union leaders worry privately that the bill can't be won intact, that the increased penalties for worker intimidation might face better odds on their own. Representative George Miller, chair of the House Education and Labor Committee, insists that it can. "We had the same opposition last year [2007], and the members understand the issue pretty clearly," he says. "You're either going to give the middle class the tools so they can hold on to their economic livelihood or you're not. It's a very important priority for me."

SEIU has committed 50 percent of its staff to a field campaign in support of Employee Free Choice and national healthcare and expects each local to commit 30 percent of its staff as well. Secretary-treasurer Anna Burger says the union will be in fourteen states with an ambitious "field, phone, air, town-hall-meeting press strategy. We're going to tie that to a Hill strategy as well so they never lose sight of us, and we never lose sight of them, until we get this done. And if they don't vote with us, they need to be clear about what's going to happen to them. People up for re-election should experience some of our ground operation now."

Kenneth Zinn says the AFL-CIO will be active in eighteen states, continuing the record-breaking ground operation it put in place for the 2008 election. It is also raising $30 million for a media campaign. Altogether, says Bob Callahan of Change to Win, the two labor federations will have several thousand people on the ground full time to fight for the bill. "Labor has done an incredible job of staying focused on this as a top priority," says Mary Beth Maxwell, "and allies have really stepped up and realized this is more than just labor's fight."

As UC Santa Barbara labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein points out, the New Deal was not just a series of reforms that stabilized banking or stimulated the economy. "Those reforms," he says, "were backstopped by the organization of the working class, and those reforms continued for two generations." Any Obama-era reforms, he adds, "can and will dissipate" unless unions form an institutional bulwark against retreat.

Fred Feinstein, a former counsel to the NLRB during the Clinton years, was a Congressional aide in the late '70s, the last time Democrats, in control on Capitol Hill, made a full-court press to pass labor law reform.

 

They failed to achieve cloture in the Senate by a single vote.

 

Then, unions were more than twice their current size and less allied with progressive causes, and so it was easier to frame the battle as a parochial fight between big labor and big business. "Labor's decline helps recast that dynamic," he says. "This time around it isn't about two special interests; it's about economic recovery and restoring the middle class."