Blog

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

This week the minimum wage rose by 70 cents to $7.25 an hour, a beggar’s lot really, but still corporations across America decried it. Good times or bad, somehow Wall Streeters walk away with $700,000 bonuses, you know, on top of their salaries, but a 70-cent minimum wage hike is never affordable.

That’s why America’s workers must seize control of their own fates. President Obama said: “Our destiny is not written for us. It is written by us.” Well, on a sweltering July 11, 1,500 civil rights, human rights and workers rights activists in Little Rock began writing a new destiny for American workers.

That destiny includes the freedom to form and join a union and to collectively bargain for a piece of the wealth they helped create. That destiny includes passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

The 1,500 met in Little Rock because Arkansas is the home state of Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat who turned her back on the Employee Free Choice Act this year, succumbing to pressure from the likes of Wal-Mart, a notoriously anti-union corporation headquartered in the Razorback State. Many Wal-Mart workers will be getting a 70 cent raise this week – thanks to that minimum wage hike.

Rich Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, and I met with Sen. Lincoln a couple of weeks before the rally, and she kept telling us how she had passed legislation to help children and how she really wanted to help families. The best way to help families is to let them help themselves through collective bargaining.

I’ll tell you what I told the 1,500 in Little Rock that day. Write her. Call her. E-mail her. “Tell her the best way to help the children, the best way to help families, the best way to help the seniors, the best way to get to the middle class is for workers to have the right to join a union and bargain collectively for a piece of the pie that they helped to make and for a piece of the wealth they helped to create.”

That is what the Employee Free Choice Act does.

The rally in Little Rock started at Central High School where nine Black youngsters braved violence to desegregate in 1958. Fifty-one years later, we are engaged in another civil rights struggle. And Rev. Wendell Griffin, a Baptist pastor and judge on the Arkansas Court of Appeals, expressed that best.

Rev. Griffin asked the 1,500, “Are we free?”

No one yelled yes.

He repeated, “Are we free?”

Again, no affirmative response.

He explained, when one person is not free, all people are not free. “We are brothers and sisters, and when one worker is not paid fairly, all workers are not paid fairly.”  And, he said, the way for all workers to be paid fairly, is for workers to have the right to organize.

He told the story of his father working, without a union, in a saw mill; how he later got  union representation, a raise, a pension and better working conditions. And, importantly, how that changed his family’s life.

Finally, he told the crowd:  “What my father had is what every worker ought to have in Arkansas.”

Every worker should have the right to join a union, receive a pension and labor in safety.

He noted that the people of Arkansas have given that to Blanche Lincoln – voted to provide her with a government job, good benefits and a pension.

“Now is our time,” he said.

“Employee Free Choice Act Now.”

Watch the Video.

Stewart Acuff

By Stewart Acuff
Special Assistant to the President, AFL-CIO

It is almost 4am as I write this at the First Presbyterian Church in Little Rock, AR. We are almost halfway through our 24 hour vigil which began at the state headquarters of Senator Blanche Lincoln yesterday afternoon.

We are holding a 24 hour vigil for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act during this Memorial Day congressional recess. When we began the vigil at Senators Lincoln’s office we presented her staff with 2000 handwritten letters including 300 from small business owners across this state. Yesterday’s batch of handwritten letters brings the total of letters Senator Lincoln has received to 14,000.

This vigil is an unusual tactic in a congressional lobbying effort. But the vigil is anything but unusual in nonviolent action for social and economic justice.

During the vigil we bear witness to the injustice of corporate America, the intimidation, termination and retaliation against workers who are trying to form unions and we pray that those who have the power to make change will use that power.

Senators Lincoln and Pryor of Arkansas are pivotal in our campaign to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. Organized labor in Arkansas has run a massive legislative blitz with phone calls, handwritten letters and face to face meetings.

But the vigil takes the campaign to a different level, introducing a more spiritual element and a traditional southern Civil Rights tactic. Faith leaders and clergy led by the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice have already been central to the campaign. Tonight faith leaders assume and even more important role.

Along with faith leaders, other elements of the Democratic Coalition and progressive movement are taking a more important and more central role in the fight for the Employee Free Choice Act. Students and young activists are outside now creating puppets for the march we will have from Senator Lincoln’s office to the State Capital.

We will break the vigil this afternoon with a march and a rally to the State Capital calling for an economy that works for all. Ministers, African American and white, young people, civil rights leaders, elected officials and union activists will all step up to increase the call for Senators Lincoln and Pryor to say no to Walmart and Tyson’s Foods and support the Employee Free Choice Act.

In a couple of hours, the sun will break over Little Rock and our vigil will be half over. We will continue to pray all day. Then we will march.