A New Economic Deal Starts with Workers’ Rights

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/04/10/a-new-economic-deal-starts-with-workers-rights/

by Seth Michaels, Apr 10, 2008

In recent years, our nation’s social contract has been radically re-written. Despite growth in productivity and the overall size of the economy, most of us aren’t seeing our share of U.S. prosperity. Economic health has been redefined as corporate health. The result is that the economy as we know it is broken.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqCsjpjACTg

Fixing it starts with empowering workers.


This week, the Roosevelt Institution sponsored an all-day conference, “Toward a New New Deal,” where scholars and activists talked about the challenges facing the country and the policies needed to turn it around.


One of the conference’s several great sessions, “Employment, Wages and Unions in an Era of Immigration and Globalization,” included such panelists as Mary Beth Maxwell, executive director of American Rights at Work. Maxwell says economic inequality is based on the increasing inability of workers to form unions. Empowering workers in the labor market doesn’t only benefit workers in unions, she says. It raises standards for all workers.

Working families need unions. We’ve got to say the “u” word. We have a 1930s labor policy that’s not up to scale to our 21st century economy. If we’re going to restore the middle class, we have to restore workers’ freedom to form unions.

Maxwell says that momentum is building for the Employee Free Choice Act, a necessary reform of federal labor laws that will restore workers’ rights. Maxwell describes the current economic crisis as an “FDR moment,” with an opportunity to update labor law and improve workers’ lives as profoundly as Roosevelt did.

They did not do this because it was easy. They had to fight hard to secure democracy and some semblance of economic justice. We have to have as much vision and as much courage as FDR.

FULL story at link.