Andy Stern on Meet the Bloggers

Andy Stern, head of the SEIU, speaking about the Employee Free Choice Act on Meet the Bloggers. On what the EFCA is, and why it would benefit workers:

If we understand what’s happening in America today, the gap between the rich and everyone else is growing pretty wide and pretty fast, which leads to all those foreclosures and other debt problems you talked about. One of the ways American workers used to get a raise was they had a union. And they way they got a union was they could make their own choice about whether they wanted to have an organization to talk to their employer about their wages and their heath care. And over the last 50 years what we’ve seen, is the courts and the corporations begin to eat away at those rights. So the Employee Free Choice Act just modernizes the national labor relations laws of our country, that again allow workers to make their own choice about whether they have a union, and tell the employer “We’ll see you after we have a majority of people who want to talk with you at the collective bargaining table, and until then this is our decision not your decision.

Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Tuesday, September 16, 2008