Celebrate Labor History Week in California

Today we are kicking off a week of exhibits, events, and web-based learning about the achievements of the teachers, bricklayers, miners and farmworkers who made California what it is today and their efforts to improve their workplaces.

The CFT, for instance, last week worked with teachers at Berkeley High School to stage a Collective Bargaining Institute, in which students formed union and management teams and spent a day in mock negotiations to learn how to problem solve through collective bargaining in the workplace. The CFT was also instrumental in creating a new pamphlet, Work, Money and Power: Unions in the 21st Century, available to help students understand the history and continuing importance of unions. And we are grateful to State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell for his efforts to help publicize Labor History Week to secondary schools in California.

Why do we commemorate the role of unions in our society? Because that role is the making of the middle class. Unions have been and remain the most important engine in creating the American Dream, homeownership for the millions, and a better life for each generation. Most of the middle class arrived when working people got together, formed unions, and wrested a fair share of what they produced from their employers. This didn't just happen. It was by acting like a working class that most of our families became middle class during the last century.

As we see in these exhibit panels, the economic advancement of workers has always relied on the escalator of collective struggle. Perhaps the best example is the New Deal, created by a president conscious of the enormous upsurge in unionization and worker activism in the 1930s, consisting of laws such as the National Labor Relations Act, Social Security Act, Unemployment Insurance Act, and Fair Labor Standards Act. While most people think of these as Roosevelt's legacy, he didn't do this alone. It took a massive surge of unionization, with workers engaged in strikes, demonstrations, factory seizures, and political action, before those in power heard their message and created the New Deal.

Today these achievements of the American working class are in jeopardy.

The National Labor Relations Act has been rendered toothless, and its Board churns out anti-worker and anti-union decisions. That's why we support the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workers the freedom to choose a voice at work through unions without intimidation and the thousands of firings a year that occur now.
As wages lag behind housing prices, home ownership is moving out of reach for urban workers.

Right wing pundits castigate union members for their supposed "lavish benefits," such as decent employer-paid health coverage. (89% of union members still receive employer paid health coverage, versus 67% of non-union members.) Meanwhile more than 20%

Corporate bosses make hundreds of times the yearly salary of their average worker, regardless of the CEO's performance, while slashing employee pensions and workers' chances for a decent retirement.

The president shifts billions of dollars into the pockets of the rich by cutting their taxes, while sending the children of the working class to die in a war waged under false pretenses.

These remarks were made yesterday at the unveiling of an exhibit dedicated to the "role of working people and their unions" in the rotunda of the state capitol and the release of websites, curricula, and DVDs for use in schools.