Striketober

Floor Speech

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Mr. GARCIA of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, from this podium, and on the streets of Chicago, I have spoken out quite a bit about essential workers.

They work every day to keep our country going, often risking their lives, their families, and they deserve respect and dignity on the job.

But today, I want to talk about the courage that it takes not to go to work and to go out on strike for better working conditions.

As we speak, thousands of workers are on strike; from the nurses and healthcare workers to the people who make cereal, tractors, and whiskey. And tens of thousands more have taken strike votes and are ready to join them if they can't reach agreements with their employers.

It is a strike wave, and we are calling it ``Striketober.''

And I stand today in solidarity with these workers who are fighting for safer working conditions, a decent living wage, and the ability to retire with dignity.

Just in the past few weeks in my city of Chicago, I stood with Nabisco workers from the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers' International Union, auto mechanics from the International Association of Machinists, and employees at the Art Institute of Chicago who are fighting to join a union, AFSCME.

Only days later, the workers at a local tortilla plant in my own neighborhood, El Milagro, walked out protesting an unsafe workplace, unfair wages, and sexual harassment at the company's plants.

In recent years, teachers, nurses, county employees, nursing home workers, and even the symphony orchestra performers in our city went on strike.

They aren't just striking for themselves, they fought to provide community resources in our schools, improve patient care for our seniors, and create art for the public.

These workers and their struggles are the newest chapters of Chicago's historic role as the center of our country's labor movement.

International Workers' Day--celebrated around the world on May 1-- commemorates the Haymarket protests in Chicago in 1886, which led to the 8-hour workday and ended child labor.

The Pullman strike, brutally suppressed by our own government, is commemorated every year on Labor Day.

This is my own history, too.

I came to Chicago as an immigrant from Mexico, and my parents' jobs and benefits as Teamsters--and my own work as a member of the Retail Workers Union, as a member of the Teamsters, the United Legal Workers affiliated with the UAW--helped make me who I am today.

So when these workers walk out on strike, they walk out for all of us.

Safety at work, dignity in retirement, a living wage, these are important issues for everyone.

There is a picket line chant that says, ``If we can't get it, shut it down.'' And it is time that working-class people did just that.

Striketober was a long time coming. The Federal minimum wage has been at $7.25 for over a decade, but millionaires got 62 percent richer during the pandemic.

A vial of insulin costs $6 to make, but pharmaceutical companies sell it for as much as $275.

Rent, childcare, and medical bills go up and up, and pundits won't stop complaining about wage inflation.

So workers across the country are standing up to say: Enough is enough. And they are standing up for us.

So we have got to support these workers on the picket lines any way we can.

In Congress, this means supporting proworker legislation, like the Protecting the Right to Organize Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which guarantees workplace rights.

It means protecting frontline workers, from nurses to CTA bus drivers, to Instacart shoppers.

It means supporting workers at the bargaining table and on the picket line because when workers fight, we all win.

Si, se puede. Yes, we can.

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