Employee Free Choice Act
Floor Speech
EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT -- (House of Representatives - March 01, 2007)
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Mr. ELLISON. Mr. Speaker, I thank you for kicking it to me because, I just want to elaborate on one of those stories you just told. I think it is very important to tell the stories, and for the freshmen who come to this Congress as the difference makers, we have to tell the stories of the people because it is from the stories of the people that we make the difference.
We have to remember that the difference that we are sitting here to make is rooted in the real life experiences of the people who sent us here to act, which is why I was so overjoyed to cast that ``yes'' vote. We saw a vote of 241-185. That is not close. We are here to send a message and to make a difference, and the Employee Free Choice Act is just that.
But let me share this with you. Ten employees of the Brink's Home Security, Minneapolis branch, met in secret in 2004 to discuss problems with their employer. They feared for their jobs if the talk about the union became public, but they decided that a life with a living wage, some health care and a pension plan was worth the risk. They signed authorization cards to have the IBEW represent them. This was back in January 2005.
The National Labor Relations Board certified the IBEW as the employees' bargaining agent, and that was in March 16, 2005. Contract negotiations began with Brink's that April and have dragged on for nearly 2 years now with no contract. This is a company whose average monthly income is $27 million.
The employees have a simple question for their employer: Why should they work for a company who insists on contracts with its customers but not with their own employees? That is a question I think needs to be answered, and the answer lies in the Employee Free Choice Act because dragging it on, taking employees down a slow dance, dragging it out, not getting down to a real contract is something that the Employee Free Choice Act is going to remedy.
But I am going to tell you all why it is that some employers resist the union, even after one has been authorized, and I think the answer lies in this simple chart.
The Union Advantage, Median Weekly Earnings, what we see is unionized employees make an average of more than $800 a week, and yet nonunion are down here just above $600. That is quite a bit of difference, 200 bucks a week. That is the difference between fixing the window that is broken, fixing the garage door, patching the roof, sending your child to school with good, decent clothing. That is the difference between a nice meal or, you know, spaghetti every single night. It is the difference between a quality of life and not.
I just want to tell you all that I am proud to stand here with you. We are the difference makers. Therefore, we should make a difference, and I would like to recognize my good friend from Iowa, Congressman Braley.
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Mr. ELLISON. Thank you, Congressman Hodes. I am looking forward to correcting some of those myths, too. It is very important, Mr. Speaker, that the public knows the truth from the myths.
But before we go back to correcting the Record and making everything clear, I just want to tell another story, if I may, because I think it is important again for us to root our presentation in real-life experience.
In 2003, employees of Walker Methodist Health Center in Minneapolis voted 61 percent to unionize. They did so in part because of their disgust with the health center that punished them for taking time off to be with ill family members. Quite ironic for a health center.
Anyway, the employees were immediately harassed and intimidated; they had all kinds of problems that they had to deal with because of their effort to unionize. And today, management continues to appeal the 2003 election, despite losing every appeal with the National Labor Relations Board. But their appeals have prevented the will of the workers to have their union recognized. And I think again, it is very important that we focus on what real people are dealing with.
Meanwhile, employees acting on behalf of their union have been harassed and disciplined, as I said, even fired for their union activity even though they voted and have gotten the union by a 2-1 margin. And I think it is time for companies like the ones we have talked about to step up to the plate and recognize the union. It is time to have something like the Employee Free Choice Act to make there be a vehicle to have a contract.
And I just want to associate myself with the comments of Congressman Yarmuth. It is absolutely right that there are many employers who understand the importance of respecting the right to organize. We don't want to demonize them. What we are looking for is all Americans, workers and employees, to do well. The great Senator Paul Wellstone is known for saying, ``We all do better when we all do better.'' So when the employers do better, workers should also do better, and, all around, Americans should say the common good is a good idea and we should continue to focus on it.
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Mr. ELLISON. Well, Congressman, I want to thank you for that question. It is an excellent question. Labor rights are human rights.
I think it is important to know that Martin Luther King, who lost his life in Memphis, Tennessee, April 4, 1968, was actually helping sanitation workers gain their rights in an effort to unionize and have collective bargaining. That union, which was mostly African American membership, received help from their main-stream headquarters union, which was in New York, but got a lot of help that way.
It is important to remember that when Martin Luther King lost his life that the union drive and the strike did not end. It continued on, and the strike was successful. It is important to know that the right of human dignity, human rights and labor rights, are inextricably linked together.
One of the first things that my father and mother would tell me as a child is that Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan, is a place where Walter Reuther of the UAW and Martin Luther King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference walked down the street arm in arm with Reverend C.L. Franklin demanding labor rights, human rights, civil rights. It is all one thing, and that is what we have all got to be about.
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Mr. ELLISON. Congressman Hodes, I just want to agree with you there. The fact is that this Employee Free Choice Act actually provides more opportunity, more choice, not less. It is critical to understand that.
Again, I want to recognize good employers who work cooperatively with their unions, but I also don't want to turn my eyes to the fact that there has been intimidation, but by and large, not on behalf of the union. In fact, I have a whole stack of horror stories that go along with workers trying to organize.
But I wanted to just talk a little bit, before we begin to wind up, about how important the Employee Free Choice Act is for working-class and middle-class prosperity. I want to start out my comments just by pointing out that over the last 6 years of this administration we have seen poverty increase by about 1 million people every year.
Right now we have got about 39 million Americans who live below what the government calls the poverty line, 39 million. That is a lot of people, and that is unacceptable in America.
Now, you might say we are not talking about poor folks, we are talking about workers. Well, let me tell you what a worker is. A worker is a person who works hard every day and makes a decent salary. Let me tell you what a poor person is, a worker who lost their job and hasn't gotten their paychecks for a little while.
So the ranks of the poor and the ranks of the working and middle class are tied together. So many people are only a few paychecks away, if not one paycheck away, from disaster. So we cannot ignore the rise in poverty during the Bush administration and say that it is not connected to workers' rights. It is directly connected.
We also have to talk about how the ranks of the uninsured have increased every year during the Bush administration. This, again, is tightly tied to the fortunes of the working class people, our folks. We have to be clear that if we have an Employee Free Choice Act in which people can organize and people can form together, build a union, what they can do is they can parlay that organizational power into greater benefits for American people.
We can now begin to form the basis of a real universal health care system, a system in which everybody can have health care in our society. We can parlay it into a real credit reform system where people are not subject to the vicissitudes of what some creditor lending institution wants to do with regard to lending practices, payday loans, all these kinds of things that sort of eat away at what working-class people are doing.
They can pull up, they can build a little fence around the fortunes of the working class, which I think are so important, and really sort of redirect the focus of our country towards the common good, which is where it should be.
So let me just say that the myths are important to address and I am glad we have done that. But I just want to say that this Employee Free Choice Act is giving working people a hedge, a fence, a wall, a protection in order to improve the lives of everyday people.
And I just want to turn our attention to this chart I have to my left which shows real median household income. For those of you who don't know the difference between real and unreal, it just means adjusted for inflation.
When we take inflation into account, we see that the median household income of Americans has dipped between 2000 and now and has gone down precipitously, dramatically, and we cannot allow it to continue.
If you have unionized workers, they don't need us to go pass a minimum wage law. They don't need us to think about some of these basic things. They do it for themselves. They have the power in their own hands when they can organize.
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