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So Barack Obama’s going to be our next president. Now we can all heave a big sigh of relief, sit back, and watch while he changes everything for the better. Right?
Not so fast.
Fox News reports that “The nation’s leading business group on Thursday urged President-elect Barack Obama to devote the early days of his presidency to reviving the economy, leaving more controversial issues such as labor rights for later.”
Problem: Who makes this economy work? Workers! You can’t improve the state of the economy without improving the condition of workers!
These days, just about every week another example of economic hardship hits the press. Housing crisis, credit crunch, failing banks, and now the auto bailout! What do all of these problems have in common? They all affect workers like us, but they’re such massive problems that it seems like there’s nothing we can do about it but hope that Congress can figure out a decent solution.
But there is one thing that we as workers can do – form unions. The prosperity of America is strongly based on the prosperity of America’s middle class. America’s middle class is hurting right now, because corporate America has gotten a little carried away taking advantage of the rest of us, and the results of this behavior are finally sinking in. In order to keep corporate giants in check, we must protect our most effective tool against them, the right to organize. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would solve the problems that workers now face when they are trying to form a union on the job. Obama’s support of workers’ rights was a key reason his campaign was successful. We need to continue to show our support for workers’ choice to help it push past opposition in Congress. Over the next few weeks we’ll be blogging more in depth about the Employee Free Choice Act to let you know what it’s all about.
