August 28—This Labor Day weekend, just as on the first Labor Day in 1882, when more than a quarter of a million people in New York City joined thousands of trade unionists in their march for respect, union workers and their community allies will rally, attend worship services and play.
They will honor the union movement’s long history of fighting for justice for workers, including union-backed passage of the eight-hour day, paid overtime, child labor laws and other job site protections fundamental to America’s working families.
Union continue to play a key role in social and economic achievements for all workers by setting compensation standards and winning legislation in areas such as safety and health, overtime and family and medical leave, according to How Unions Help All Workers, a new Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report.
But even as they celebrate their victories, union activists also are reminding the nation that workers’ freedom to improve their lives by joining unions is under attack.
In fact, some 92 percent of all employers routinely oppose workers efforts to join unions and more than one-quarter of employees illegally fire workers for their union activity, according to research by Cornell University researcher Kate Bronfenbrenner.
Workers at Cintas Corp. who sort and hang dirty uniforms in a hot laundry for a meager paycheck and inadequate benefits, are among employees facing employer attacks against their efforts to join a union and have a voice at work.
Cintas worker Josefina Casarubias says a manager fired her father on the spot when he didn’t finish an impossibly huge work assignment. When her father tried to talk to his daughter—who also was his ride to and from work—about finding a way to get home, the manager threatened to call the police if he did not leave the premises immediately.
Says Casarubias: “Many people are very scared.”
Labor Day Actions Highlight Workers’ Struggles to Form a Union
In Cincinnati, more than 17,000 union members, their families and friends will demand that Cintas, the nation’s largest uniform rental provider and industrial launderer respect its workers’ rights to a voice at work. AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney, Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa and UNITE President Bruce Raynor will join workers organizing with UNITE and the IBT in a Sept. 1 rally at the Cincinnati AFL-CIO Labor Council’s annual Labor Day celebration.
Elsewhere, workers will join AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka in Minneapolis, where they will sign an oversized petition pledging to support only electoral candidates who back workers’ freedom to join unions. In the Charlotte, N.C., area, more than 30 unions are donating money, food and prizes for a raffle with all the proceeds going to UNITE members who recently lost their jobs when Pillowtex Corp. declared bankruptcy and shut its plants down costing almost 6,500 workers their jobs.
This Labor Day, the Economy Is No Picnic for Many Workers
In Labor Day events across the country, workers and union activists also will highlight the Bush administration’s failed economic policies that have cost the nation 3.2 million jobs since he took office—the worst job slump since the Great Depression, according to a new report, Labor Market Left Behind, by the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute.
As Bush takes to the road to tout his administration’s economic strategies, union and community activists will rally outside his Labor Day stop in Richfield, Ohio. They will protest Bush’s trade, tax and economic policies that have cost the Buckeye State 200,000 jobs and his support for a U.S. Department of Labor proposal to eliminate overtime pay for millions of workers.
“For the same money that Bush spent on millionaire tax breaks, he could have stimulated the economy and created jobs by building roads and schools, helped provide much-needed health care, sent urgently-needed aid to the states and given tax breaks to the low- and middle-income earners who need it and will spend it to get the economy moving,” says President Sweeney.
Faith in Action
Since 1996, the AFL-CIO and the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice have brought members of the clergy and workers together in churches, synagogues and mosques as part of Labor in the Pulpits. This year more than 900 congregations will hold services in partnership with the union movement, demonstrating to their communities the connection between faith and the freedom to form unions and earn family-supportive wages. AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson will take part in two San Jose, Calif., services Aug. 31.
Union members, such as those in Houston, also will mobilize and highlight the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, set to kick off Sept. 20 in several cities around the nation. Modeled after the Freedom Rides of the 1960s, the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride will mobilize national support for changing immigration policy to create a road to citizenship for all immigrant workers, allow immigrant workers to reunite their families, ensure immigrants’ civil rights and liberties and protect the rights of immigrants in the workplace.
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