By John J. Sweeney
Last November, working families and our unions worked a political miracle. After being pounded for six painful years by an anti-worker, anti-union administration in Washington, we helped elect a new Congress with progressive majorities in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. Today, we have a louder voice on Capitol Hill than we’ve had in years and we can breathe a little easier when it comes to safeguarding the benefits and protections we’ve won down through the years—right?
Wrong! We’ve gotten off to a good start, but we’re running a marathon and if we slow to a walk, we’ll never reach the finish line.
Consider what’s happened to our shamefully low federal minimum wage. The House voted to raise it from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour as one of its first acts this year, but a sizable minority in the Senate has held the increase hostage for months and now it has been vetoed (as part of the Iraq funding bill) by the president.
It’s the same thing with the Employee Free Choice Act, which is our top legislative priority because it is crucial to restore the freedom of America’s workers to bargain for better wages and benefits. The legislation, which will go a long way toward fixing our nation’s broken system for worker organizing, flew through the House, only to slow in the Senate, where we have only a razor-thin majority.
Meanwhile, workplace health and safety protections are still under relentless attack by a White House that regards them as a mere obstacle to unfettered corporate profits. Millions of workers still go to bed every night worrying about hanging onto their jobs and pensions. And nearly 45 million Americans still wake up every morning without health insurance to protect them and their families.
The damage done to our economy and our country by Bush and his corporate co-conspirators is staggering.
Since January 2000 worker productivity rose so fast that corporate profits doubled. But workers’ wages continued to stagnate. CEOs now make 431 times what the average worker makes. And we now have the widest wage and wealth gap of any industrialized nation.
Bush’s tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations created the largest federal budget deficit in our history, and his trade policies have resulted in the biggest trade deficit ever. Under his hand, we’ve shipped millions of our best manufacturing jobs overseas, 1.8 million of them to China alone.
Today, only 30 percent of us say our families are getting ahead economically. Only a quarter of us believe the next generation will be better off. And fewer than 30 percent of us think Bush is doing any kind of job at all.
Working Americans and our families—the middle class that keeps this country going—are being driven to the edge. And if we don’t turn things completely around in November 2008, there’s a real danger the unfairness and inequality in our economy will harden into permanent ruts.
That’s why it’s so important that we continue the campaign we started last year without breaking stride. We have to fight legislative battles every day in our states and communities as well as in Washington. Then we have to add to our majority support in the Senate, and elect a president who does more than just agree with us from time to time.
We need a working family champion in the White House, and the AFL-CIO has begun a program to make sure union members are engaged early in the election process.
We’re hosting town hall meetings with candidates across the country so we can hear what they have to say about our issues and concerns. In August we will hold a multi-candidate forum in Chicago so we can compare the candidates as they stand side by side. And we've just launched our Working Families Vote 2008 website with extensive information on candidates' positions and records on our key issues: the Employee Free Choice Act, good jobs, health care, trade and manufacturing, retirement security and education.
Our goal for Working Families Vote 2008 is to have a real conversation that will inform our presidential endorsement and activate our members. I hope you will join the conversation by telling us about the issues you think will bring working family voters to the polls. By giving us your opinions about the presidential candidates and their positions. And by using our website to contact the candidates, watch videos, follow the polls, keep up with the blogs and get the latest news about what is shaping the working family vote.
Yes, the election is a year and a half away. But the presidential candidates from each party will be chosen sooner than ever. And with so much at stake, we cannot and must not stop to rest or relax.
