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Change to Win demands lawmakers fulfill New American Dream
8 September 2009
| WASHINGTON - Change To Win is demanding the nation’s lawmakers honor workers by passing legislation, starting with health care reform and the Employee Free Choice Act, to help workers forge and fulfill a new American dream. |
Reiterating a theme CTW has pushed since it was founded in 2005, CTW Chair Anna Burger said in her Labor Day statement that the economy must be rebuilt to work for working people. She said CTW’s seven unions and six million members “will be on the frontlines” this fall urging lawmakers to act.
“Bailouts to big banks and shameless corporate greed left us with a faltering economy, a weak job market and a crumbling financial system that made workers more vulnerable than ever. To put workers back on the path of prosperity, we need to build a new economy where the jobs of the 21st century are good, middle class jobs,” she said.
Many of those jobs -- including jobs in fields the CTW unions concentrate on -- are not, Burger pointed out. Those laggard jobs which must be brought up to middle class status include “jobs at Wal-Mart, in nursing homes, in our growing fields and warehouses…and for those who care for us at our hospitals and hotels,” she added.
They must be converted into “good jobs that provide paychecks that allow working families to buy cars, homes and educational opportunities” for their kids, Burger said. But only passage of “legislation that brings back balance and fairness” to the economy will do that, she contends.
Topping that agenda are two endangered initiatives: The Employee Free Choice Act and “real health care reform.” Other legislation that will help workers, she added, approves “investment in a clean energy economy, and financial regulatory reform.”
Health care reform is threatened by manufactured Right Wing protest and by Senate negotiations to drop the key “public option.” That would have a government-run program compete with the insurance companies -- breaking their local monopolies and hopefully slowing their skyrocketing co-pays, premiums, cancellations, denial of care and resulting thousands of deaths of workers and families.
The Employee Free Choice Act, to help level the playing field between workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining, needs 60 Senate votes overcome a planned GOP filibuster. The talkathon is aided and abetted by a multimillion dollar business disinformation campaign against the legislation.
“We are on the verge of witnessing some of the most critical debates in our history…We will mobilize to move America forward so that we all prosper and create an economy and country that we are proud to leave to the next generation,” Burger said.
This article was written by Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission. |
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