Labor’s message to its friends is clear: hold fast!
By Dick Meister
(Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and labor reporter for KQED/TV’s Newsroom, has covered labor and political issues for a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator.)
U.S. unions marked Labor Day this year with greater challenges than they’ve faced in many years but also with unusually high expectations of success.
Looming above all is the Employee Free Choice Act the long-pending legislation that would open the way to significant expansion of the labor movement by denying employers the underhanded tactics they’ve used to block workers from unionizing.
The growth of unions, which now represent little more than 10 percent of U.S. workers, would benefit all Americans, union and non-union alike. As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich notes, “The way to get the economy back on track is to boost the purchasing power of the middle class, and one major way to do this is to expand the percentage of working Americans in unions.”