The coming year will be full of challenges for working families and our unions. Expect direct assaults on workers’ rights, efforts to dismantle retirement security and escalating corporate greed that destroys jobs and job quality. We face uphill battles to restore workers’ freedom to form unions and get health care to every working family. Meanwhile, America’s unions must organize as never before and take the steps necessary to strengthen the union movement for the future.

We’re going to need to capture and channel every bit of the grassroots momentum and solidarity that fueled our Labor 2004 work—the union movement’s greatest member mobilization ever. More than 225,000 union activists volunteered for voter education and outreach, and some 5,500 union staff took assignments around the country. As a result, more than 90 percent of union members said they received information from their unions on critical working family issues. Everywhere, union members were fired up, united and committed.

Today, the job of union leaders is to point that energy and commitment toward key fights at both the federal and state levels. We must power up for 2005 gubernatorial elections and expand efforts to elect union members and progressive candidates at all levels. We must confront new assaults on overtime pay, Social Security, workplace health and safety and civil and human rights. We’ve got to take on the exporting of U.S. jobs and bad trade deals and undertake a unified campaign to challenge the Wal-Marting of America. We have to lead a powerful new effort to expand health coverage. Above all, we must ensure every worker can choose for himself or herself whether to join a union and bargain collectively for a better life.

In the coming months, expect to see major action in the following nine important battlegrounds for America’s working families.

 

GOOD JOBS

America Needs Good Jobs

	“I tried getting back into the information technology field, but it was so lean. I’ve shifted into a different field, but the benefits aren’t there. There were a lot of cutbacks because of outsourcing. They say new jobs are being created. But are they jobs you can live on? Or are they $5-an-hour jobs with no benefits? People think things are getting better, but they aren’t.” —John Narusis, former IT worker, Crystal Lake, Ill.

Working families will have to fight for their livelihoods this year, battling to keep good jobs in this country and to maintain and improve the quality of jobs that remain here. They’ll take these fights to Congress and to state legislatures, using every opportunity to ensure work can sustain families and a strong middle class—for today’s workers and for our children.

Millions of good jobs have disappeared since George W. Bush took office in 2001—and they aren’t coming back. Those jobs include some 2.7 million US manufacturing jobs, 1.78 million of which were lost due to the explosion in the US trade deficit since 1998. And white-collar jobs no longer are secure: In the past two years, corporations began shipping out white-collar jobs as well. This will include up to 850,000 financial jobs by 2010, according to a study by Deloitte Research, a global financial consulting company.

“The economy is really bad, and people are out there looking for jobs at the worst time,” says Ucinda Sims, a member of Steelworkers Local 286 in Lincoln, Neb. The Goodyear Tire plant where Sims has worked for 21 years began moving most of its production to Mexico in November. When the move to Mexico is completed, Sims says the plant will employ 500 workers, down from 1,800 in the early 1990s. She hopes she has enough seniority to stay on, but she’s not sure.

Companies such as Wal-Mart are fueling the exodus of American jobs with their massive purchases of goods from low-wage countries that decrease demand for U.S.-made products. Wal-Mart also is fueling a major corporate race to the bottom, using its status as the retail behemoth to lower standards for corporate practices and workers’ wages and benefits.

Halting the Wal-Marting of America

One of the greatest challenges facing working families is this Wal-Marting of America. Wal-Mart, the country’s largest and most profitable corporation—employing 1.3 million workers and taking $9.1 billion in profits in 2003—builds itself up by draining local taxpayer money. Its entry into communities forces local businesses to close, and its assault on workers’ wages and benefits forces other retailers to adopt similar low-road practices to remain competitive.

Wal-Mart’s virulent anti-unionism means its employees—more than 70 percent of them women—have no voice on the job to improve the wages that leave many of them in poverty. The corporate giant pays “associates” an average of $7.50 to $8.50 an hour and works them for an average of 32 hours a week, according to Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay for Wal-Mart, a February 2004 report by the Democratic staff of the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Even at $8.50 hourly, working 32 hours a week a Wal-Mart employee earns only $14,144 annually, less than the $15,670 federal poverty line for a family of four in 2004. While employees are not guaranteed a set number of hours, only full-timers can accrue sick pay based on number of hours worked—and only two-thirds of Wal-Mart employees work full-time.

	“Three to four times a week, I had to stay past the end of my shift—sometimes two hours. And I know when I got paid, my overtime was not there.” —Liberty Serna, former Wal-Mart employee, Kingsville, Texas

One consequence of Wal-Mart’s low wages is that many of its employees cannot afford to participate in the company’s health insurance plan—and as a result many turn to taxpayer-funded public health services for care, according to an October 2003 AFL-CIO study, Wal-Mart: An Example of Why Workers Remain Uninsured and Underinsured. Part-time workers must wait two years before they can buy into the company’s health plan—which doesn’t cover family members. Because of Wal-Mart’s low wages and health coverage restrictions, fewer than half of its employees receive health care benefits on the job, compared with 66 percent of workers at large US firms overall, according to the study.

Taxpayers regularly pick up the tab for Wal-Mart: Nationwide, each Wal-Mart store with 200 employees costs taxpayers an average of $420,750 annually in social services such as subsidized housing, school lunches and health care, according to the Everyday Low Wages report.

As Business Week wrote in an April 2004 commentary, “the cheap-labor model turns out to be costly in many ways. It can fuel poverty and related social ills and dump costs on other companies and taxpayers, who indirectly pick up the health care tab for all the workers not insured by their parsimonious employers.”

Yet Wal-Mart balks at paying even its paltry wages. Wal-Mart is now fighting nearly 40 state and federal lawsuits in some 30 states, with workers claiming tens of millions of dollars in back pay for hundreds of thousands of workers denied work breaks or forced to work off the clock. And in June 2004, a US District Court in San Francisco gave class-action status to a lawsuit brought by current and former female Wal-Mart workers who say the company discriminated against them in pay and promotion practices because of their gender. Involving 1.6 million women, it’s the largest class-action lawsuit in US history.

The problems Wal-Mart creates go well beyond the company’s employment practices, though. Wal-Mart squeezes its suppliers for impossibly low prices, forcing production and good jobs to China and other countries. Wal-Mart alone imports more than $15 billion in goods each year from China.

Addressing the Wal-Marting of America must be a key component of the union movement’s efforts to restore good jobs and strengthen the nation’s middle class. A multipronged, union-movement-wide campaign will challenge the policies of corporations such as Wal-Mart that sap taxpayer dollars from communities, deny workers family-supporting wages and benefits and drastically lower employment standards throughout whole industries.

Find out more about Wal-Mart at www.walmartcostsyou.com.

	“If companies send our jobs out of the country, then how are people supposed to live?” —Lawrence Johnson, member, LIUNA Local 478, Miami

Keeping Good Jobs in America

AFL-CIO unions and their members must work at the local, state, national and international levels to enact legislation and adopt policies to keep good jobs in this country, rebuild the battered manufacturing sector and make international trade work for working families here and abroad.

Last year, more than 40 states considered legislation to prohibit or curtail exporting jobs funded by taxpayers’ dollars. Illinois and Tennessee passed legislation, and supporters in many other states plan to bring bills up again this year.

State legislation is part of the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council’s (IUC’s) agenda for revitalizing manufacturing. The strategies outlined in the IUC’s new report, Revitalizing American Manufacturing: A State and Local Agenda, include helping states leverage federal resources for manufacturing job creation, targeting state economic development incentives to companies that create good jobs and pushing states to withdraw from US trade deals that limit local governments’ power to create and protect local jobs. The 14 industrial unions that make up the IUC also are formulating international initiatives to combat job exports.

The union movement must and will demand congressional action to close tax loopholes that benefit job exporters, require overseas service providers to disclose their locations to customers and prohibit the export of sensitive financial, health or other personal data. AFL-CIO unions also must work with governments and industries to address health care and pension funding crises that threaten basic benefits for

millions of workers and retirees and make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for US manufacturers to compete on a level playing field with international counterparts.

	“The Bush administration’s trade policies encourage employers like mine to make products overseas. I’m afraid if this administration ever decides to try and keep jobs here, it would make costs less stringent on worker safety. Either way, the companies are making money off our backs.” —Ucinda Sims, Steelworkers Local 286, Lincoln, Neb

At the same time, unions must take on the Bush administration’s drive to enact more NAFTA-like trade deals that fail to protect workers, US jobs and the environment. Among trade deals on the table, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) is the Bush administration’s top trade priority, and the White House could send it to Congress as early as this spring. CAFTA was signed last May by the United States and five Central American countries.

If approved, CAFTA would eliminate most tariffs among the United States, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala,
Honduras, Nicaragua and possibly the Dominican Republic. It also would impose more uniform investment rules in the region and extend to Central America the disastrous job displacement and environmental damage caused by NAFTA. CAFTA is just one of as many as six trade agreements Congress could consider this year under the Fast Track procedure, which allows Congress to vote up or down on a trade agreement as a whole but not to offer amendments. In November 2003, workers in North and South America slowed negotiations toward a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would create the world’s largest free-trade zone, eliminating tariffs and nontariff barriers among 34 countries with a combined population of more than 800 million.

One particularly problematic bilateral trade agreement that also could come to a vote this year is a deal with Thailand. Many of the world’s vehicle manufacturers, including General Motors, Ford-Mazda Auto Alliance, Mitsubishi and Toyota, produce pickup trucks in Thailand. The United States currently imposes a 25 percent tariff on all imports of pickups. A deal with Thailand that reduces or eliminates that tariff would seriously threaten the jobs of thousands of UAW members involved in the production of pickup trucks, according to the UAW.

Workers and their unions also will continue to urge the Bush administration to pressure China, the nation’s largest trading partner, to revalue its currency, the yuan. China manipulates the yuan, keeping it undervalued by as much as 40 percent compared with the US dollar. This means Chinese exports to the United States are underpriced by 40 percent and US exports to China are overpriced by 40 percent. One result is that one-fourth of the record-breaking US trade deficit—expected to have reached $575 billion in 2004—is with China.

 

HEALTH CARE

Exposing Sham Solutions and Fighting for Real Reform

The nation’s health care crisis continues unabated, with approximately 45 million Americans not covered by health insurance. Meanwhile, those with coverage face skyrocketing premiums, deductibles and co-payments as costs rise and employers shift more of the burden to workers. This year, unions must continue fighting to make health care more affordable for workers and employers, improve health care quality and extend coverage to more Americans. And they will fight sham proposals that would further erode good coverage.

	“Not only is my current health coverage barebones, but I can’t afford to cover my son. I want a union to get me and my co-workers the health coverage we deserve. There is no reason why anyone in the country should have to worry about affording good medical care.” —Genevieve Bauer, library specialist, New Mexico State University, seeking a voice at work with AFSCME

Here are some good proposals:

• Ensure real relief from high prescription drug costs for retirees and workers by pressing for legislation allowing the reimportation of safe drugs from other countries and requiring Medicare to negotiate for the best drug prices—an approach proven effective by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
• Ease the costs of employer-sponsored health coverage, the backbone of health financing in America, through national and state reinsurance pools that fund the lion’s share of expenses for high-cost cases—those above $50,000. Such reinsurance pools are estimated to stop health insurance premium increases and actually roll them back by $1,000 a year per family.
• Require all large employers to provide affordable health care coverage for workers and their families.
• Provide subsidies and tax credits to enable uninsured Americans to enroll in the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program or, for those with low incomes, in Medicaid and state child health care programs.
• Sharply reduce the huge number of preventable medical mistakes and improve quality of care through widespread public reporting of comparative quality performance statistics among health care organizations.

• Health savings accounts (HSAs) proposed by President Bush are coupled with high deductible insurance policies and would require individuals to spend at least $1,000 and families $2,000 before insurance kicks in.
• Individual tax credits will undermine job-based health coverage for employed workers and their families. These credits will encourage employers to drop job-based coverage while doing nothing to expand health care options or rein in spiraling costs.
• Proposed association health plan (AHP) legislation would authorize barebones coverage—attracting firms with younger, healthier workers—and would be exempt from important state consumer protections. The Congressional Budget Office estimates only 330,000 small business workers would gain coverage through AHPs, while 80 percent of those currently insured would see premiums increase and some 10,000 actually would lose coverage.
• Block grants or a cap on federal dollars for Medicaid, which are proposed by the Bush administration, would renew efforts to limit federal contributions to Medicaid, put enormous fiscal strains on states and force cuts that would hurt those most vulnerable.

	“Before Social Security, the elderly were in poverty. Privatizing Social Security will put the money at risk. It’s not honoring your father and mother to take away their safety net. People should not have to work until they are 103 to get Social Security benefits.” —Jeanne Boone, retired member, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers/AFT Local 3

As job-based pensions erode— and as decades of promised benefits and deferred wages are wiped out with corporate bankruptcies—Social Security is all that stands between millions of retirees and economic disaster. Yet President Bush’s push to privatize Social Security would further diminish retirement security and spell disaster for the millions of working families that depend on the nation’s most successful family protection program, say union leaders.

Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security would subject retirees to the uncertainties of the stock market while giving an unprecedented windfall to Wall Street. Financial firms charging fees to administer private retirement accounts would reap $940 billion over 75 years, according to Austan Goolsbee, an economics professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
Today, nearly two-thirds of retirees count on Social Security for most of their retirement incomes. Each year, more than 47 million retirees, family members of workers who have died and people with disabilities rely on Social Security. Between 1960 and 2004, the nation’s Social Security Insurance program has helped cut the poverty rate among the elderly by more than two-thirds, from 35 percent to 10 percent.

Social Security is a lifelong, guaranteed safety net, with benefits that rise with the cost of living—and has never missed a payment in its nearly 70-year history. Legislative changes enacted in 1983 will ensure Social Security is sufficiently funded to pay full benefits for 40 years. In addition to fighting to protect existing defined-benefit pensions and greatly increasing protections for workers’ existing retirement accounts, such as 401(k) plans, union activists will fight proposals to replace Social Security’s guaranteed defined benefits with individual investment accounts. Such accounts threaten Social Security’s capacity to safeguard family living standards and provide adequate incomes when a worker dies, becomes disabled or retires.

Funding private individual accounts would require such massive start-up costs, experts predict it would force large cuts in both Social Security’s guaranteed benefits and workers’ total retirement income as well as raise the retirement age. Replacing Social Security’s benefits with risky individual accounts will cut the vital family protections on which so many depend.

Possible alternatives to bolster Social Security funding include federal legislation that redirects revenue by taxing large estates rather than completely eliminating the estate tax. Under current law, big cuts in the estate tax are being phased in so that by 2009, estates worth up to $3.5 million for individuals (up to $7 million for couples) will be exempt from the estate tax, and the tax rate on estates worth more than those amounts will drop to 45 percent. If Congress does not eliminate the estate tax, the resulting revenue could provide a major source of support for Social Security.
The cap on wages subject to the payroll tax also could be increased. In 2005, high-earning workers will pay Social Security taxes only on the first $90,000 per year (and so will their employers). All or part of wages above the current cap could be subject to a payroll tax.

Union activists will fight proposals to replace Social Security's guaranteed defined benefits with individual investment accounts.

	“In November, 26 of our endorsed state legislative candidates won, and in the spring, 13 of our 19 candidates won seats on the [Milwaukee] County Board of Supervisors. We’re going to ask them to support resolutions to force employers to recognize the right of workers to organize, to keep good jobs here and get the ball rolling on mass transit funding that’s vital to our members’ jobs.” —Brandon Jensen, ATU Local 998, Milwaukee

During his first four years in office, President Bush used a combination of executive orders and heavy-handed White House pressure on Congress to launch an all-out assault on workers and their jobs, rights, safety and wages. With larger Republican majorities in the US House and US Senate, Bush now has even fewer restraints to keep him in check. The intense grassroots activism that built the largest-ever working family political mobilization in 2004 must be tapped to hold lawmakers on both sides of the aisle accountable in these key fights ahead.

| Overtime pay | Among the biggest battles, the union movement will challenge the ongoing attacks by Bush and his Republican allies on workers’ paychecks. The Republican-majority Congress will likely propose legislation allowing employers to substitute compensatory time off for cash overtime pay. Comp time legislation would encourage longer hours and more unpredictable work schedules by making it less expensive for employers. Making mandatory overtime cheaper for employers means an employee’s choice to give up cash overtime is less likely to be truly voluntary. Comp time legislation also provides no effective remedies to ensure the choice to give up cash overtime pay is voluntary or that employees can take time off when they choose. President Bush also has threatened the 40-hour workweek by proposing so-called flex-time legislation that would allow employers to pay overtime only after employees work 80 hours in a two-week period. Under this proposal, an employee could work 50 hours one week and 30 the next—and never receive any overtime pay. Comp time and “flex time” guarantee flexibility for employers—the flexibility not to pay cash overtime—rather than additional work schedule flexibility for employees.

| Workplace Safety | To maintain strong workplace health and safety standards, the union movement will focus on the Bush administration’s Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Mine Safety and Health Administration, which are expected to push for even more inneffective voluntary efforts by employers to comply with safety laws instead of engaging in tough enforcement and inspection. The new chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), previously sponsored legislation to loosen enforcement requirements, hazardous and toxic materials record-keeping rules and to privatize some OSHA responsibilities.

	“We had no choice but to go on strike. Eventually we won our union with UNITE. But it shouldn’t have to take all the things that we were put through to win this basic right. Sterling Laundry finally agreed to let us form a union, and we won higher wages, health care and a pension. Most importantly, we won respect, fairness and justice.” —Evelyn Thomas, UNITE HERE, who took part in an unfair labor practice strike after workers said managers threatened to fire them and cut their hours in an effort to intimidate employees who wanted a union.

Millions of US workers hunger for a voice on the job so they can improve their lives, families, communities and workplaces. But current federal labor law is so riddled with loopholes and so feebly enforced, workers have little recourse against unscrupulous employers that intimidate and harass them when they try to form unions. In November 2003, a unified union movement spearheaded the introduction of the Employee Free Choice Act, landmark legislation to strengthen workers’ freedom to form unions.

The legislative campaign for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act will be the centerpiece of ongoing efforts to help workers win a voice at work. Union activists will help the American public understand the connection between workers’ freedom to have a voice on the job and strong communities where workers have access to health care, family-supportive wages and secure retirements. Workers will join elected officials, religious leaders and civil rights activists in stepping up efforts to aid workers seeking a voice at work. And union activists and their allies will shine a spotlight on the National Labor Relations Board when the Republican majority uses its power to restrict rather than protect workers’ rights. By combining these strategies, activists are working to create a climate that respects workers’ freedom to form unions.

Within one year of the introduction of the Employee Free Choice Act by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), a bipartisan group of 37 Senate and 209 House lawmakers signed on as co-sponsors. When passed, the Employee Free Choice Act will help restore democracy to America’s workplaces. The act would ensure when a majority of employees in a workplace decides to form a union, they can do so without the debilitating obstacles employers now use to block workers’ choice. Currently, in 25 percent of organizing campaigns, private-sector employers illegally fire workers—and that’s just the beginning of the employers’ war against workers.

The Employee Free Choice Act would strengthen protections for workers’ freedom to form unions in three ways. First, it requires employers to recognize the union after workers sign cards authorizing union representation. Second, it provides for mediation and arbitration of first-contract disputes. And finally, it authorizes stronger penalties for violation of employee rights when workers seek to form a union and during first-contract negotiations.

The campaign for the Employee Free Choice Act has been a crucial tool in helping elected officials understand the obstacles workers endure when they try to form unions. As the new Congress convenes, the union movement is stepping up its long-term campaign for fair labor laws, ensuring the bill is re-introduced and a bipartisan group of elected officials again cosponsors the legislation.

	“Working together with all the trades in Labor 2004, we were able to build something and make connections in the community that will be valuable in the future. People realize—some for the first time—that politics is important and that they can have an impact. There’s going to be other fights and other elections.” —Edwardo Williams, Laborers Local 113, Milwaukee

As union activists at the state level seek to protect overtime pay rights, ensure affordable health care and keep good jobs from going overseas, they will build on the network of grassroots activists that energized and mobilized the union movement’’s Labor 2004 campaign and marshal that momentum for electoral action next year and beyond. In 2005, working family voters will work to elect governors in New Jersey and Virginia and local public officials in several major cities. Union member lawmakers, their union activist colleagues and community allies also will work to strengthen the voices of working families in the decision-making process—whether in city councils, county boards or state legislatures—and continue to build a network to win pro-worker legislation and elect pro-worker candidates.

Major mayoral and municipal elections are on tap this year in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Miami, Detroit and Houston. In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) cut important jobs and services and attacked union workers’ contracts. This year, voters in New York and the other cities will mobilize to back candidates who support working families.

Many union-member lawmakers—including the 34 union members who won state seats for the first time and another 118 who were re-elected in 2004—have benefited from the AFL-CIO’s efforts, launched in 1996, to elect pro-worker candidates and assist union members running for public office. Today, more than 2,500 union members hold elected office, and under the Target 5000 program, the union movement will advance efforts to bring 5,000 union members into public office.

Meanwhile, the National Labor Caucus of State Legislators (NLCSL) will work to increase its membership in legislatures around the country. The NLCSL is a
bipartisan network of union-member and union-friendly state lawmakers and provides a forum for educating and mobilizing local lawmakers to ensure they understand the issues at stake for working families. @