Free choice and small business Author: Sen. John F. Kerry

[dcsmart]

Americans today are working harder than ever, and too often finding that the secure and stable middle-class life their parents counted on is falling further and further out of reach for them and their children.

Story after story remind us just how much in the past working Americans have fallen behind in the past eight years. For those who have struggled during this difficult period, it comes as no surprise that median household income in 2007 was $1,175 less than it was in 2000, while basic family expenses rose $4,600 in that same period. These families don’t need to be lectured with statistics — they feel the middle-class squeeze every day in their paychecks and checkbooks.

Now — with a new president and a new, strong progressive majority in Congress — these workers are hoping that Washington will at last be an incubator of good policies that create opportunity, reward work not just wealth, and help restore the middle class. That’s why it’s so important that the 111th Congress pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

We know that one of the lessons of the Greatest Generation remains that when workers can join a union, the middle class is strengthened. The gains workers made in the last century would never have been possible had union organizers not marched and pushed and gone door to door, shop to shop, to stand up for their fellow workers.

Workers in unions earn 30 percent higher wages on average, and are 60 percent more likely to have employer-covered health insurance. The question is what we will do to empower workers in this new century — and it should begin with The Employee Free Choice Act’s common sense, fundamentally fair mission of making it easier for men and women to join a union in their workplace. The legislation would give workers a fair and direct path to form unions through majority sign-up, help employees secure a contract with their employer in a reasonable period of time and toughen penalties against employers who break the law.
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FULL ARTICLE
http://pww.org/article/articleview/14581/

[karynnj]

1. this is a very nice op-ed

Reading it, what struck me is how consistent Kerry has been on this - here is a 1993 Senate speech - more detailed because of what it was - but speaking of the same things.

In many ways, we are witnessing the most rapid change in the workplace in this country since the postwar era began. For a majority of working Americans, the changes are utterly at odds with the expectations they nurtured growing up.
Millions of Americans grew up feeling they had a kind of implied contract with their country, a contract for the American dream. If you applied yourself, got an education, went to work, and worked hard, then you had a reasonable shot at an income, a home, time for family, and a graceful retirement.
Today, those comfortable assumptions have been shattered by the realization that no job is safe, no future assured. And many Americans simply feel betrayed.
To this day I'm not sure that official Washington fully comprehends what has happened to working America in the last 20 years, a period when the incomes of the majority declined in real terms.
In the decade following 1953, the typical male worker, head of his household, aged 40 to 50, saw his real income grow 36 percent. The 40-something workers from 1963 to 1973 saw their incomes grow 25 percent. The 40-something workers from 1973 to 1983 saw their incomes decline, by 14 percent, and reliable estimates indicate that the period of 1983 to 1993 will show a similar decline.
From 1969 to 1989 average weekly earnings in this country declined from $387 to $335. No wonder then, that millions of women entered the work force, not simply because the opportunity opened for the first time. They had no choice. More and more families needed two incomes to support a family, where one had once been enough.
It began to be insufficient to have two incomes in the family. By 1989 the number of people working at more than one job hit a record high. And then even this was not enough to maintain living standards. Family income growth simply slowed down. Between 1979 and 1989 it grew more slowly than at any period since World War II. In 1989 the median family income was only $1,528 greater than it had been 10 years earlier. In prior decades real family income would increase by that same amount every 22 months. When the recession began in 1989, the average family's inflation-adjusted income fell 4.4 percent, a $1,640 drop, or more than the entire gain from the eighties.
Younger people now make less money at the beginning of their careers, and can expect their incomes to grow more slowly than their parents'. Families headed by persons aged 25 to 34 in 1989 had incomes $1,715 less than their counterparts did 10 years earlier, in 1979. Evidence continues to suggest that persons born after 1945 simply will not achieve the same incomes in middle-age that their parents achieved.
Thus, Mr. President, it is a treadmill world for millions of Americans. They work hard, they spend less time with their families, but their incomes don't go up. The more their incomes stagnate, the more they work. The more they work, the more they leave the kids alone, and the more they need child care. The more they need child care, the more they need to work.
Why are we surprised at the statistics on the hours children spend in front of the television; about illiteracy rates; about teenage crime and pregnancy? All the adults are working and too many kids are raising themselves.
Of course, there is another story to be found in the numbers. Not everyone is suffering from a declining income. Those at the top of the income scale are seeing their incomes increase, and as a result income inequality in this Nation is growing dramatically. Overall, the 30 percent of our people at the top of the income scale have secured more and more, while the bottom 70 percent have been losing. The richest 1 percent saw their incomes grow 62 percent during the 1980's, capturing a full 53 percent of the total income growth among all families in the entire economy. This represents a dramatic reversal of what had been a post-war trend toward equality in this country. It also means that the less well-off in our society--the same Americans who lost out in the Reagan tax revolution--are the ones being hurt by changes in the economy.
You might say that we long ago left the world of Ward and June Clever. We have entered the world of Roseanne and Dan, and the yuppies from `L.A. Law' working downtown.
{/div]