The poverty platform: John Edwards speaks in Wakefield

[JohnLocke]

The poverty platform: John Edwards speaks in Wakefield
By Gary Band--Wakefield Observer
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
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Wakefield - As part of the North Shore Labor Council’s 11th Annual Legislative Dinner at the Sheraton in Wakefield on June 9, 2008 Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards delivered a rousing 15-minute speech to a 300-member crowd all too eager to hear what he had to say about labor laws, healthcare, tax cuts and the war in Iraq.

The North Shore Labor Council is a coalition of 50 labor unions representing 18,000 families on the North Shore. Other elected officials in attendance included Rep. Mike Festa, D-Melrose, and Cong. John Tierney, D-Salem.
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“I stand, we stand with the Quincy Teacher’s Union,” Edwards began to thunderous applause, referring to the Quincy Education Association’s June 8 vote to strike after failing to reach a contract agreement with the city’s School Committee. The conflict is over what the teachers say is the failure of a 13 percent salary increase over four years to adequately compensate for doubling the teachers’ share of insurance costs.

“We need to make sure that the cost of health care is not being pushed back onto the workers,” Edwards said.

The former North Carolina senator, founder and former director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at UNC Chapel Hill said he has been all over the country helping to organize groups, march in picket lines and contact employers and behalf of the workers.

“I believe with all my heart and soul that the labor movement is crucial to sustaining and saving the middle class,” he said. “I see abuses everywhere I go and we need labor reform law in America.”
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“The labor movement is the single greatest anti-poverty program this country has ever seen,” he said. “This country needs a president willing to walk out on the White House lawn, and you’re looking at him, and say, ‘We need unions. If you believe in America, growth and prosperity, then you believe in the labor movement.’”

Alluding to efforts by employers to discourage workers from joining or forming a union, Edwards said he believes that if you can join the Democratic or Republican Party just by signing a card, you ought to be able to do the same with union membership. “If employers violate the law, they need to be held accountable,” he said.

Saying labor reform is very personal to him, Edwards said his mother, father and brother had health care because of the union. But he believes heath care today is dysfunctional. “We need real universal health care for every man, woman and child in America,” he said. “We need to outlaw the pre-existing condition laws and treat mental health the same way we treat physical health.”

To pay for his plan, that he said will cost between $90 and $120 billion a year, Edwards said he would roll back President Bush’s tax cuts for people making more than $200,000 a year.
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