Huffington Post: On Tour for the Employee Free Choice Act

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stewart-acuff/on-tour-for-the-employee_b_191047.html

From meetings with Democratic state legislators in the Montana state capitol to engaging state political leaders in Denver, Louisiana, Nebraska, Arkansas to town hall meetings all across America to meetings with faith leaders from Montana to Louisiana to phone banks and letter writing gatherings to actions by civil rights leaders to debates with union busters in Alaska, New York and Baton Rouge to a Dr. King memorial in Omaha, Nebraska to rallies and marches in Pennsylvania, tens of thousands of working folks and their allies created the largest and deepest grassroots legislative blitz in American labor history.

We gathered at almost 400 events to send the loudest possible message to the United States Senate: "We demand and expect you to pass the Employee Free Choice Act now." We made 100,000 phone calls and delivered 50,000 handwritten letters. All of this occurred over the last two weeks during the Congressional spring recess.

The American labor movement and corporate America are locked in the biggest, most high stakes legislative fight in two generations.

The Labor Movement is determined to pass the Employee Free Choice Act to restore the freedom of workers to form unions and bargain collectively, to end 30 years of stagnant and declining wages, to strengthen and deepen the middle class and to end the corporate assault on workers when they try to form unions.

Corporations and their right wing allies want to preserve an increasingly untenable status quo: union busting, rampant retaliation against workers trying to organize, the greatest inequity in the U.S. since 1929, a declining and shrinking middle class, an economic crisis created in part by a severe lack of consumer demand, growing poverty, and a severe health care crisis.

I was privileged to spend those two weeks and a third on the road debating the other side, rallying union members and our allies, doing dozens of media interviews, and two debates.

After getting blown off course in a Colorado snow storm, I joined my old friend Jim Hightower to speak at a large and energetic Communications Workers district convention in Denver. Later that night I spoke at two local union meetings.

FULL story at link.