Collective Bargaining: It’s Our Right, Remember?

http://www.afscmeblog.org/

Collective Bargaining: It’s Our Right, Remember?
April 19th, 2007

Standards such as the 40-hour workweek, plus medical and family leave, define the current American workplace. But they weren’t conceded to workers out of the goodwill of their employers’ hearts. They were fought for and won by generations of workers who refused to give up.

This same fighting spirit fuels the battle of AFSCME members across the country to help workers bargain for a better life for themselves and their families.

Take Nevada, for instance. A bill introduced by the State of Nevada Employees Association (SNEA)/AFSCME Local 4041 to grant collective bargaining rights to state workers just passed a state Assembly committee unanimously. Since local government employees in Nevada already enjoy this right, it is simply a matter of fairness that their state counterparts should do so, too.

Meanwhile, in Oregon, members of Child Care Providers Together CCPT/AFSCME Local 132 of Council 75 recently went before the state Senate Commerce Committee to demand that lawmakers write CCPT’s collective-bargaining rights into law.

Working families are the backbone of the country’s economy. Bargaining for better conditions at the workplace is our hard-earned right. AFSCME is making sure it stays that way.

Posted in Workers' rights, Organizing

if they never have another customer. They never seem to understand that WORKERS are also CLIENTS & customers.

How do we bargin if the masser just fires the lot of us and hires less competent, more desperate people who will work for less.

Rights, damn, I remember those. But seems we have gone feudal

I'm sorry, OS. In a major pissy mood and about to give up on ANY hope that common sense will prevail.

Capitalism is dead. They have gone back to a feudal system with corporations as Dukes. It's the dark ages.

Hope I get some hope back someday. I was a big fan of ol Sam Gompers.

Until then, workers are pitted against workers, injunctions which send today's union 'leaders' ducking for cover (where their 30's counterparts used to 'use them as wallpaper'), will continue to coerce workers back to work in the face of givebacks and wage cuts, and we will become just another divided herd of economically unstable, frightened sheep, happily fighting eachother for table scraps while a tiny, rich minority sucks up all the gravy.