Unions Step Up Mass Mobilization For Employee Free Choice Act

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)

The nation’s unions stepped up their mass mobilization to pressure Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, working over the 2-week legislative recess to lobby lawmakers for the pro-worker bill. And they unveiled a new round of commercials - including the hard-hitting “GREED” - to run nationwide, while enlisting African-American leaders as key allies. The object of the drive, which ratcheted up last week as Congress left town for its Easter-Passover recess, was to garner the needed 60 senators to overcome a planned GOP-led filibuster against the measure, labor’s top legislative priority. The African-American lobbying, coordinated by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), includes both secular organizations, such as the NAACP, and African-American churches.  All convened in a national conference call LCCR organized April 8. The African-Americans’ campaign for the law will focus on its economic benefits, especially to minorities, by pointing out the difference between wages of unionized minority-group member workers and non-union minority group member workers. “Those of us in the civil rights community know that the Employee Free Choice Act is more than a labor bill,” LCCR executive director Wade Henderson told colleagues. “Labor rights are civil rights.”
- by Mark Gruenberg, Press Associates