In a town hall meeting today in New Mexico, President Obama reaffirmed his commitment to passing the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would allow workers to bargain with their employers for better job security, wages and benefits.
Watch it:
"What a difference a President makes," said SEIU International President Andy Stern. "For hard-working families who suffered for eight long years under George Bush's extreme anti-worker policies, President Obama's and Vice President Biden's leadership on behalf of the middle class is a breath of long-needed fresh air. We consider the President and Vice President steadfast partners in our fight to give working people a voice on the job in the face of the most challenging economic times since the Great Depression--and we look forward to seeing them at the signing ceremony of the Employee Free Choice Act."
Text of Obama's full remarks below the fold.
One of the things that i believe in, and if you look at our history, i think it bears this out - even if you're not a member of a union, you owe something to unions, because a lot of the things that you take for granted as an employee of a company, the idea of overtime and minimum wage and benefits, a whole host of things that you, even if you're not a member of a union, now take for granted, that happened because unions fought and helped to make employers more accountable.
The problem that we've seen is that union membership has declined significantly over the last 30 years. And so the question is, why is that? Now part of it, the economy has changed. the culture has changed. There hasn't been a very friendly politics in Washington when it comes to union membership. But part of it just has to do with the fact that the scales have been tilted to make it really hard to form a union.
So a lot of companies, because they want maximum flexibility, they would rather spend a lot of money on consultants and lawyers to prevent a union from forming than they would just going ahead and having the union and then trying to work with, and collectively, allow workers to collectively bargain. So there's a bill called the Employee Free Choice Act that would try to even out the playing field. and what it would essentially say is is that if majority of workers at a company want a union, then they can get a union without delay and some of the monkey business that's done right now to prevent them from having a union.
