3:26 PM Eastern - Wednesday, June 10, 2009

SEIU exposes U.S. Chamber of Commerce's record of fighting common-sense legislation

The very same day that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced a $100 million campaign to "defend the free market system," SEIU announced a campaign of its own: to expose the Chamber's record of opposing working families and common-sense legislation that would help our economy. The campaign will launch today with a new ad designed to tie the Chamber's current opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act to their past opposition of popular legislation like the Family Medical and Leave Act, SCHIP, and raising the minimum wage.

Watch the ad here:

"While Americans are losing their jobs, their retirement security and their health care, the greedy CEOs that the U.S. Chamber represents have brought us nothing more than executive bonuses and taxpayer-funded bailouts," said SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger. "Now they've announced a deep-pocketed misinformation campaign. Let me tell you: It's going to take more than a $100 million PR campaign to make people believe that greedy CEOs have their best interests at heart. They're going to have to start behaving differently."

The ad, entitled "Bad Company," will run online in Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Louisiana, Virginia and North Dakota.

"Over the next couple of months, you're going to hear from a wide coalition of interests, from small businesses to environmental groups, exposing the U.S. Chamber's assault on common-sense legislation across the board," continued Burger. "We'll never be able to outspend Big Business, but luckily, we'll have the will of every American who believes we should give average workers a dollar raise before we give another CEO a million-dollar bonus."

In an April poll from Public Strategies, Inc., just 37 percent of Americans said they trusted corporations to "do the right thing." Recently, the Chamber of Commerce even admitted that they still accept taxpayer-funded bailout money to fund their ad campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act.

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