SWEENEY, BURGER EMPHASIZE THREAT TO MIDDLE CLASS, AMERICAN DREAM

Friday, August 29, 2008

(PAI)SWEENEY, BURGER EMPHASIZE THREAT TO MIDDLE CLASS, AMERICAN DREAM

   DENVER (PAI)--The nation’s two top union leaders, AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney and Change To Win Chair Anna Burger, emphasized the threat to the middle class and the American Dream in their speeches to the Democratic Convention. Their solutions, in their August 26 addresses: Election of Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama as president and passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

   Sweeney, Burger, UAW Local 2344 President Robin Golden, SEIU member Pauline Beck of Oakland, Calif., Pennsylvania Steel Worker Jim Bauer, and UNITE HERE member Gloria Craven of North Carolina were part of “economics day” at the convention, August 25-28 in Denver.

   All these speakers concentrated pocketbook issues: The loss of jobs, the threat to the middle class and--in Bauer’s case--how “clean energy” jobs pushed by USWA can revitalize U.S. manufacturing.

   The legacy of the American Dream “is fading” Burger, who is also Secretary-Treasurer of the Service Employees, told the 4,000-plus delegates and a national cable television audience. “Under George W. Bush, hours are up and wages are down, and John McCain offers more of the same,” she declared.
   “All over America, children like Marcus Lewis are riding their bikes, starting sixth grade and dreaming of breaking Olympic records—or just finding a good job and raising a family. But unless we turn our country around, they’re not going to make it, not even into the middle class,” said Sweeney, who spoke about a half-an-hour before Berger. Neither speech was carried by the over-the-air broadcast networks.
   Both Sweeney and Burger enactment of the Employee Free Choice Act would help restore the middle class, though they did not mention the legislation by name. The Democratic-run House approved the bill, which is designed to help level the playing field between workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining. A Senate Republican filibuster killed it.
   “Dan Luevano is an electrician who worked for a construction company for 10 years, six of them without a raise. When he told his boss he’d be voting for a union so he could bargain for a better life, he was fired.
   “Steve Skvara is a retired steelworker who learned about unfair trade the hard way—when the giant company where he’d worked went bankrupt, cut his pension by a third, and eliminated his family’s health care,” Sweeney said.
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Press Associates, Inc. (PAI) -- 8/29/2008
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   “These are good people, strong people. They work hard and believe in their country, their faith and the future. They can’t afford four more years like the last eight. They need change, and that’s why they all support Barack Obama for president.”

   Sweeney said those workers--and all workers--“deserve a better America—an America where every worker can count on a good job, where every family has health care, where every senior enjoys a decent retirement….where all workers have a free choice to join unions, to collectively bargain, to lift up their communities and our economy and build a better life for their children.”
   Burger did not use other peoples’ stories in her speech, but her own, as the daughter of a Teamster and a nurse, to explain how unions put her family and their kids into the middle class.
   But with that middle class under siege, she added, “It is time for a change, an Barack Obama will bring the change we need,” Burger declared.
   “We believe in an America we need--where corporations pay their fair share, and where workers are free to form a union without being harassed or intimidated,” she said.
   The three workers who spoke took three different perspectives. Golden said he and the 438 other members of UAW Local 2344 in Grand Rapids, Mich., will lose their jobs in two weeks when the auto parts plant they work for closes up shop and moves to Mexico. “I’m not only losing my job, I’m losing my union,” Golden said.
   Golden then pinned the job losses on corporations that shifted U.S. jobs overseas for lower wages, no unions and no environmental standards. “McCain has voted for tax breaks for companies that have shifted jobs overseas,” Golden said of the Arizona senator, the presumed Republican presidential nominee. “I want a president that knows organized labor helped build the middle class and that organized labor helps keep the middle class strong.”
   SEIU’s Beck, a home health care worker from Oakland, returned to Obama, since he spent a day on the job with her--one of her union’s requirements for each Democratic and Republican hopeful. No Republicans responded to SEIU’s offer, or its questionnaires.
   Obama, Beck said, helped her care for an 87-year-old retired cement mason. Obama “did the laundry, mopped the floors, changed the sheets and did the dishes an talked with John about his career as a cement mason. That’s the kind of president we need: One with an understanding of working people.”
(continued)
Press Associates, Inc. (PAI) -- 8/29/2008
(convention, cont. -3)

   Bauer spent his time, on an economic panel between the speeches, talking about how making renewable energy machinery can provide well-paying U.S. factory jobs. A longtime Steel Worker whose mill closed, he became one of a 500-person USWA-organized workforce at Gemasa, the Spanish windmill turbine manufacturer which--seeing Pennsylvanian tax incentives for “clean energy” plants--bought the closed mill. Gemasa bought the mill and reopened it to make the windmill turbines.

   Gemasa is a key example in the Steel Workers’ 10-year multibillion-dollar Apollo Alliance project to restore U.S. manufacturing through tax incentives and other methods to create “clean energy” jobs.
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