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APWU Locals Go to Bat
For Employee Free Choice Act

APWU Web News Article #061-09, May 27, 2009

Click here to view a slideshow about the EFCA.

APWU members across the country are stepping up to the plate to help pass the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would help level the playing field for workers who want to form unions.

Answering a call to help finance a national media campaign, APWU locals have raised more than $25,000 so far for the AFL-CIO’s Turn Around America Fund [contributors’ list – PDF]. The national union also has contributed to the fund, which is dedicated to building public support for EFCA.

“This is just the beginning,” said Secretary-Treasurer Terry Stapleton. “We are asking every local to make a donation.”

“The Employee Free Choice Act is the most significant labor legislation in decades,” he wrote in a March 2009 letter [PDF] to APWU local and state presidents co-signed by Legislative and Political Director Myke Reid. They asked locals to contribute a minimum of $2 per member to help pay for the EFCA ad campaign.

The Employee Free Choice Act is based on a simple premise: If a majority of employees in a workplace want a union, they should be able to have one. The legislation (H.R. 1409 in the House of Representatives and S. 650 in the Senate) would:

• Require employers to recognize unions when a majority of workers sign up for union representation;
  
  
• Encourage employers to bargain in good faith, and
  
  
• Stiffen penalties for employers that retaliate against employees who try to gain a voice in the workplace.

At an April 19 union meeting, APWU San Jose Area Local members signed a letter urging Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to support the Employee Free Choice Act (S. 650).

At local meetings, APWU members have authorized contributions to the fund and have written to legislators urging them to support EFCA. Local leaders have been presenting a slide show about the bill and other important items on the union’s legislative agenda, including the Mail Network Protection Act (H.R. 1686), and H.R. 22, which is desperately needed to save the Postal Service from a crushing financial crisis.

Although postal workers already have a union, the Employee Free Choice Act is essential to preserving USPS jobs, wages and benefits, the slide show notes, because a large pool of non-unionized workers allows all employers to keep wages low.

“Many private-sector retail clerks, mail processors, truck drivers, maintenance technicians and others who perform work similar to USPS employees earn substandard compensation because they don’t have a union to bargain for better wages and benefits,” the show points out. “The best defense against demands for concessions at the bargaining table is having a strong union movement in the private sector,” the slide presentation asserts.

APWU members and activists have also been supporting EFCA individually by donating online and contacting their legislators online through the AWPU and AFL-CIO Web sites.

“I urge every local to make a generaous donation to the EFCA fund and to ask members to write to their U.S. senators,” APWU President William Burrus said. “The stakes are too high to not to act now for the future of postal employees and working families across the nation.”

[more EFCA news]

 

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