The CWA News | Working Together: Working Families Deserve Better than What We’ll Get in the New Congress

Larry Cohen, CWA President

The results of the midterm elections were a disaster, and for working and middle class families, the new Congress will be the worst in decades.

This isn’t because the Republicans or Democrats won the election. It’s definitely because corporations spent billions of dollars in this election cycle and now are ready to call in their favors.

We’ve already seen corporate interests moving to do away with gains workers have made during the Obama administration: the Chamber of Commerce has said it will set up a new unit to “scrutinize” initiatives by the Labor Department, National Labor Relations Board and other agencies that support workers’ interests.

The 2010 elections were radically changed by the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision, which allowed unprecedented spending by corporations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and “advocacy groups” fronting for right-wing and corporate interests that didn’t want to put their names on their message. This unchecked spending has pushed our political process back one hundred years, to the days when only the Big Trusts and robber barons had a voice.

Today, these corporate special interests have a lot of influence on Capitol Hill, where they are very good at working the Senate rules to keep legislation that would benefit working families from even being debated, let alone come to a vote.

This past year, the Senate remained stuck in gridlock, with obstructionists in the Republican Party blocking important initiatives like restoring bargaining rights through the Employee Free Choice Act, ending tax breaks for corporations that move jobs overseas, providing bargaining rights for public safety officers and stopping pay discrimination against women, among others. The House passed these measures but the Senate couldn’t even discuss them.

Debate is essential in a democracy. Preventing debate robs the public of one of the fundamental rights of our political system: the right to hold our elected representatives accountable for the actions they take, or don’t take.

And it’s not just the filibuster that’s the problem.

Holds, secret holds and threatened filibusters by Senators meant government agencies like the National Labor Relations Board couldn’t do their jobs. The NLRB had just two members for nearly a year because of holds placed on nominees to fill the remaining seats. That denied justice for thousands of workers who were illegally fired or mistreated by employers.

Just 43 percent of President Obama’s appointments were confirmed by the Senate in the first 18 months of his presidency. Compare that to the 87 percent of nominations in the George W. Bush administration who were confirmed over that same 18-month period.

CWA is working with other unions and progressive groups for reform of the Senate rules that will end these destructive holds and will bring about open debate and ‘yes or no’ votes after Senators engage in full discussion of the issues. Isn’t that why we elect them to office?

Looking ahead, it won’t be easy. We face tough bargaining in all our industries, a Congress determined to support financial and capital interests over the needs of ordinary citizens, and an economy that’s just not working for working and middle class families.

So we do what we always do. We reset, we set new strategies for positive change and we work the CWA triangle: organizing, bargaining and legislative/political action and coalition building around our key issues.

This issue of the CWA News looks at the ways we’re doing just that in this difficult climate.

Our overall goals remain the same:

• Restoring bargaining and organizing rights, which for U.S. workers are near the bottom of the global economy. Beginning in the post-election legislative session, we’ve been mobilizing to win collective bargaining for public safety officers, most likely the only opportunity we’ll have this year to expand workers’ bargaining rights.
  
  
• Creating secure, sustainable jobs in the United States and ending the offshoring of jobs that has devastated millions of families, entire communities and important U.S. industries. We’re calling on Congress to focus on secure, sustainable jobs, including legislation to keep call center jobs in the United States.
  
  
• Real retirement security, not plans to privatize Social Security and Medicare or extend the retirement age to 70.
  
  
• A major initiative is to reform the Senate rules that have produced two years of gridlock and obstruction in the 111th Congress and very little for working and middle class families.