Ron Gettelfinger: Labor Voices

Worker rights bill deserves debate, vote

February marks Black History Month -- and few chapters in our nation's history are more compelling than the moral crisis of the 1950s and 1960s, when civil rights activists forced us to confront a terrible reality: People of color were systematically denied basic rights of citizenship.

Blacks who stood up to claim their rights faced vicious harassment. In the light of day, white employers would fire blacks who attempted to register to vote; in the dark of night, cowardly terrorists would attack them.

No democratic nation can tolerate such outrages. But time and again civil rights measures were passed by a majority in the U.S. House and supported by a majority in the U.S. Senate -- only to be defeated by a filibuster used by a minority of senators.

Fortunately, popular pressure broke the filibuster, and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

The effort to stop social progress was led by Dixiecrats -- Southern Democrats who stood for the privileged elite against the will of a majority of the American people. Today, their spiritual heirs have changed political parties, but they still reward the fortunate few who hold wealth and power and trample the needs of everyone else.

In December, a group of Republican senators used a filibuster to block legislation authorizing bridge loans for the U.S. auto industry, despite majority support from both houses of Congress. They were unwilling to give a penny to American companies and workers without imposing conditions that would effectively legislate our union out of existence.

A minority made up of many of the same senators is now threatening another filibuster -- this time against an effort to expand workplace rights. They have signaled they will attempt to block the Employee Free Choice Act, which is supported by President Barack Obama and majorities in the House and Senate.

The proposal will reverse decades of discrimination against American workers. All too often workplace activists are fired, demoted or otherwise harassed when they stand up for their right to organize and bargain.

Corporate America and its allies have dishonestly claimed that the bill prohibits secret ballots in union elections. The act enables workers to organize a union either with signed cards from a majority of workers or with secret ballot procedures. The difference is that employers now have the power to dictate which method workers use to organize. The new law would leave the choice up to workers.

Is the fight to expand workplace rights truly a part of America's civil rights heritage? Martin Luther King certainly thought so. In the last days of his life, he traveled to Memphis to support a strike by municipal sanitation workers. The walkout began two months earlier when two workers were crushed to death by a malfunctioning trash compactor.

King believed workers deserved better -- and the only way to win better conditions was to empower men and women to organize their workplaces. "The labor movement," he said, "was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress ... and above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival, but a tolerable life."

Illegal retaliation against workers who try to organize is a serious problem, and the issue deserves a full debate in Congress. But all debates must end. When it's time to call the question, our elected officials should respect a fundamental principle of democracy: majority rule.

Ron Gettelfinger is president of the United Auto Workers. E-mail letters to letters@detnews.com.