Earlier this morning, Anna Burger, the Secretary-Treasurer of SEIU, spoke to the convention and I wanted to highlight her comments about The Employee Free Choice Act in particular. There is a fairly effective ad campaign on the air right now that is framing the The Employee Free Choice Act as "anti-worker privacy" and uses a Sopranos character to fear-monger about what passing The Employee Free Choice Act would mean for workers. So where's the pro-Employee Free Choice Act ad campaign? Hmm, good question. They simply haven't found the right message yet but there is an acknowledgment that there needs to be one and fast. It is a complex issue, one that's not easily broken down into a one line concept or sound byte and it's hard to explain to people why they should care. Anna Burger today made as good a case as I've ever heard for why we should all care about its passage.

What would the Employee Free Choice Act accomplish?

The Employee Free Choice Act is a simple law that does 3 profound things:

• It says a majority of workers can decide to have a union
• Imposes big penalties on employers who violate worker rights, and
• Gives newly-unionized workers guaranteed first contract through binding arbitration

No government interference. No corporate intimidation. No ridiculous rules and roadblocks set up to block your rights.

And the key reason it is so important:

It is the fuel -- the opening -- for SEIU to change our growth curve from 100,000 to a million or more workers a year.

That in itself, Burger argues, makes the Employee Free Choice Act larger than any one single issue, even more important than healthcare.

We are the leaders of the fight for healthcare. We are the biggest healthcare union in our three nations because we fight for it every single day. It's time that the United States and Perto Rico join our sisters and brothers in Canda and win quality, affordable healthcare for every man, woman and child in 2009!

Let's be straight: we need political leadership, not petty arguments.

We need fundamental change, not incremental thinking.

We demand action.

Healthcare is critical, but having the freedom to join a union -- that's transformational.

The passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, Burger argues, will make the difference between incremental change and transformational change, because it will allow the creation of a movement that will not only demand that change, but enable it. So, the Employee Free Choice Act is more important than healthcare because without it, there is no healthcare reform, or at least not the real reform we want and need. Same goes for every other progressive legislation we hope to pass in the post-Bush era.

Imagine a world where five years after the Employee Free Choice Act is signed into law, SEIU is organizing a million or more workers a year and the labor movement has added 20 million members to its ranks. Through the Employee Free Choice Act we've built a principled, permanent workers movement that will redefine politics for the next century.

Then just imagine what our movement could do:

• A real living wage for every single worker
• Healthcare for every child, guaranteed from birth
• Guaranteed retirement security
• Quality child care everyone can afford
• A tax system that rewards work
• An immigration system that is fair to everyone, everywhere, always
• Environmental policy that puts our planet and our children first.

Forever.

She's sort of making a process argument here, one that works in a labor setting since it celebrates the power of workers as a movement. How to make the average voter understand how important it is is another question entirely and represents one of the challenges the progressive movement faces.

(disclosure: SEIU is paying for my travel expenses to be here to cover their convention)

The AFL-CIO has put together a well-referenced briefing book on John McCain called McCain Revealed: The Briefing Book that shows he has been consistently hostile to workers.

Some excerpts from the publicity email:

...McCain has said economic issues are something he's "never really understood."

As the Democratic nomation fight continues, it's time working families understand John McCain's poor record on working family issues. Here's a quick look:

McCain--Wrong on Trade: McCain has cast vote after vote for every free trade agreement under the sun, including the most devastating agreement in our history, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). He has gone on to praise NAFTA and its effects and has voted to make it easier for the president to enter into agreements without strong worker protections.

McCain--Wrong on Workers: McCain voted to block the Employee Free Choice Act and supported a national "right to work" for less law. He supported President Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans while voting against raising the minimum wage.

McCain--Wrong on Jobs: McCain has made it a point to tell audiences that some jobs "aren't coming back." What he doesn't often explain is his role in exporting those jobs in the first place. McCain voted against prohibiting the overseas outsourcing of government contracts and voted to privatize federal jobs. He also voted to contract out federal jobs. And McCain has certainly done little to aid those who have lost their jobs, voting against the extension of federal unemployment insurance benefits.

McCain--Wrong on Social Security: McCain voted for Bush's Social Security privatization plan and says the only solution to fixing Social Security is through private accounts.

McCain--Wrong on Health Care: McCain wants to make health care premiums part of taxable income, creating a new tax for working families. His plan would force working families to fend for themselves in the private insurance market and undermine employer-based health care. In addition, McCain has voted to slash funding for Medicare and opposed the reauthorization and new funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

McCain--Wrong on George W. Bush: Since President Bush took office, McCain has supported Bush's positions 89 percent of the time. McCain's support of Bush's policies reached as high as 95 percent in 2007....

In Kentucky's First Congressional District we managed to field a great Democratic woman who believes in fighting for the working american, for equal opportunity for everyone, and for the American dream. She believes that every American who works hard should be rewarded with fair wages and benefits. Now, in the coming campaign I am sure Ed Whitfield will run as a "moderate", who cares about everyone. This record doesn't bear itself out, and there are monumental differences between the priorities of Exxon Ed Whitfield and Heather Ryan, who wants to work for the betterment of ALL the people of our district.

John Sweeney, President of the AFL-CIO, said 2 years ago:

"Today, the Employee Free Choice Act has 208 co-sponsors in the House, including 10 Republicans, and 42 in the Senate -- and we will pass it while George Bush is in office." John Sweeney at National Press Club 1/18/2006

Since then the EFCA, which adds penalties for labor violations, has passed the House, but has stalled in the Senate over a Republican blockade over a small change in "card check" organizing campaigns and has been abandoned by Democrats and Unions until 2009.

Currently employees can optionally organize or decertify a union using signature cards instead of secret ballots. Business groups only want to be able to decertify unions using card check, calling organization by signature cards "undemocratic" and condemning the entire EFCA as "Orwellian named." If the Republican position sounds like a double standard, thats because it is.

Sweeney and his Democrat allies in the Senate could easily shift the debate to just enforcing current labor law. Instead, they are letting the Republicans have a free ride this November by keeping the general public confused about technical aspects of forming a union.

Cross posted on Daily Kos

An Open Letter to DOL Sec. Elaine Chao:

Dear Secretary Chao,

I find it highly disturbing that a Cabinet secretary of the United States, let alone the leader of the Department of Labor, which is tasked with protecting worker rights and wellbeing would lie so blatantly and carelessly when it comes to the Employee Free Choice Act.

And what is truly infuriating is that the labor movement helped create the very department you have bastardized into a tool for the very corporations it was created to guard against. Today it is clear just how far you are willing to go to protect corporations from workers - instead of the other way around.

I wouldn't be surprised if the anti-union talking points you regurgitated in the Wall Street Journal today were crafted by professional fear mongerer Rick Berman and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. I am surprised that a Cabinet secretary would publicly display her ignorance of our labor laws - both as they are on the books now, and the proposed changes in EFCA.

Your ignorance is either laughable or malicious. In either case, your words and actions call into question your fitness to lead the Department of Labor.

Andrew Cuomo is on  Verizon's case.

One of my favorite blogs is the consumerist, mostly because it's are always catching big companies being really stupid and nasty to normal people.  Here's a good example of Verizon Wireless being stupid, training their people badly, and charging 100 times what they promised.

Also, we might need to start putting pressure on Congress for net neutrality.  Discrimination is starting to happen, Comcast is restricting bandwidth to customers, and Robert Cringely is getting disturbing reports.

"I used to work at Time-Warner Cable's Road Runner High Speed HQ," wrote one reader, "and as of 2005, TWC marked all VoIP packets with the TOS bit turned to 1. TWC has 5 levels of priority, VoIP having the highest, router tables second, commercial services 3rd, Road Runner consumer 4th and everything else is classified as 'best effort'."

There will be action possibilities soon.  We will beat these people.

For the moment, let's forget the important recent debate over whether easing the joining of labor unions is a net good or a net bad for both American workers and American business. Let's instead look at how a Fortune 50 like Verizon might attempt to rid itself of an unwelcomed business reality: many of its workers currently belong to a union, either the Communication Workers of America or the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Verizon is a sophisticated, modern telecom behemoth. It isn't likely to resort to blunt-instrument union-avoidance techniques like summarily firing workers who are pro-collective representation.

So what's Verizon to do? Verizon Inc. CEO Ivan Seidenberg is attempting to restructure the telecommunications industry, or at least where Verizon fits into that industry. Verizon's approach to the future is to grow the business while lessening the impact of unionization. How? By quarantining already the unionized technicians, sales people, and service reps of core Verizon from the rest of the growing employee population by building cordon sanitaires around their unit. The end result: unionized Verizon lacks the density that ideas need to spread effectively.

As it stands now, unionization at core Verizon is concentrated to workers who handle POTS -- that's Plain Old Telephone Service. The Seidenberg approach is to not let that high rate of unionization in core Verizon infect the rest of the company as it grows or acquires new units. Verizon has long tried to keep the unions out of Verizon Wireless. Now it's attempting to do the same with other units as they are added to the amalgamation. Case in point is Verizon Business, aka VZB. VZB used to be part of MCI until last year or so, and is now operated as a separate, non-unionized business unit under the umbrella of Verizon Inc. Verizon is moving more and more services and clients and accounts to VZB -- so rather than getting rid of existing union jobs exactly, they're just growing the areas where non-union jobs currently thrive.

As part of my work with the AFL-CIO I've been meeting with the CWA, who along with the IBEW are running a joint campaign to organize about 400 VZB techs in the northeast. About 150 are right here in New York City. The VZB techs have signed cards saying that they want to join the union. Those cards were verified by John Kerry, Stephen Lynch, John Tierney, and others (watch the video). Verizon won't recognize them. Senators Clinton, Kerry, Edwards, and Schumer, and Reps. Slaughter, Weiner, and Nadler and others have pushed the company to recognize the employees' choice. Of course, were the Employee Free Choice Act to pass the Senate and become law, that card check would be enough to form a union here.

A big part of this picture is that Verizon is aiming to compete with the cable companies, particularly via FiOS, Verizon's fiber-optic cable service to the home. FiOS means super-speedy broadband Internet. (Like up to 50 Mbps under ideal conditions. At that speed I could fully download the next movie in my Netflix queue, which happens right at the minute to be "Harlan County, USA," in about 5 minutes.)

But FiOS also means that Verizon can compete with the cable cos in delivering custom digital television content. Not to draw too much into this discussion, but the buildout of resource-intense last 100-yards technologies like FiOS is one of the things that telecoms cite when they argue against net neutrality. Neutrality (they argue) threatens their ability to control their own revenue streams, and the buildout of FiOS is 'spensive, something like $18 billion.

So Verizon wants to compete with the cable folks. But whereas the rate of unionization in the phone-line-in-the-ground business is around 90%, it's at just about 4% in the cable industry. By comparison, it's at something like 35% in the wireless industry, where Verizon also competes. But even in wireless there are other models. Cingular (now AT&T Wireless) has adopted a stance of neutrality when its workers want to join a union, and something more than half of its workers are unionized. Verizon's different approach means that Verizon Wireless and Verizon wireline are kept deliberately separate, including distinct websites at verizon.com and verizonwireless.com. Verizon customer service reps for the wireless service can't answer a question about wireline services. Instead, they'll transfer you to a unionized rep. Quarantined, see?

As I learn about labor, it seems to me that the whole field of union-avoidance is self-educating, in a way. Best practices get studied and copied. If Verizon is successful in quarantining its union workers as it diversifies and grows, then I'm thinking we'll see these techniques learned from and replicated by other employers in the same boat.