Stolen Word For Word

And in its entirety.

By AFL-CIO President John Sweeney on Labor

In one bold and unjust stroke, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) appointed by President Bush has invited employers to rob workers of their freedom to have a union by simply reclassifying them as “supervisors.”

The board’s decision on October 3 in the lead of three cases referred to collectively as “Kentucky River” is the natural progression of an escalating attack on workers and their unions by the Bush administration and its allies in Congress. The Bush NLRB’s ruling has the potential to strip union rights from up to 8 million workers.

And that’s just the NLRB. Other corners of Bush’s administration intervened multiple times to disrupt bargaining by transportation workers, terminated or attempted to deny hundreds of thousands of federal employees’ their bargaining rights, worked to gut civil service protections, imposed onerous and unnecessary new reporting requirements on unions and dropped strict reporting rules for union-busting consultants and attorneys.

It is clearer now than ever that if America’s workers want to restore their hard-fought freedom to form unions and bargain collectively with their employers, we must replace our anti-worker national leadership. Now.

Our rights are in shreds thanks to six years of rule by Bush and his party’s leadership in Congress. And we will not restore those rights until we restore a pro-worker national government. When a democracy works properly, Congress exercises checks and balances and corrects errors and injustices by the executive branch. But ruled by Bush’s party, Congress has rubber-stamped the president’s anti-worker, anti-union agenda.

America’s workers are going to need a strong partnership to reverse the damage the Bush administration and its allies in Congress have done in the past six years. We need to forge that partnership now through Nov. 7 by working for candidates who will work for us in Congress.