By Mark Gruenberg
Pro-worker legislation,
including equal pay for equal work and an updated stronger version of the
Employee Free Choice Act, are part of the progressive platform lawmakers will
try to push through the Democratic-run House in the 116th Congress, Rep.
Pramila Jayapal, the Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair, says.
Pramila Jayapal serves as the
U.S. Representative from Washington’s 7th congressional district, which
includes most of Seattle as well as suburban areas of King County.
Teachers (AFT) President Randi
Weingarten and other witnesses discussed crumbling classrooms and underpaid
teachers and staff on February 12. The next day, the panel got down to work on
the Workplace Fairness Act, designed to put teeth into equal-pay-for-equal-work
law. And that’s not all.
Other pro-worker causes
pending before solons include the non-binding resolution for a Green New Deal,
which includes more than just a pledge to switch the U.S. over to non-fossil
fuel energy sources over a 10-year period. And Rep. Andy Levin, D-Mich., a
former AFL-CIO staffer, introduced legislation to undo a Trump decision to let
employers get away with infrequent reporting of workplace injuries.
The Green New Deal also
envisions construction of new and clean infrastructure, training workers for
high-paying clean energy jobs and reversing historic discrimination, in those
industries and elsewhere, against women and minority-group workers.
Meanwhile, lawmakers and gun
control advocates pushed for strong gun control legislation, a year after the
Valentine’s Day Massacre at Florida’s Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School.
There a gunman murdered 14 students and three AFT-member teachers, setting off
a nationwide student-led campaign for stiffer gun control. And the students
voted, helping elect pro-gun control lawmakers.
Rep. Jayapal outlined the
pro-worker measures as leadoff speaker on Feb. 8 at the conference on the
future of unions, which AFT’s think tank and the Century Foundation put
together. An organizer herself, Jayapal also stressed the best way to get the
measures approved, as well as mobilize for worker power, was to ensure – and
organize – wide community support, by highlighting community-oriented issues
and folding worker causes into them.
“Labor issues are community
issues and community issues are labor issues and we will fight for both,” she
promised. Two other issues the Progressive Caucus will fight for:
Medicare For All. Jayapal is
now the lead House sponsor and promised to introduce a new and more
comprehensive Medicare For All bill “within a few weeks.” She also previewed a
key campaign theme for it: Targeting the greedy health insurers.
“Insurance companies have had
a run of declining care and increasing profits,” even under the Affordable Care
Act, Jayapal said. “What is unaffordable” for the U.S. “is 80 million uninsured
and underinsured people while the country spends 19 percent of its GDP on
health care.” Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., its longtime sponsor there, will
reintroduce it in the GOP-run Senate.
“We know we will get attacked
by the insurance and health care companies and even by some in our own party” –
business-oriented Democrats beholden to those interests. “But nothing in this
country has ever occurred because we thought small.”
The Workers Freedom to
Negotiate Act. Though Jayapal described the measure’s aims as “to stop misclassification
of workers” as “independent contractors” without worker rights and “to stop
(state) right to work laws,” the measure is actually a lot more.
First unveiled late last year
by Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., now the Education and Labor Committee chairman, the
bill is actually the updated, expanded and strengthened Employee Free Choice
Act, a Scott fact sheet says.
Its provisions include larger
fines and damages for labor law-breaking employers, plus fines and damages
against individual corporate officers and directors. It also would immediately
reinstate workers illegally fired for union organizing – and without waiting
for a court order – and let individuals sue firms for labor law-breaking when
the NLRB won’t.
The bill would also allow
secondary boycotts, reinstate fair share fees for public workers – overturning
the Janus decision by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-man GOP-named majority – and
reinstate workers’ rights to file class action suits, which the justices also
threw out.
And it would require mediation
and arbitration if the two sides can’t reach a first contract, and write into
law the NLRB’s proposed “joint employer” rule, which Trump’s board threw out.
That rule said big corporate franchises – think McDonald’s headquarters – that
actually set labor policy for their franchise-holders are jointly responsible
for obeying, or breaking labor law.
Jayapal’s list adds to the
agenda of the 98-member Progressive Caucus, the largest such group in the
Democratic-run House. Also prime is the Green New Deal, unveiled by Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass.
That measure will go to a
special House committee Speaker Nancy Pelosi set up. And while it’s just a
resolution – a statement of goals – and not a proposed law, it’s a flagship for
progressive forces in Congress and includes more than just making U.S. energy
consumption “green” by 2030. That hasn’t stopped the GOP in general from trying
to smear it. GOP President Donald Trump, meanwhile, aims a “socialism” smear at
Medicare For All.
By contrast, five Democratic
senators seeking the party’s 2020 presidential nomination against Trump have
already signed on to the Green New Deal: Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy
Klobuchar of Minnesota, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala Harris of
California and Cory Booker of New Jersey. So has Sanders, who is pondering
another White House run.(IPA Service)
Courtesy: People’s World
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