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Contact: President Don Rowen email: dprowen@msn.com 
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Remarks of President Larry Cohen to the CWA Convention June 22, 2009 We meet in Washington at an historic time. Thanks to your work last summer and fall, we have a new government led by President Barak Obama. His election was only the beginning as President Obama has challenged us ? this is a time for change and the U.S. labor movement and CWA, in particular, are major engines of change. (read the rest of his remarks) (watch the video) Vice President Joseph Biden addressed the CWA Convention (watch
the video)
Watch Out, Washington, D.C. – Here We Come! More than 2,500 CWA members will converge upon the nation’s capitol June 22-25 for the 71st CWA Convention and Legislative-Political Conference. This year’s event will in some ways be a “perfect storm” – it takes place as two of our signature issues, the Employee Free Choice Act and quality, affordable health care take center stage in Congress. “This is an historic time, the best opportunity the union movement has had in decades to restore workers’ bargaining rights and gain real health care reform,” said CWA Executive Vice President Annie Hall. “CWA has been a leader in the fight to help rebuild the middle class and our economy and our convention/legislative-political conference in Washington, D.C. is taking place at exactly the right moment.” CWA members will hear in person from Vice President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. And they’ll participate in two days of rallies and lobbying on the Hill. On Wednesday, June 24, CWA members will walk the halls of Congress, meeting with members and staff and demanding passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. The following day, we will rally and lobby to demand quality, affordable health insurance – and reform that includes the option of a public health insurance plan without taxing workers’ existing health care benefits. This rally is being sponsored by Health Care for America Now, the largest single-issue coalition built in modern U.S. history – a coalition that includes CWA and other leading labor groups. 
 In
a Point
of View guest column at the AFL-CIO website, Richard Kirsch, national
campaign director of Health Care for America Now! (HCAN), writes:
It’s not only President Obama who is on board for real health reform. All five committees in Congress that work on health care are right now joining together to write health reform bills. And 194 members of Congress have signed on with Health Care for America Now’s principles for real reform. Hirsch says the need for health care reform is urgent and can’t wait. * The majority of all family bankruptcies in America today are due to health care costs. * Health insurance premiums have risen more than 1,000 percent since 1993, the year the insurance industry first killed health care reform. * Wages, meanwhile, have lagged far, far behind. * Soaring health care costs have led many businesses to drop or scale back health care benefits, leaving employees at the mercy of insurance companies. Hirsch, who has been working for grassroots health reform for more than 20 years, says these rising health care costs “are unsustainable” and threaten to bring down not only our federal budget or individual families, but our entire economy. As President Obama says, we must bring down this nation’s health care costs, and that means we must reform our health care system. We cannot wait. There are four corners to health care reform, says Hirsch. First, allow consumers the choice of keeping the health care plan they now have or selecting a public insurance option. Establish new rules for private insurers, including covering pre-existing conditions. Coverage must be affordable and government, business and individuals will share responsibility for providing health insurance. Health care reform must ensure that all communities and groups, especially those currently underserved, have equal access to health care. Says Hirsch: Now is the time to pass these reforms, to give all of us the care we need, and to bring down costs so health care doesn’t overwhelm our personal bank accounts or our entire economy. Join Hirsch and thousands of other health care, union and community activists June 25 in Washington, D.C., for the largest-ever rally for health care reform. Go to www.HealthCare09.org for more information. Click here to read Hirsch’s guest column, “Health Care—We Can’t Wait.” Retirees Set to Tell Lawmakers: Health Care Reform Now by James Parks, For three hours before the formal opening of their annual legislative conference today, members of the Alliance for Retired Americans got down to business by taking part in workshops on health care reform and Social Security. They will be joined by speakers such as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.). Throughout the June 15-18 conference in Washington, D.C., delegates and many high-level officials and union leaders will discuss the best solutions to the nation’s health care crisis and develop strategies to protect and strengthen Social Security. In her opening address, Alliance President Barbara Easterling said seniors are in a unique position to influence the debate on health care. It is important for seniors to define the health care issue for Congress and the American people, Easterling said. Too many debates in this town make your eyes glaze over. People try to bury you in buzzwords and jargon, in statistics and sound bites. They do this so you won’t notice their top-dollar lobbyists sneaking around the back corridors of the Capitol. We must make this year’s health care debate different. It must be a debate about values—about how our country will never be a just society until every American has access to quality, affordable health care. On Wednesday, delegates will visit Capitol Hill where they will tell their elected representatives that the nation must have affordable, universal health care and that they must protect and strengthen Social Security. “We must tell our elected officials what is really happening back home,” Easterling said. We must shine a bright light into the dark corners that the drug and insurance companies don’t want us to see. In other words, we must do what we do best—tell people our stories. Easterling also outlined the Alliance’s agenda for health care reform: * Allow Medicare to negotiate volume discounts with drug manufacturers. Veterans Affairs does this, and its prescriptions cost 58 percent less. * End wasteful taxpayer subsidies to private insurance companies that run Medicare Advantage programs at a cost nearly 20 percent higher than Medicare. * Provide early retirees the option to purchase Medicare coverage. Many of the 5.1 million Americans between age 55 and 64 who lack health insurance are victims of mass layoffs. * Create a public insurance program to help families afford the cost of long-term care. * Pass the Employee Free Choice Act to help workers negotiate for higher wages and health care and retirement benefits. We must tell the story of how it was only through collective bargaining that we were able to support our families and have a decent retirement. Easterling warned delegates not to forget about the battle over Social Security. Calling it “the best anti-poverty program in the history of this country,” she reminded the delegates that in these difficult economic times Social Security is needed more than ever. We must tell people no privatization, no way, no how. Alliance Secretary-Treasurer Ruben Burks, a retired member of the UAW, said the problems facing the auto industry, and the nation are connected. Instead of creating universal health care, we have let the big drug and insurance companies do whatever they want, charge whatever they want and discriminate against whomever they want. Our nation’s manufacturing base has crumbled. Our tax and trade policies have actually encouraged big companies to send jobs overseas. We have let the Wal-Marts and the Wall Streets of the world run roughshod over our nation’s labor laws. We have learned the hard way that when the ability to form a union gets taken away, there will not be much left of the middle class in this country. This is a time for our nation to come together, Burks said. In times this tough, we have to stay true to our values. Stay true to the values that guided our generation through some pretty tough fights—building strong unions, growing the middle class and tearing down the walls of hatred and discrimination. Union leaders who will speak to delegates include AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee, Communications Workers of America President Larry Cohen, Machinists President Tom Buffenbarger, Teamsters President James Hoffa and former Alliance President George Kourpias. In addition, Alan Cohen, chief counselor for Social Security for the Senate Finance Committee, and Nate Loewentheil, executive director of the Roosevelt Institution, are slated to speak. Two Former Labor Secretaries: Why We Support Employee Free Choice by Seth Michaels,  Ray
Marshall, secretary of labor from 1977 to 1981, and Robert Reich, secretary
of labor from 1993 to 1997, have borne witness to a big shift in the economy
and the power of workers over past decades. They’ve seen an economy weakened
by inequality, corporate greed and the decreasing ability of workers to
bargain for their fair share—and they know now is the time to change that.
In Sunday’s Chicago Tribune, Reich and Marshall explain clearly why we need the Employee Free Choice Act, which would level the playing field for workers seeking to join unions and create an economy that works for everyone. Economic recovery starts by giving workers the tools they need to get fair wages, better benefits and economic security, say the two former labor secretaries: A vital component of our nation’s recovery is making sure that we don’t return to a bubble-and-bust economy, where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the middle class gets squeezed…the economy we are rebuilding must be a sustainable one. That starts with good-paying, secure jobs. Long-term economic growth requires consumers to have the purchasing power necessary to buy the goods and services small and large businesses provide. Lessons of history, Marshall and Reich say, show that when workers have the ability to bargain for a better life, everyone—workers, communities and businesses alike—benefits: We must reform our obsolete labor laws so workers can join unions without the roadblocks so many face. The principles that are the foundation of the Employee Free Choice Act—giving workers a direct path to form unions, toughening penalties against employers who break the law and helping workers secure a first contract in a reasonable period of time—are ones we must never waiver on. Read the whole thing here. |
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