1,500 Workers Take Fight for Union Rights to NLRB’s Front Door

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/

Organizing & Bargaining, Bush & Co.

Jul 13
1,500 Workers Take Fight for Union Rights to NLRB’s Front Door

by James Parks

In a protest filled with symbolism that resonated from civil rights marches in the 1960s, nine union and religious leaders, backed by some 1,500 chanting workers, locked arms and blocked streets at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., for nearly half an hour today at the height of the lunch hour.

Chanting, “We’re Union, Get Used to It!” and “Labor Board, You Ain’t Right, You Ain’t Gonna Take Our Rights,” workers from a gamut of unions protested the Bush-appointed NLRB’s failure to do its job and protect workers’ rights. In recent months, the labor board has systematically taken away workers’ rights and is poised to bar millions more workers from belonging to a union.

Packing the sidewalks outside NLRB headquarters and spilling into the streets for more than two hours, workers such as Herman Brown of the D.C. Nurses sought to send a message to the labor board.

"I’m concerned about what’s happening in this country," Brown said. "The Bush administration wants to take away our right to organize. We’ve had enough."

Romay Tatum, a member of the United Mine Workers (UMWA), joined the march because she believes it’s important that workers have the freedom to belong to a union.

"The need for a union is just as strong as it was in the 1930s when the National Labor Relations Board was created," Tatum said. "We still have to fight for everything. It’s just that today we have to fight the people who were supposed to protect our rights."

In an impassioned speech, Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts, flanked by mine workers from Pennsylvania, reminded the union crowd of its legacy of fighting for justice:

Jesus marched for justice. Ghandi marched for justice. Martin Luther King marched for justice. John L. Lewis marched for justice. Moses marched for justice. We are marching for justice today.

The American labor movement has gotten on its feet and hit the streets and ain’t nobody gonna turn us around.

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tags: workers’ rights, National Labor Relations Board, NLRB, Cecil Roberts, Joslyn Williams, Kentucky River, Fred Azcarate, Jobs with Justice, Bill Lucy, Stewart Acuff, Mine Workers, Linda Chavez-Thompson