Workers' rights desperately need protection in the United States (from 2003)

[Omaha Steve]

http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2003/122003/12182003/1196385

Civil liberties are in the news nowadays, but don't forget about workers' rights.

Date published: 12/18/2003

THESE DAYS when we think of threats to our civil liberties, we have visions of a scowling John Ashcroft brandishing his beloved Patriot Act.

But for years we've been passive in the face of another, more pervasive menace to our freedom: bosses' suppression of workers' right to join a union.

Employers' anti-union tactics have been abetted in recent years by a major shift in our culture. Americans have come to identify themselves as consumers, as taxpayers, as shareholders--as almost anything but workers.

And yet, as fantastic as it may seem, most people in this country still are workers (or retired workers) and, as such, depend on wages and salaries and employer-sponsored benefits and pensions to get by.

But lots of workers are barely getting by. Labor activist Beth Shulman, who was in Fredericksburg earlier this month to discuss her book "The Betrayal of Work: How Low Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans," observes that one in four American workers makes less than $8.20 per hour--poverty wages, according to official standards.

As Shulman pointed out recently in a Q&A with Bill Moyers, these low-wage workers aren't just kids flipping burgers at fast-food joints. They're child-care workers, nurse's aides, bank tellers, cashiers, meat and poultry processors. They're people with families, people in the mainstream of our society.

FULL story at link.