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Public
Employee Press
‘‘I
believe in unions”
—Barack Obama
Senator
Barack Obama, the Democratic Party candidate for president, spoke about unions
and the needs of working people before an audience of 2,000 on Aug.5 at a high
school in Youngstown, Ohio. Below are some of his remarks:
Barack Obama
Obama
addressed
this Labor Day message to
America’s working people:
"America
was built by its laborers, but today our workers are struggling just to get by
in an economy that no longer works for them. We can’t afford four more years
of the failed George Bush economic
policies — policies that Senator McCain
has proudly embraced and promises to continue. It’s time you
had a partner
in the White House — a president who will stand up for working men and women
by building an economy that rewards not just wealth, but work
and the workers
who create it."
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I
believe in unions. I believe in unions because if you look at the history of this
country, things we take for granted — the 40-hour work week, minimum wage,
overtime, health care benefits, paid leave, child labor laws — those were
union fights.
Unions made life better for working people when they were being
taken advantage of. Even if you’re not in a union, you’re still benefiting
from the fact that there’s a union out there putting pressure on employers
to do the right thing.
The problem is, we’ve had the most anti-union
administration in memory under George Bush. We have to strengthen unions and give
workers a little more leverage.
Number 1, I think we should pass the Employee
Free Choice Act that will make it easier for unions to organize, make it harder
for companies to block unionization.
Number 2, it’s not the Department
of Management, it’s the Department of Labor. We need to have people in the
department who believe in labor standards, who are gonna enforce labor standards.
We need a National Labor Relations Board that will rule in favor of unions when
management is not negotiating in good faith and when they’re engaging in
unfair labor practices.
I think most unions are very responsible in terms
of wanting to see their employers succeed. But they expect that if a company is
making billions of dollars of profits, they’ll share some of those profits
with the workers that made that wealth possible.
That is a basic principle
of American life.
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