[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 89 (Tuesday, June 22, 1999)]
[House]
[Page H4674]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             CELEBRATING FREEDOM OF WORKERS TO JOIN A UNION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 19, 1999, the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. 
Norton) is recognized during morning hour debates for 3 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Madam Speaker, I come to the floor in celebration of the 
freedom of workers to join unions. Would that it were only a 
celebration for 7 days in June. Workers across the United States are 
crying out for their right to join unions. Is this America? It is a sad 
day when we have to draw attention to the importance of the freedom to 
organize in a society like ours.
  One of those 7 days in June will be this Friday, the day in the 
District of Columbia where Members of the region will sit and hear 
testimony from union members in this region about the difficulties they 
have had in joining unions and forming unions in this region.
  I know something about this area. I continue to be a tenured 
professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. When I was full-
time, one of the major courses that I taught was labor law, and I saw 
and read and studied the deterioration of workers' rights, of the right 
to strike.
  I saw the contrasts between a period of great prosperity in American 
life when business understood that part of the symmetry of the 
workplace was the right to organize. We have come to a point instead 
where there is no longer talk about occasional union-busting, but 
workers meet wholesale resistance to the development of unions in the 
workplace whereby most employers, confronted with workers who want to 
join unions, develop strategies to keep unions from even getting a vote 
on whether workers want a union, in fact.
  Show me a society where the right to organize is in danger, and I 
will show Members a society without full democracy.
  What has our society come to? Wall Street is bursting at the seams. 
We have had surpluses for years on end. We have the best economy of the 
century, and we do not want workers to organize to get a fair share of 
that economy? We are sending people out off the welfare rolls, as well 
we should, and we do not want them to be organized so they can get a 
fair share, so they can in fact support their families as they leave 
welfare?
  What have employers to fear? After all, unions have to win a vote the 
way we have to win a vote in order to come back to this House every 2 
years. That is hard to do with today's demographics, where workers are 
by no means automatically oriented towards unions. Why, then, do half 
of the employers threaten to shut down if their workers organize? Why 
do they fire one in four workers who in fact organize?
  Despite these extraordinary efforts, unions are now having remarkable 
success. They are winning half of their elections of 500 or more 
unions. Minority and female workers in particular fare much better when 
they are organized than when they are not.

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