[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 82 (Wednesday, June 13, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H3127-H3128]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                SALUTE TO ORGANIZED LABOR IN OUR COUNTRY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. ANDREWS. Madam Speaker, I am pleased to join with my friend and 
colleague, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Bonior), in the salute to 
organized labor in our country.
  The enduring value of organized labor's contribution is best measured 
by what labor has done for those who are not members of labor unions. 
Labor unions have done much for their members: Higher wages, broader 
and more valuable benefits, safer and more fair working conditions. It 
is the collective lifting of all workers and all industries and all 
persons across the country that has been the lasting legacy of 
organized labor.
  With that in mind, I think it is important that we examine what labor 
has achieved, how our lives would be different if labor had not been 
organized; what we must do in this Congress to continue the strong 
tradition of collectively bargaining in America, and then to consider 
the issues that affect each of us that labor is taking a lead in 
fighting and working for.
  Members of the generation that has been described as America's 
greatest generation were born in a very different world than the one in 
which we live today. A person 75 years of age today was born in 1926. 
In 1926, when they stopped working they stopped having an income unless 
they were someone very affluent and very privileged. Most people worked 
until the

[[Page H3128]]

day that they died. Then labor helped to take the lead in enacting the 
Social Security legislation in the mid-1930s.
  If one was born in 1926, they lived in a world where the day they 
stopped working, they stopped getting any kind of health care coverage 
or access to medical services if they had it at all before then.
  The mid-1960s again was in the vanguard as Congress passed and 
President Johnson signed the Medicare legislation, which has assured 
generations of Americans, labor union families and nonlabor union 
families, the security of first class health care from the day they 
retire until the day that they die.
  If one was born in 1926, they lived in a world where it was legal to 
require someone to work more than 40 hours a week without paying them 
overtime. It was legal to press into service children. It was legal to 
send them to work for long hours in dark places that were unfit for 
human work or human habitation. Labor was in the vanguard of changing 
that as well.
  The strides that labor has made are based upon the ability to bargain 
collectively, and it is this right of collective bargaining that needs 
protection and support in the Congress of the United States. There are 
two actions that I think are important for us to consider. One we 
should take and one we should not take.
  We should, as the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Green), has suggested and 
others have suggested, enact legislation that says to an employer that 
when the employer in bad faith refuses to bargain collectively with a 
duly recognized collective bargaining union, that that employer should 
be held responsible for the consequential damages and attorney's fees 
which flow from such a failure to bargain in good faith.
  The way it works today is that when a union fights and wins a 
representation election and an employer chooses to keep on fighting 
rather than to start bargaining, that lost wages and lost value of 
benefits and expenses incurred as a result of continuing to litigate 
and to fight are not recoverable by the workers who won that 
representation election.
  It is a unique anomaly in American law. In virtually every other area 
of contract law in America, if one has a contract and it is breached by 
the other side, they are made whole for the consequences of that 
breach. That is not true in collective bargaining legislation and it 
ought to be. That is the aim of legislation that I have introduced in 
the House of Representatives in this Congress.

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