I will do everything in my power to block such legislation. And imagine, Sen. Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid pushing the union agenda, it would be very, very, very unfortunate.Got that? McCain will do everything in his power to prevent you from having a job with good wages, health care and a retirement plan.
The Employee Free Choice Act would level the playing field for workers who say they'd join a union if they could, and there's a very good reason our young people may want to do just that - Unionization Substantially Improves the Pay and Benefits of Younger Workers.
According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a large wage and benefit advantage exists for young workers in unions relative to their non-union counterparts, and younger workers are earning about 10 percent less than their counterparts did in 1979, despite impressive gains in young workers' educational attainment over the same time period.
The report, "Unions and Upward Mobility for Young Workers," found that young unionized workers - those age 18 to 29 - earned, on average, 12.4 percent more than their non-union peers. In addition, young workers in unions were much more likely to have health insurance benefits and a pension plan.Unionized workers in typically low-wage occupations benefited too.
The report, which analyzed data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS), found that unionization raises the pay of young workers by about $1.75 per hour. According to the report, young workers in unions were also 17 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and 24 percentage points more likely to have an employer-provided pension plan than young workers who were not in unions.
Among young workers in the 15 lowest-paying occupations, union members earned 10.2 percent more than those workers who were not in unions. In the same low-wage occupations, unionized young people were 27 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and 26 percentage points more likely to have a pension plan than their non-union counterparts.Union jobs provide decent wages, health care and retirement security in return for our hard work. So, who really cares about the middle-class? Barack Obama said he will sign the Employee Free Choice Act. John McCain said he would veto it “in a New York minute.” That puts him at odds with the middle-class and those young people struggling to have a decent life. No wonder they're overwhelmingly siding with Barack Obama.
4 comments:
I read a lot of blogs, and yours is one of the strongest voices for unions. Glad to see it. It's no coincidence that as the influence of unions has declined, so has the lot of workers.
Abi, you might be surprised to learn I've never been a union member; however, various members of my family have so that impacted my perspective.
I've heard all the criticisms about lazy unions members not carrying their weight, but I've worked with enough salaried employees over the years to tell you that cuts both ways. Good and bad workers wear blue and white collars, and its not any easier to get rid of lousy white collar, non-union workers than it is blue collar hourly workers. Large organizations just transfer the bad employees or assign them to another department, and of course some employers keep people around because they're good in bed. ;-)
Sorry, I'm bad! Anyway, I've lived in union states and right-to-life states and I've seen first hand how much better living standards are for people in union states vs. non-union ones. It's not a coincidence that union states have higher per capita incomes and jobs that provide benefits.
Shame on you. ;-)
I've been on both sides of the union fence. I was in the Teamsters' union for 12 years, and for the last 20 I've been a non-union worker, and I can tell you, human nature is the same regardless of unions.
Oops! I meant to write "right-to-work" states above. Duh!
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