Date: 2007-03-01
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

I yield myself 3 minutes. Madam Chairman. Members of the House. my colleague from the other side said that every American is guaranteed the right to organize. and that is what this legislation is about. You have a guaranteed right to organize. but when you do. very often what you find out is you do not get the right to organize on behalf of better wages or a pension plan. or holding onto your health care benefits. or the hours that you get paid at work. or the tension between your family life and work. the -kinds of things that people organize for. In many workplaces. when you exercise your right to organize. you get fired. you get intimidated. you get harassed. you get followed home. your kids get followed to school. people park their cars outside your house. Your work shift has changed. you are on the graveyard shift instead of the daytime shift. That is what you get. What we arehere about today is to redeem what has been in the law for almost 70 years. and that is the law that gives you the right to organize. It says you can either choose to go through an NLRB election or you can choose to have a majority signup. But then they inserted in the law many years later the right of the employer to veto that right to majority signup. So what the Republicans are suggesting in their opposition to this bill is that we should take away the choice from those workers that has been in the law for 70 years. So that those people. when a majority of people in a workplace decide that they need to organize their workplace to protect their jobs. to protect their salaries. to protect their pensions. to protect their health care. that they will be able to have that organization come into being. Today. you get harassed. you get intimidated. you get an election. and after the election. you get appeals. And you get endless bargaining that in our own State of California. people have been waiting 7. 8. 9 years for a union that they won in an election. Apparently the secret ballot isnt enough to win your full share of democracy. and has not been enough for millions of workers across this country. So this legislation is very simple. it is only eight pages long. It .says the worker gets to choose. That is the basis of American labor law. It is up to the employees to choose their organization and to choose how they want to arrive at that organization. They can choose an NLRB election or they can choose a card check majority signup. And we are simply saying. let the law work. Let the employees have the choice. And stop the illegal intimidation of workers. This last year. 30.000 workers had their pay restored to them because illegal actions were taken against them by employers because those workers did nothing else than exercise what the gentleman on the other side of the aisle spoke to. the right in America to oiganize. But 30.000 workers lost pay. lost hours at work. got fired. All of those things happened to them. And the year before it was 20.000. 20.000 and 20.000. This has gone on far too long. It is time to empower the employees to make this choice about their workplace. Madam Chairman. I reserve the balance of my time.