Thank Your Senators…Or Tell Them to Stop Obstructing the People’s Will

by Tula Connell, Jun 26, 2007

A big THANK YOU to all the senators who voted 51-48 for cloture on the Employee Free Choice Act today: All the Democratics, both Independents and one Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.). And a special thank you to Sen. Edward Kennedy, who has championed this bill when it was first introduced in 2003, when many Capitol Hill pundits thought it didn’t have a chance. The union movement and our allies proved the pundits wrong, with a majority in the Senate for the first time in a generation voting for a bill that would level the playing field for workers seeking to form unions.

By voting for cloture, these senators supported efforts to bring the bill to a vote in the Senate. But the 48 Republican senators who opposed cloture basically slammed the door on legislation that would have strengthened the nation’s middle class—and on the efforts of America’s workers to improve their lives and working conditions through unions.

Take a minute now to thank your senators who backed the Employee Free Choice Act—or tell your senators to stop obstructing workers’ efforts to join or remain in the middle class. 

As Bill Scher wrote immediately after the vote, the Senate action today ”adds to the growing list of attempts at progress from the new Congress stifled by the conservative minority,” including blocking efforts to empower Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices.

But the people have the majority on their side. Nearly 1,300 lawmakers in 60 state, county and city legislative bodies passed resolutions supporting Employee Free Choice; 16 governors signed on to a letter backing the bill, as did 115 religious leaders. Workers staged nearly 100 actions in the past week in support of Employee Free Choice, and middle-class Americans generated 50,000 phone calls to the Senate, 156,000 faxes and e-mail messages and 220,000 postcards, including 120,000 delivered to the Senate last week.

As Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.)  said at the 4,500-strong rally for the Employee Free Choice Act last week on Capitol Hill: the bill is really about the future of America.

The momentum is on our side.