| September 2019 | ||
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A New Path for VeteransVEEP Offers a Career in the Trades 
The IBEW's Newest Local North of 49° Au nord du 49° parallèle
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Sen. Robert F. Wagner was matter-of-fact in his call for Congress to pass the National Labor Relations Act in 1935: The New Deal's labor board was failing American workers. The oversight agency had become a "maze of confusion and contradictions… a sham and a delusion," Wagner said. Workers were struggling to survive while business and industry reaped the rewards of the nation's recovery from the Great Depression. With the stroke of Franklin D. Roosevelt's pen that July, the NLRA was law. It laid the foundation for a National Labor Relations Board with the power to enforce the right of workers to organize, bargain contracts and lawfully strike when management refused to play by the rules. The Act wasn't perfect. It excluded many workers and its remedies were weak. But it was a huge step forward. As union membership grew over the next 40 years, so did the economy. Working families prospered, able to buy homes, send their children to college, take vacations and look forward to a secure retirement. If unions were the nails in building America's middle class, the NLRB was the hammer. Wagner, who authored the Social Security Act that same year, understood that. What would he think now? TODAY's National Labor Relations Board is knocking down workers' rights and affirming management abuses at a breathtaking pace. Recent rulings give employers a green light to eject union organizers from public spaces, to more easily withdraw union recognition, to discriminate against union members in the workplace, to thwart protests and to run roughshod over the rights of people working for subcontractors and franchises. The list goes on. "You have a board under this administration that is rolling back policies of an Act that was limited from the outset, interpreting it in a way that continues to diminish the rights and protections of employees," former NLRB Chairman Mark Gaston Pearce told The Electrical Worker. |
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