{"id":5936,"date":"2008-12-24T12:12:10","date_gmt":"2008-12-24T19:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=5936"},"modified":"2008-12-24T12:12:10","modified_gmt":"2008-12-24T19:31:58","slug":"rep-hilda-solis-and-the-prospect-for-organized-labor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=5936","title":{"rendered":"Rep. Hilda Solis and the Prospect for Organized Labor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thought I’d share this post with you guys.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

I got an e-mail a few hours ago from Mahmoud Hossam, a reporter for El Badeel<\/a>, a newspaper in Egypt. I’m sort of their labor liaison and beat reporter (thanks to Hossam<\/a> who is an editor there) for America due to my work with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He was asking me about Rep. Hilda Solis being nominated by President Elect Barack Obama to the position of Labor Secretary and as well as the prospects of the Employee Free Choice Act being able to get passed in Congress and in getting support from Obama despite the fact that big busniess and its billion dollar lobbyists are in full swing in trying to get Obama to reverse his position of support for the bill. This is part of my analysis I gae to Mahmoud. I will link the article to you guys when I get it:<\/p>\n

Thank you for taking time for e-mailing me about your questions. First off, I will start with the Hilda Solis<\/a> appointment as I am a trade union activist with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters<\/a> (I’m an elected shop steward<\/a> for the union) and her appointment to Labor Secretary will obviously affect union work inside the United States.<\/p>\n

She is born from immigrant Latino parents and spent 18 years in the California legislature before representing the heavily working class and Asian and Latino 32 district in the U.S. House of Representatives which includes mostly East Los Angeles (a working class Latino and Asian area in the city and county of Los Angeles, California).<\/p>\n

Her pick is very much welcomed by the AFL-CIO<\/a>, the main labor federation in the United States and she is rated very highly by them. She is also very much welcomed by the other main labor federation, the Change to Win<\/a> coalition and is called a “An ‘Unwavering and Tireless Voice’ for Working People.”<\/p>\n

The main importance of her nomination is this<\/strong>, Solis is an advocate of the Employee Free Choice Act<\/a> (H.R. 800) which will be key in building the labor movement in the United States and will make it easier for workers in the U.S. to unionize.<\/p>\n

In the United States it is extremely hard for workers to organize a union at their workplace despite it being legal to do so in accordance with the National Labor Relations Act<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In order to set up a union the workers must first be actually interested in setting up a union, but the climate for this in the United States is very dismal as union membership has shrunk in the U.S. As of now unionized workers only make up 12.1% of the U.S. workforce<\/a>, in 1953 unionized workers made up 35.7% of the workforce<\/a>. And even if they do agree to unionize management essentially still has a strangle hold on its workers due to the way U.S. law has been set up against the worker to unionize…(Read the rest at The Mustard Seed)
\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thought I’d share this post with you guys. I got an e-mail a few hours ago from Mahmoud Hossam, a reporter for El Badeel, a newspaper in Egypt. I’m sort of their labor liaison and beat reporter (thanks to Hossam … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-poverty-labor-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5936\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}