'A Last Vestige of Slavery & Segregation' ~ By Dick Meister

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'A Last Vestige of Slavery & Segregation' ~ By Dick Meister

 

It's been three-quarters of a century since enactment

of the National Labor Relations Act that grants U.S.

workers the basic legal right of unionization - the

right to bargain with employers on setting their wages,

hours and working conditions.

 

But for all that time, two groups of our most highly

exploited workers have been denied the law's

protections - farm workers, and housekeepers, nannies,

and other domestic workers.

 

Congress should remedy the situation by amending the

law to include the excluded workers. Which is the goal

of a campaign - "Labor Justice" -- that's been launched

by two veterans of United Farm Worker union campaigns,

longtime UFW activist LeRoy Chatfield and former UFW

attorney Jerry Cohen. They've already won the backing

of labor, political, civil rights, academic, religious

and community leaders and organizations in more than 30

states.

 

Chatfield and Cohen played key roles in passing the

1975 law that granted union rights to California's farm

workers. There have been drives to enact similar laws

in other states, but none have even come close to

passing. Neither  have drives for state laws to grant

union rights to domestic workers.

 

The need to extend the legal protections is obvious.

Most farm workers' pay is at or near the poverty level.

They typically have few fringe benefits and very little

legal protection from employer mistreatment.

 

Domestic workers, some of them self-employed, some of

them employees of companies that hire them out, also

generally earn little more than poverty-level pay and

have few benefits.  Most are women, who often are

subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Some have

formed union-like organizations to seek better

treatment, but need the force of law behind them.

 

The "Labor Justice" campaign leaders call the exclusion

of farm workers and domestics from the protections of

the Labor Relations Act "one of our nation's last

vestiges of slavery and segregation."

 

Certainly the exclusion is at the least racist, since

the vast majority of U.S. farm and domestic workers are

Latino immigrants. In a letter to Labor Secretary Hilda

Solis urging the Obama administration to back the

proposed expansion of the law, Cohen compared the

exclusion of farm workers and domestics to the

situation in racist South Africa under Apartheid.

"Blacks," Cohen noted, were specifically excluded from

the protections of South Africa's equivalent of the

National Labor Relations Act.

 

It was racism, in fact, that kept farm workers and

domestics from being granted the protection of the U,S.

law originally, although it was a more subtle racism -

a "sleight of hand," as Cohen said.

 

At the time of the law's introduction in 1935 as part

of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, most

farm workers and domestics were African-American. The

segregationist Southern Democrats in Congress, an

important part of FDR's political base, absolutely

refused to vote for a law that would grant

African-American workers the same rights as white

workers.

 

So, as presented to Congress by Roosevelt and as

passed, the Labor Relations Act, the basic labor law of

the land, specifically excluded from its legal

protections "agricultural laborers" and anyone "in the

domestic service of any family or person."

 

But now, 74 years later, we finally have the

opportunity to correct that shameful exclusion.

Finally, we have the chance to provide every worker -

every one of them - the vital right of unionization.

 

Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based journalist, has

covered labor and political issues for a half-century

as a print, broadcast and online reporter, editor and

commentator. Contact him through his website at

http://www.dickmeister.com

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Education for Liberation!
Peter S. Lopez ~aka: Peta
Sacramento, California, Aztlan
Yahoo Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com

http://anhglobal.ning.com/group/humanerightsagenda
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Humane-Rights-Agenda/
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