Writing on Shalom Rav, a website run by his rabbi, Brant Rosen, Hamer says he immediately went to the school’s principal who set up an emergency meeting where he convinced the committee to move the prom, even though it meant giving up a $3,000 deposit. The students are making up the $3,000 through fundraisers. Hamer writes:

I proceeded to relay some facts: i.e. that Congress workers made $8.80 an hour with minimal benefits while the standard is now $13.20 with significant benefits. Also, I made it clear to the committee members that having prom at the Congress would misrepresent Northside as a place where liberal thinking and cultured morals abound.

And there was the practical matter that supporters of the workers might put up a big picket line at the hotel and that the pool of teacher chaperons would immediately diminish since the teachers, who belong to the largest union in the city, probably would not cross the picket line.

Why would a teenager, whose thoughts at this time of the year turn toward graduation and senior parties, think about a group of mostly immigrant hotel workers? Here’s Hamer’s answer:

Everything in my religious spirit, my religious being, tells me that to stand by while injustice occurs would be the wrong thing to do. Thankfully, the discussion …ended with the decision that our own financial burdens should never take precedence over the daily struggles of working class families that are less fortunate than we. When I got home I said the Shema (an affirmation of Judaism and a declaration of faith in God).

Hamer also is an alumnus of Or Tzedek , the teen social justice summer program of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs.  At Or Tzedek, he engaged with a variety of social justice issues, learned about organizing and gained tools to create social change. Since that summer, he has been taken on many endeavors through Or Tzedek, including the Congress strike.

Hamer’s commitment to justice comes naturally from his faith and training. Rabbi Rosen says the Jewish religious tradition is “rife with imperatives about protecting workers, paying a fair living wage and making sure workers’ rights are protected.” He adds:

It is foundational to who we are. And one tenant of our faith is worker and immigrant justice. We are well aware of our history in this country and the benefits of the union movement. Our job now is to realize that not long ago these were issues we dealt with as part of our common experience.

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The segment follows Thindwa, a Zimbabwe-born community organizer who has worked for years to help workers in his community—from the nurses of Resurrection Health Care to the sit-in strikers at Republic Windows. He helps community members get involved in rallies, contact their elected leaders and participate in campaigns to improve their lives and those of their neighbors. As Moyers says, Thindwa’s tireless efforts are:

All in a day’s work for a man who spends his days organizing people to tackle issues they face in the workplace, from low wages and meager benefits, to corporate behavior.

Now Thindwa, like JwJ organizers and working families around the country, is taking part in the campaign to pass the Employee Free Choice Act—hosting rallies, gathering signatures, getting letters to elected officials and helping young leaders speak out in favor of the critical bill. He knows the importance of giving workers the freedom to form unions and bargain, and the role that unions can play in giving workers a stake in the economy, as well as giving them the tools to improve their own lives and participate in their communities.

Thimdwa understands how important unions are to a fair economy, where worker power  balances the overwhelming corporate power. He also knows the importance of good jobs to building strong families and strong communities. Says Thindwa:

The question of good wages, decent wages for workers, isn’t just a question of economic justice, isn’t just a question of fairness for that worker….It does have broad implications for social stability.

You can watch the entire segment here. It’s an inspiring story of one man’s effort to help make the economy work for everyone.

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As part of SLAP’s week of action, held each year to honor Martin Luther King Jr. and Farm Workers founder César Chávez, students in 28 states and the District of Columbia are getting involved in the campaign for the Employee Free Choice Act. In coordination with the student week of action, Jobs with Justice will hold a “Resistance and Recovery” week of events.

You can find out about student actions in your area here.

United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) also is getting involved with the fight for Employee Free Choice. Over the past week, USAS has held regional conferences for students concerned with workers’ rights. As part of the USAS Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference, students from around Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Maryland and the District of Columbia on March 27 attended a rally at Penn State University to demand passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. This past weekend, hundreds of students attended the Southeast Regional Conference in Decatur, Ga.

The enthusiasm of thousands of students around the country is yet another critical element in passing the Employee Free Choice Act.

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The latest to sign on in support of the Employee Free Choice Act include a wide diversity of religious beliefs. The range of faiths represented illustrates the widespread support for the bill, which is backed by 73 percent of Americans.

For example, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, which represents more than 100,000 local congregations and 45 million persons in the United States, has endorsed the bill.  

Sojourners/Call to Renewal, the national faith-based movement for social justice and an end to poverty, has come out in support of Employee Free Choice.

 Both the Muslim American Society Freedom (MAS Freedom) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council also have joined the fight to allow workers to decide for themselves how to choose a union.

The Jewish Labor Committee also is behind the bill, saying in its statement of support that “for workers who decide to unionize, the current law is stacked against them.”

  Other groups to recently announce support for the bill are:

• Center of Concern; 
• Irish Apostolate USA; 
• Lutheran Volunteer Corps;
• Unitarian Universalist Service Committee; and
• Nebraskans for Peace.

Click here for a complete list of who’s backing the Employee Free Choice Act.

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Stewart Acuff, special assistant to the president, reports on the ongoing national campaign to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

What grassroots American movement can, in the span of one week, run 57 letters to the editor in newspapers across America, send 14,000 handwritten letters to 10 U.S. senators and simultaneously plan 35 grassroots advocacy events with workers in 10 states?

America’s labor movement, the AFL-CIO, can. Now that the Employee Free Choice Act has been introduced in the U.S. House and Senate, organized labor’s multistate grassroots campaign is running at full throttle. Religious leaders are speaking out for the Employee Free Choice Act to create fairness in the economy. Small business owners are sending letters, signing petitions and testifying about the value to their business of having a union. The newly appointed U.S. senator from Colorado, Michael Bennet, says that at every campaign stop and town hall meeting, a worker asks his position on the Employee Free Choice Act.

All over America, workers and folks who believe in workers’ rights and economic fairness are stepping up to counter corporate America’s increasingly desperate efforts to maintain their destructive stranglehold on our economy and our lives. They have lied over and over ad nauseam about the Employee Free Choice Act.

They have tried to bully U.S. senators just as they do workers who try to form unions. They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to obfuscate, distract and confuse the public and lawmakers.

But the power of the truth and everyday hardworking American grassroots action is defeating their litany of lies.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page finally admitted that the Employee Free Choice Act will not destroy secret ballot election. The Economic Policy Institute just released a study by John DiNardo, professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, that proves unions do not harm businesses and do not destroy jobs. Even Erin Burnett of CNBC went to David Gregory’s “Meet the Press” to explain that the “populist rage” sweeping America, results from 30 years of stagnant and declining wages, CEO pay that is 400 times as much as the average worker, a recession created at least in part by a lack of demand and buying power, and an obscenely top heavy economy.

Because of all this—the massive grassroots campaign, the failures and inequities of the economy and the growing support for the Employee Free Choice Act—even sectors of corporate America have smelled the coffee and are looking for compromise legislation. Three huge American corporations—Starbucks, Costco and Whole Foods have come forward with a compromise. Though their compromise is totally inadequate, it does signal that the ranks of corporate America have broken and that passage of the Employee Free Choice Act is increasingly inevitable.

It is a rare, beautiful thing in America when we see the class solidarity of the upper classes break down. Sometimes it mistakenly seems that the class solidarity of the upper classes is the most powerful thing in our political economy. Of course, it isn’t as we learned in November 2008 and are learning again today.

As the momentum for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act grows, so does the evidence of its necessity. The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances has released dates showing that the net worth of the average American household is less today than in 2001. They also found the wealth gap between white Americans and African Americans has grown. That stands to reason. Black union workers make about 30 percent more than black nonunion workers. Union membership is one of the most powerful tools we have to reduce wealth and income inequality. As workers—white and black—have lost the freedom to have unions and bargain collectively, inequality has grown exponentially so that we now have more inequality than at anytime since 1929.

Support and campaign work for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act is growing all over America because more and more Americans know that this legislation is a simple, commonsensical way to restore the freedom of workers in American to form unions and bargain collectively and to create an economy that works for all of us.

This is a cross-post from the Huffington Post blog.

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Specter made a statement today about the failures of America’s labor laws—failures that make the Employee Free Choice Act necessary—but he also advanced falsehoods spread by corporate front groups. The statement shows that he’s listening not to his constituents, but to the big-money interests who are hoping to prevent workers from exercising their basic freedom to form unions and bargain. 

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says that while Specter’s cave-in to corporate lobbyists is disappointing, it won’t blunt the momentum behind this critical bill to protect worker’s freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life. 

Today’s announcement by Sen. Specter—a sponsor of the original Employee Free Choice Act who voted for cloture in 2007—is frankly a disappointment and a rebuke to working people, to his own constituents in Pennsylvania and working families around the country.

The fact is the Employee Free Choice Act has more support than ever—large majorities in both houses of Congress, the president and vice president, 73 percent of the public. We will continue to work with Democrats and a number of Republicans to create common-sense solutions to the decades of corporate power. 

We do not plan to let a hardball campaign from Big Business derail the Employee Free Choice Act or the dreams of workers. 

There are deep flaws in our labor laws, as Sen. Specter acknowledged today. The freedom to join together and bargain with employers for fair wages and better benefits is critical to rebuilding our middle class—and now is exactly the time to do it, as we begin to revive our economy in a way that works for everyone.  In the coming weeks, we will be escalating our campaign and finding the best ways forward to a balanced, strong economy.

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Some of the nation’s top historians have signed a petition asking Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act and protect the freedom to form unions and bargain.

Organized by University of Washington historian Michael Honey, who is president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA), the petition includes the signatures of 100 historians from around the country. They’ve looked at our nation’s historical record and say that it’s clear we need to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

Writing on behalf of these 100 historians, Honey makes a strong argument about what the lessons of history can teach us about our current economic straits and the need for workers’ freedom to bargain as a tool to help set our economy on the right track by addressing the long-term imbalances in power between workers and management.

From historical perspective the reason is simple: both democracy and our economy needs labor law reform.

The last Great Depression occurred when unions declined to almost nothing in the 1920s. Republicans cut taxes on the rich and removed many of the regulations of the Progressive era, which in turn allowed bankers and corporations to make sky-high profits. The housing and stock market boomed, and the rich got richer. That led to the crash of 1929.

Because labor was not organized, it had almost no restraining influence on government, leading to a vast divide between the rich and the working class. Sound familiar?

History may not repeat itself exactly, but as Honey notes, there are a lot of similarities between our current situation and the 1930s. In fact, opponents of workers’ freedom to form unions are using scarily similar language, as the Labornerd blog points out. LaborNerd provides a list of anti-worker, anti-union quotes and asks readers to determine which quote comes from the 2000s and which is from the 1930s.

So when corporate front groups try to make the argument that an economic crisis is the wrong time to protect workers’ freedom to bargain for a better life, we should remember it’s the same broken record from the 1930s. As Honey says, empowering workers to form unions and bargain is critical to ensuring a strong, sustainable recovery.

In 1935, the Wagner Act made it easier for workers to organize, establishing the right to freedom of association and speech on the job without employer intimidation or interference. The rise of unions paved the way to the Social Security Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and many of the government safety nets we rely upon today.

Because unions gained in strength, workers increased their wages and their buying power. When the economy came out of its stupor during the rapid industrialization of World War II, unions became widespread. The result was the rise of the largest middle class in world history.

The support of these historians is an important contribution to the fight to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. You can download a full list of the 100 historians who have signed on to this petition here.

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On March 25, the AFL-CIO will host author Kirstin Downey who will discuss her new book, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience. The event, at 12:30 p.m., includes a light lunch. Copies of the book will be available for signing. If you’re in Washington, D.C. and can stop by, please RSVP to 202-637-5297. As the review below points out, Perkins’ role in the New Deal has too long been underplayed.

When Frances Perkins stepped into her office as labor secretary, the first-ever woman in a presidential Cabinet, her welcoming committee consisted of this: a huge cockroach.

It’s a fair guess few had a rougher welcome to a high Washington position than Perkins did in 1933. In a splendid new biography of Perkins, The Woman behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience, Kirsten Downey writes:

Some male Labor Department staffers threatened to resign rather than report to a woman.

But as The Woman behind the New Deal vividly recounts, Perkins already had faced much hostility throughout her career. She had braved a vicious mob of Ku Klux Klansmen at a Missouri campaign rally for the Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith. As a New York state’s industrial commissioner, she had spoken with angry strikers and persuaded them to give up their stockpiles of dynamite. (They “delivered loads of explosives in suitcases, bags, even a baby carriage,” Downey reports—and some creative maneuvers by Perkins soon fractured the employers’ unity and brought about a strike settlement.)

She was not someone to be underestimated.

The Woman behind the New Deal describes how, in the 12 years of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, this extraordinary woman not only overhauled a horribly dysfunctional and gangster-ridden Labor Department bureaucracy from top to bottom-this was the least of her achievements-but helped transform the lives of literally hundreds of millions of Americans, a legacy that continues today.

There’s a fair amount of disagreement among historians about who in the New Deal was responsible for which successes. Downey makes a persuasive case that Frances Perkins, more than any other single individual, was the driving influence behind the creation and design of both the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act.

This really means that every senior citizen who gets a regular Social Security check, as well as every worker who depends on the minimum wage, or counts on overtime pay, or files for unemployment comp, owes a huge debt of honor to Perkins.

As if that weren’t enough, she also dramatically cut back child labor, increased workplace safety and expanded the U.S. Conciliation Service.

For anyone interested in the ways of politics, one of the more dramatic stories in The Woman behind the New Deal-and it has plenty of them-is the creation of Social Security. It was a project of breathtaking ambition.

Perkins had begun her career as an idealistic social worker, but she also had sharp political instincts about what Americans would support and what they wouldn’t. So when Social Security was being designed, she rejected systems other countries used in which government funding was the main support of senior citizens. Instead, as Downey points out:

She looked to the insurance model, in which people pay in when they are employed, so that they can get money back when they are not.

That deceptively simple insight made a world of difference. It may well have been the ticket to Social Security’s long-term survival. Roosevelt-who, according to his Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard, “clearly loved and admired” Perkins-understood exactly what was going on. He said Social Security “had been constructed in a way that no future politician would be able to tinker with it because it would be funded by workers’ own contributions.”

In devising Social Security, Franklin Roosevelt, a brilliant and ruthless politician, didn’t always give credit where credit was due. Kirstin Downey, a fine historian and a gifted writer, does.

Yet Downey’s well-balanced account shows that not all of Perkins’s judgments were sound. When her good friend Sen. Robert Wagner of New York wanted to write legislation giving workers and their unions the legal right to collective bargaining with their employers, Perkins did her best to dissuade him. “People may be made to go into the same room, but they can’t necessarily be made to agree,” she told Wagner.

Later, Perkins noted, “I did all that I could to slow the idea down.” Several major union leaders were at least as skeptical at she was.

Fortunately, Wagner didn’t listen to them. He pushed forward with the National Labor Relations Act, still known as the Wagner Act and eventually won some support from most of the trade unionists and from Perkins herself (”she tepidly testified in support of the bill,” according to Downey). Wagner’s legislation turned out to be the strongest Bill of Rights that American workers have ever had in the workplace.

But if Perkins was initially wrong on the National Labor Relations Act, she was magnificently right on just about everything else.

It’s peculiar that “a woman whose intelligence, compassion, creative genius, and fierce loyalty made her an exceptional figure in modern American history,” as Downey accurately describes her, is nearly unknown today.

Yet Perkins was little known even at the height of her considerable power. Eleven years into her career as Secretary of Labor, Collier’s magazine published an article that, in Downey’s phrase, “squarely identified the New Deal as a Frances Perkins creation”-and yet the title of the article was “The Woman Nobody Knows.”

Perhaps The Woman behind the New Deal will help change that. One can hope that in addition to being a gripping read and a well-crafted biography, it will finally bring to Frances Perkins some of the attention and gratitude and admiration she never had in full measure and always deserved.

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