Karen Nussbuam's Remarks

Karen Nussbaum
AFL-CIO
Take Care Net / Congressional Briefing
10/31/03

Thank you.

Congratulate Take Care Net. This important new organization will bring essential validation and insight into the problems faced by working people every day, and will put their research into the service of making needed change.

I’d like to draw a picture of an historical period: there is great social turmoil around the 8 hour day; tens of thousands of people are in the streets; there are many small strikes and a number of big strikes; and there is division among political leaders on how to respond.

If you said I was talking about the beginning of the last century, you would be right. And if you said I was talking about the beginning of this century, you would also be right.

In my few minutes I want to make three points:

Work and family issues are vital to unions Because they are vital to working women and men and the current fight to save Overtime protections shows how salient these issues are.

Vital to Unions

Unions have a long history of struggling to make work respond to family needs: From the fight to limit the work week 150 years ago; To the network of child-care centers set up by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in the 1960s, which made them the biggest private-sector provider of child care at the time; To the groundbreaking contracts in the last two decades that confronted an array of work and family issues in almost every industry, with the most impressive gains in the auto industry, telecommunications and the public sector.

Today, more than ever, unions are fighting for progress on issues such as work hours, paid leave and child care in collective bargaining and public policy. For example:

• The United American Nurses went on strike nearly 50 times in the last three years over the issue of mandatory overtime and staffing;
• A $60 million work and family program negotiated by the UAW and Ford set the high water mark a few years ago;
• And the priority set by the California Federation of Labor on paid family leave resulted in winning this sweeping reform in a record one year’s time.

Vital to Working People

Unions work this hard on work and family because our members tell us it is important to them.

• In a poll done by Hart Research in 2001, 90% of all workers say it is essential or very important to have time off for a new baby or sick family member and sick leave without losing your job, yet more than a third of workers say employers do a poor job in protecting those rights.
• Time pressures are acute. More than one out of four women regularly works nights or weekends, and nearly half of all couples work split shifts, which results in higher divorce rates, according to Dr. Harriet Presser of the University of Maryland.And the priority set by the California Federation of Labor on paid family leave resulted in winning this sweeping reform in a record one year’s time.
• And 61% of workers between the ages of 25 and 29 say that employers fall short on policies that help working parents.

Overtime: A Salient Issue

The response to the Bush proposal to eliminate overtime pay for millions of workers demonstrates the power of these issues to working families.

 We knew work hours and overtime were important to working people: a poll of all workers last year placed Overtime protections as the highest priority along with a living wage.

But we have been stunned by the activist response:

• More than 1 million e-mails, letters and faxes have been sent by e-activists since March on overtime pay.
• Unprecedented level of visits to Congressional Representatives and Senators.
• The connection with people is immediate. Whether I am talking to a group of union women or going door to door in a middle income neighborhood, people are at the end of their tether and want someone to protect them against losing control over their time even more.

Conclusion

The old refrain “…Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will,” expresses an ideal as urgent to working people now as it was 100 years ago when it was coined.

Policy makers would do well to respond to work and family priorities for today’s working people and their organizations.

Thank You