by Tim Burga | Feb 12, 2021 | Uncategorized
Outdated labor laws have hampered our fundamental right to join together and negotiate for better wages, benefits and working conditions. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act will empower America’s workers and make our economy work for working people.
Click here to call your members of Congress and tell them to pass the PRO Act now!
The House of Representatives passed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act last year, but anti-worker legislators in the Senate blocked it. Undeterred, working people fought to elect pro-worker lawmakers to the Senate, House and White House. And we won. We thank Senator Sherrod Brown and Representatives Tim Ryan, Joyce Beatty and Marcy Kaptur for signing on as co-sponsors. Now is the time to put pressure on our Republican Representatives to stand up for working people.
Lawmakers gave us their word they would make the PRO Act a top priority. It’s time for them to keep that promise. You can read my statement on the bi-partisan introduction of the PRO Act here.
The PRO Act is the cornerstone of the AFL-CIO’s Workers First Agenda. If it passes, it would:
Empower workers to organize and bargain.
Hold corporations accountable for union-busting.
Repeal “right to work” laws, which were created during the Jim Crow era to keep White and Black workers from unionizing together.
Stronger unions mean higher wages, safer working conditions and dignity for all people who work. The PRO Act is our first step to get there.
Click here and we’ll connect you to your member of Congress: Tell them to vote “yes” on the PRO Act.
In Solidarity,
Tim Burga, President
Ohio AFL-CIO
by Tim Burga | Aug 6, 2020 | Uncategorized
More than six months after President Donald Trump promised that the COVID-19 pandemic was “totally under control,” cases are still rising across the country, Ohioans are still losing their lives, and working families are still struggling to survive the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression.
But this week, far from doing everything he can to get help to those who need it, Trump is parachuting into Ohio to stage a photo op and raise money from a handful of rich friends. Once again, Trump is focused on the wealthy and big corporations; while he rubs shoulders and pockets cash, working families are paying the price for his disastrous pandemic response.
Even as the situation has grown more desperate, Trump has repeatedly allowed his own incompetence and selfishness to stand in the way of delivering the basic necessities that working Ohioans need to survive.
We don’t need to play host to a high-dollar fundraiser. We need a national testing strategy, we need a domestic supply chain that provides widespread access to personal protective equipment, and we need a president in the White House with the capacity to lead us through this crisis.
Working people know that our greatest strength is found in solidarity. We can overcome immense challenges if we work together, support each other, and put our urgent collective needs first. But instead of rallying us together — rather than carry out the most basic responsibilities of his job — Trump has put himself first at every turn.
From the first days of the outbreak, Trump ignored public health experts, downplayed the virus, and failed to take meaningful action, causing the United States to lead the world with more than 4.6 million cases. As a result, thousands of Ohioans have lost their lives to COVID-19, tens of thousands have been infected, and hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs through no fault of their own.
Just last week, we learned the economy suffered through its worst quarter on record, contracting by nearly a third. And asked about the growing death toll, Trump said: “It is what it is.”
Even now, rather than keeping Ohio families from falling further into this economic nightmare, Trump and his congressional allies have allowed emergency unemployment benefits to expire. And instead of securing Ohioans’ health coverage in the midst of historic job loss, they have continued to wage a twisted campaign to overturn the Affordable Care Act, endangering health coverage for more than 740,000 Ohioans and threatening protections for millions more with pre-existing conditions.
Ohioans want to go back to work. But this virus doesn’t care about convenience. It doesn’t care about what’s easy, and it certainly doesn’t care about Donald Trump’s political interests.
In order to begin returning to any kind of functioning economy — as so much of the world has already done — the United States needs to work together and rally behind a common cause. The labor movement knows a thing or two about that.
If the last three and a half years have made anything clear, it’s that Donald Trump is incapable of living up to this moment. Joe Biden has spent a career engaging and mobilizing communities to do great things in the face of enormous hardship. While Trump continues to ignore the reality of this pandemic, Biden is showing us the path forward — a plan to build back better.
Now more than ever, we need that kind of leadership in the Oval Office. Working Ohioans have suffered tremendously over the last several months. We can’t afford four more years of Donald Trump’s chaos, incompetence, and broken promises. We deserve better, and on Nov. 3, we’re going to win it.
by Tim Burga | Feb 25, 2020 | Uncategorized
We are standing up for our public Postal Service. It’s time to protect America’s most cherished institution.
The House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed the USPS Fairness Act. Now let’s get it through the Senate. We are telling our Senators to pass S.2965, the USPS Fairness Act.
In 2006, Congress saddled our public Postal Service with an unfair and unsustainable burden of pre-funding retiree health care benefits for the next 75 years! That means paying now for USPS workers who aren’t even born yet.
Selling the public Postal Service to private corporations is not in the public interest and would be nothing more than a raid by corporate pirates on our treasured public Postal Service which is protected in our Constitution.
The USPS Fairness Act will start to put that right by removing the unfair burden. By repealing the prefunding mandate, the Postal Service would then be able to focus on investing and innovating services in order to better meet its mission to service every American household and business.
Join us in supporting our public Postal Service. Call Senator Rob Portman today at (833) 924-0085 and tell him to stand up and protect our public Postal Service by supporting S.2965, the USPS Fairness Act.
The White House’s plan states, “Like many European nations the United States could privatize its postal operator.” What’s left unsaid is European nations charge substantially more for mail services delivered in a much smaller area, and they regularly raise the price of delivery. One example is that the price of sending a letter in the United Kingdom has increased 80 percent over the last decade.
Eliminating the universal service obligation to deliver to the 157 million U.S. addresses at the same price, as the plan suggests, would hurt businesses and individuals alike. It would be a dagger in the heart of rural America and undermine e-commerce.
Join us in supporting our public Postal Service. Call Senator Rob Portman today at (833) 924-0085 and tell him to stand up and protect our public Postal Service by supporting S.2965, the USPS Fairness Act.
In Solidarity
Tim Burga, President
Ohio AFL-CIO
by Tim Burga | Oct 23, 2019 | Uncategorized
Senate Transportation, Commerce and Workforce
Senate Resolution 376 – Opponent Testimony
October 23rd, 2019
Timothy Burga
President, Ohio AFL-CIO
Chairman McColley, Vice chair Thompson, Ranking Minority Member Antonio and members of the Senate Transportation, Commerce and Workforce Committee, thank you for the opportunity to submit written testimony today. My name is Tim Burga and I am the President of the Ohio American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (Ohio AFL-CIO). The State Federation represents over 500,000 organized workers in nearly all sectors of employment. From making steel to baking bread, building our schools and teaching our children, keeping us safe and delivering the goods Ohio’s union members are doing the work that connects us all. I write to you today on behalf of our union members and Ohio’s working families in opposition to Senate Resolution 376, which urges Congress to adopt the trade agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada, also known as USMCA or NAFTA 2.0.
NAFTA and subsequent trade deals have been a disaster for the U.S. manufacturing sector and as a result our local communities. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Ohio has lost approximately 106,000 blue-collar jobs because of NAFTA, as manufacturing plants closed and relocated to Mexico. That’s because NAFTA was written to enrich corporations, providing a massive windfall for big-business at the expense of working people and the communities where we live and raise our families. To make matters worse, it soon became the template for other anti-worker trade agreements, perpetuating a vicious cycle of multinational corporations outsourcing jobs to low-wage, low-standard regions and destroying the livelihoods of working families in the process.
After a quarter-century of this race to the bottom, working people are fed up and demand a better way forward. We are hungry for a North American trade deal that lifts wages and improves livelihoods. But make no mistake: The deal the Trump administration is pushing on Congress falls short of what we need and deserve.
President Obhof claimed in his testimony that this trade agreement will be different because the USMCA’s “enforceable labor standards will enable the American worker to compete on a level playing field, while improving wages and labor standards among our trading partners.” One of the standards that proponents hold up as an example is a requirement that at least 40 percent of vehicles made in Mexico must be assembled by workers “making at least $16 an hour.” As written, the deal allows any party to block an enforcement proceeding by refusing to appoint
arbitrators to a dispute panel. And the $16 wage rule is an average, not a floor, so it includes engineers and other highly paid white-collar workers. This flaw would allow Mexican auto factories to continue to pay the vast majority of workers poverty wages.
To win working peoples support, the treaty needs robust enforcement mechanisms not currently in the plan. Without the necessary enforcement provisions, the American worker will have little faith that Mexico can or will keep up its end of the bargain to establish a Department of Labor, implement and enforce long-overdue labor reforms, allow workers to form real unions and negotiate better wages and working conditions. While the Mexican government has taken steps in the right direction, this proposal has no way of ensuring that they continue following through on their promises.
This deal needs to mandate transparent reporting and strong, guaranteed consequences for violations. With working people in Mexico currently facing wages as low as $2 per hour or less, we cannot accept a deal that doesn’t have the enforcement tools to raise standards for working people in all three NAFTA countries.
Under the proposed deal, any party can unilaterally shut down a settlement panel investigating trade violations. That’s akin to giving an accused thief the right to shut down his own trial. Negotiators had gotten rid of this loophole in recent trade agreements, so to turn back now would be another unacceptable concession to multinational corporations. If a trade deal cannot be enforced, then it’s not a deal at all.
Finally, the administration needs to rein in pharmaceutical corporations’ monopoly over prescription drug prices. The new USCMA would lock in exorbitant prices for life-saving medicines for a decade — a massive giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry and a blow to working families and consumers. These are the most egregious issues, but there is a range of other problems with the current proposal that also needs addressed, from allowing corporations to hide the origins of our food to leaving high-wage jobs vulnerable to continued outsourcing.
While I am glad that this much needed debate is happening right here in Ohio, Senate Resolution 376 falls short of what Ohioans need from our state Senate on this matter. This body should be urging Congress to correct the issues outlined above before bringing the USMCA up for a vote. For too long, Ohioans have suffered from lost jobs and lower wages because of so-called “free trade” deals that place the interests of multinational corporations over our workers. The USMCA as written is just more of the same failed policies. I urge this committee to vote NO on Senate Resolution 376 and instead ask Congress to change the USMCA so that it works for working families.
Thank you for taking the time to read my written testimony opposing SR 376. Please do not hesitate reaching out to my office with any questions.
by Tim Burga | Apr 30, 2019 | Uncategorized
This past Sunday, April 28, was Workers Memorial Day. Unions of the AFL-CIO observe Workers Memorial Day to remember those who have suffered and died on the job and to renew the fight for safe jobs.
Across Ohio, events were held to honor and remember those who lost their lives on the job. The Occupational Safety and Health Act and Mine Safety and Health Act promise workers the right to a safe job. Unions and our allies have fought hard to make that promise a reality—winning protections that have made jobs safer, saved hundreds of thousands of lives and prevented millions of workplace injuries and illnesses.
“We must remain vigilant to ensure that the workplace safety gains that have been made over the last five decades are not eroded and to put in place new needed protections,” said Tim Burga, President of the Ohio AFL-CIO, speaking at the Dayton-Miami Valley Central Labor Council event. “The goal everyday for every family is to have their loved ones return home safely at the end of their work day and collective bargaining agreements are the best tool to achieve safe and secure workplaces.”
Each year, thousands of workers are killed and millions more suffer injury or illness because of their jobs.
“The Workers Day Memorial is a reminder that the best way to honor workers who lost their lives on the job is by pushing for stronger workplace safety and protection measures,” said Ohio AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Melissa Cropper to a crowd honoring fallen workers at the Cincinnati AFL-CIO event.
Recently, workers have won new rules to protect us from deadly silica dust and beryllium, a stronger coal dust standard for miners and stronger anti-retaliation protections for workers who report job injuries.
But these hard-won gains are threatened. The Trump administration has carried out an all-out assault on regulations, targeting job safety rules on beryllium, mine examinations, injury reporting and child labor protections. The labor movement and allies have fought back and blocked some of these attacks. However, this assault has taken a toll: Key protections have been repealed or rolled back and agency budgets and staff have been cut. There has been no action on critical safety and health problems like workplace violence, silica in mining and exposure to toxic chemicals.
As the health of working people continue to be threatened by extreme right-wing politicians, we will always continue in the words of labor activist Mother Jones and, “Mourn for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”
In solidarity,
Tim Burga, President
Ohio AFL-CIO
