There’s No Going Back
Last week was the 50th anniversary of the historic Memphis sanitation workers strike where hundreds of brave working people marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to demand higher pay and fight for a strong union.
We’ve made some progress since then, but there is still much work to do.
Across the country, this movement is now led by domestic and fast-food workers, teachers and other underpaid workers showing us the way. In the past few years, we’ve seen workers in Birmingham, St. Louis and Kansas City win big raises by going on strike with the Fight for $15, continuing Dr. King’s legacy. Time and again, politicians have tried to stop their progress by passing laws to steal those hard-earned raises away.
Here in Iowa, working people, faith leaders and community organizers were able to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour in some of our largest counties like Polk, Johnson, & Linn. But Terry Branstad, Kim Reynolds and the Republicans in the Legislature wouldn’t let it happen. They rolled wages back to $7.25. The lesson is clear: If workers had a union, elected officials couldn’t step in to help their corporate donors and CEOs take money out of workers’ pockets.
The fight for higher pay and a strong union is gaining steam again.
We’ve seen what happens in Iowa when billionaires and corporations control our politics: high-profit companies get massive tax breaks, factory farms pollute our rivers and streams, teachers and nurses lose basic workplace protections — and two-thirds of the jobs in our state pay less than $20/hour. Now more than ever, working people need strong organizations to fight for them and win back the good jobs and fair pay powerful corporations stripped away. I’ll say what other people running for office now seem afraid to say: Iowa desperately needs more unions, new unions. And Iowans need the right to join a union no matter where they work or what they do.
In every city and town I travel to on the campaign trail, I meet Iowans who want a union in their workplace. This is especially true for young people who are being forced to leave because they are graduating with massive student debt and face jobs in this state that don’t pay enough to keep them here. Whether I’m listening to people in the tech industry in Cedar Rapids, financial service workers in Des Moines, or educators in Mount Pleasant, they all want the same thing: an economy that works for them and their families. They’ve cycled through a series of jobs that don’t pay enough and they’re frustrated they don’t have the rights to change things in their workplaces. They want a union. They deserve one.
I’m running for Governor to make it easier for all Iowans to join a union or employee association no matter where they work. That’s the best way to raise wages, improve our working conditions and fix the rigged economy. Let’s face facts, there are far too many Iowans working two and three jobs while still struggling to pay their bills — forget about saving money for the future.
Politicians will never fix the economy they rigged — it works for their wealthy donors and big corporations, but not for us. Labor unions were the last organized opposition to unchecked power in this state. For over 70 years, Iowa has been “right to work” and unions have fought to survive in hostile conditions. Republicans and conservatives have worked hard to destroy unions. Their dismantling of Chapter 20 in Iowa law was designed to be a final deadly blow, stripping away bargaining rights from public sector workers.
But as bad as the Republicans are, things haven’t always gone better when Democrats have been in charge. When Democrats had their chance to repeal right to work laws over a decade ago in Iowa, a number of them walked away instead of getting it done. We have seen unions shrink year after year for the past four decades. Right now, only around 6% of the private sector workforce is in a union, down from a peak of 35% in 1955. In Iowa, it’s about as bad as it can get. Over 90% of Iowans don’t have any way to advocate for better pay or working conditions. That’s why when I hear Democratic politicians talk about restoring public sector union rights, I say it simply isn’t good enough.
We need to start by restoring Chapter 20 protections to bring back the union rights that were stripped away from 184,000 public sector workers. That’s the bare minimum. We also need to allow Fair Share to strengthen public workers’ organizations.
As Iowa’s next Governor, I will also stand up to the corporate bullies and stop their assault on working people. That means having a spine and making it easier for hundreds of thousands more working people to form a union by supporting the elimination of the misleadingly named “right-to-work laws” in our state. It also means using the power of the Governor’s office to review every corporate tax break and tax credit to ensure that any company getting them is on track to pay a minimum wage of $15 and making it possible for their workers to join a union or employee association.
Innovative new laws are emerging to allow workers to deduct contributions from their paycheck to form worker collectives or associations. New policies are being developed to allow people to join together in employee associations and support these organizations through voluntary payroll deductions similar to what the United Domestic Workers, Fight for $15 and other groups are pioneering. We need to support these kinds of policies in Iowa too.
As a nurse and union leader who risked my job along with my co-workers to form a union, it’s clear to me we must reinvent unions as the way we see economic and social change materialize. We can do that by uniting working people across entire industries around issues like raising the minimum wage, winning universal health care, workplace protections and making sure workers can’t simply be fired “at will” on the whim of their bosses. A “just cause” law is one of the first basic steps Iowa could take to protect workers and their right to speak out and organize in their workplaces.
By expanding union rights, we can improve the lives of more than a million Iowa nurses, custodians, cashiers, educators and other working people, instead of just the wealthy few.
Our current Governor and the Republicans in the Legislature are using Iowa workers to advance their extremist, anti-democratic agenda. Governor Reynolds wants Iowa to be the poster child for corporate tax giveaways and CEO power. She knows if the business lobby can rip apart workers’ rights here they can spread these policies across the country.
It’s up to us to stop it here in Iowa.
If we truly want to fight and win against the greed of the CEOs, political insiders and lobbyists, we need to move beyond a model of unions that was created in the 1930’s. We need to challenge the status quo and allow workers to build a new labor movement to lead the next wave of workplace organizing in the same way industrial unions of the past created the middle class. We need to embrace a new future where anyone who wants to join a union in their workplace can, no exceptions.
Treating working people with respect is always the right thing to do. Fighting for justice is always the right thing to do. Now, it’s our time to be bold and rise up to the challenge in Iowa.
The fight for higher pay and a strong union is not going away. We’re just getting started.
In Unity,
Cathy
