- Playing
- "Slavery & Segregation"
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- Dick Meister
A national campaign has been launched to try to win union rights for two of our most exploited groups of workers -- farm and domestic workers, who are specifically denied the protection of the 74-year-old National Labor Relations Act. The law granted union rights to all other workers, but when it was introduced as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in 1935, racist Southern congressmen demanded that protection of the the law be denied the mostly American-American farm and domestic workers.
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Piece Description
A national campaign has been launched to try to win union rights for two of our most exploited groups of workers -- farm and domestic workers, who are specifically denied the protection of the 74-year-old National Labor Relations Act. The law granted union rights to all other workers, but when it was introduced as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in 1935, racist Southern congressmen demanded that protection of the the law be denied the mostly American-American farm and domestic workers.
Broadcast History
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Transcript
It’s been 74 years since the National Labor Relations Act went into effect … 74 years since passage of that vital law 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 those years, two groups of our most highly exploited workers have been denied the law’s protections … farm workers, and housekeepers, nannies, and other domestic workers.
It’s way past time that Congress did something about that. Time that Congress expanded the National Labor Relations Act to grant union rights to those workers who’ve been denied those rights for so long.
Which is the goal of a campaign called “Labor Justice” that’s been launched by two veterans of the United Farm Workers’ campaigns. That’s longtime UFW activist LeRoy Chatfield and former UFW attorney Jerry Cohen.
They’ve already gott...
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Intro and Outro
INTRO:Commentator Dick Meister says some of our most important workers need legal help ...
OUTRO:Dick Meister is a longtime labor journalist.
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