AFL-CIO Leaders Have Lost Their Spine LaborTalk By Harry Kelber for December 1, 2004
So what kind of a campaign did the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions conduct? By their own account, they boasted that “workers have sent more than 1.6 million e-mail, mail and fax messages to the White House, Congress and the Department of Labor protesting the assault on the wages and hours laws.”
Even when it became clear that the electronic and paper barrage to lawmakers was not having the desired effect, Sweeney and the Executive Council still clung to this one strategic option. They also held rallies of union members in several cities, far from the eyes and ears of the nation’s lawmakers.
This was essentially the sum and substance of the AFL-CIO campaign to save overtime pay for the nation’s workers.
What was obviously wrong about the campaign is that it lacked a human face. It did not show the hardship and pain that workers would suffer if they were deprived of their right to receive overtime pay for their overtime labor.