Full 2016 Platform

2018 46^th DRAFT LABOR

A strong, fair, and just economy depends on jobs that provide living wages, retirement benefits and safe working conditions. These are rights best guaranteed by ensuring workers’ abilities to organize themselves, bargain collectively and have a real voice in their workplace. 

We support:

1. A living wage: the federal minimum wage, including tipped workers, must be raised above $15 per hour and indexed to the cost of living. We define a living wage as the wage necessary for a person working 40 hours a week, with no additional income, to afford decent housing, food, utilities, transport and health care. “No one who works full time should have to live in poverty” –President Obama
2. Raising the state minimum wage to $13.50 incrementally over 4 years
3. A Worker’s Bill of Rights that includes: 
   1. A safe and healthy workplace with rights of association, assembly, free speech, due process and freedom from discrimination
   2. Benefits, including health care, retirement and paid family leave for wage earners and their families
   3. Equal pay for equivalent work for all workers, regardless of gender
   4. Prohibition of involuntary overtime
   5. Due process, including protection for whistleblowers and collective bargaining activities
   6. A ban on mandatory meeting by the employer about unionizing, politics, or religion
   7. Democratic and fair elections within unions
   8. A work environment free from all forms of discrimination, bullying, and harassment with meaningful reporting mechanisms and remedies for targets of discrimination and harassment
   9. Prohibiting any firing without just cause and strengthening protections during probationary employment periods
   10. Progressive discipline and mandatory arbitration for workplace infractions
   11. Prohibiting reprisals against or permanent replacement of workers locked out or on strike
   12. Enforcement of labor laws against employers who extort workers exercising their collective bargaining rights by threatening to move work
   13. Job training, education and related service for employees who are unemployed or underemployed, or whose jobs are outsourced, downgraded, or eliminated
4. Repealing the union-busting Taft-Hartley Act and so-called “Right-to-Work” state laws, as well as any law that seeks to interfere with freely negotiated agreements between employers and unions to collect fees for providing collectively bargained benefits to its membership
5. Prosecuting employers who force workers to work off the clock or fail to pay wages (“wage theft”)
6. Respecting picket lines by not crossing them
7. Unemployment benefits and retraining for workers who are locked out or on strike
8. Extended unemployment benefits in a bad economy
9. Safe and adequate housing, sanitary facilities, medical care and education for farm and forestry workers and their families
10. Amending the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 to apply to government workers, independent contractors, domestic workers, agricultural workers and their supervisors
11. Reforming the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to streamline the appeals process and institute meaningful penalties for employers found to have engaged in unfair labor practices
12. Automatic union recognition when unions demonstrate majority status in a work group desiring collective bargaining rights (“card check neutrality”), without being forced into an arduous NLRB process 
13. Equal participation between labor and employers in the management of workers’ pensions 
14. In cases of corporate bankruptcy, giving employee pensions equal priority to creditors 
15. Pension benefits that are portable between employers
16. Wage increases that reflect increases in productivity
17. Affirmative Action, including local hiring in all public construction projects

We oppose:

1. Free trade agreements that do not observe internationally recognized labor standards, including the right to organize and bargain collectively, workplace rights and safety laws, prohibition of child labor, prison labor, slave labor and human trafficking
2. Corporations that use mergers to steal workers’ pensions
3. Using tips as part of a minimum wage calculation