During the MTD convention, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Margaret Blackshere, president of the million-member Illinois AFL-CIO, offered numerous examples from their own state as to why grassroots political action remains vitally important to union members across the country.Despite major challenges faced by labor organizations throughout the United States, Blackshere and Blagojevich outlined the pro-worker progress that has been made in Illinois over the past few years.
Citing hard work, perseverance and solidarity as the cornerstones of an effective grassroots strategy, Blackshere explained how the rights, wages and benefits of public employees have been protected at a time when the state has been trying to reduce a $5 billion deficit. She discussed improvements in health care, prescription drug coverage, education and labor protections, including long-overdue adjustments to the state’s minimum wage rate and enactment of state laws shielding Illinois workers from changes in the nation’s overtime regulations.
Acknowledging that “they make decisions in Washington that we can’t affect,” Blackshere said trade union activists can make a difference at the state and local levels. And, in Illinois, to a large extent they have succeeded.
She gave a great deal of credit to Blagojevich, a three-term congressman who has carried his passion for workers’ issues, especially health care, to the governor’s office.
Noting that his parents were immigrant workers who found middle-class respectability through the trade union movement, Blagojevich stressed, “Now that I’m governor of Illinois, I think about their challenges and their struggles, and I try to make decisions that would make the lives of people like my parents better.”
Blagojevich addressed a major obstacle facing today’s workers when he pointed out, “Unlike the labor movement more than 100 years ago, nowadays the jobs of hard working people in this country are being shipped and exported to places where they don’t pay people fair wages. And while we have policies that come from Washington that are unfair to the labor movement and unfair to working people, in Illinois I’m proud to say we’ve gone in another in direction.”
He added that people who care about working families must do more than simply electing pro-worker representatives. “You need to have organizations across the country that are strong, that fight the fight for men and women who do the work of the world. That’s why supporting labor has been a big priority of this administration. My mother and father were able to raise their kids in a family where they could afford to one day send them to college, because whatever money they earned and put aside and saved, they were able to do it because they had benefits and they had wages that were fair. And they had those things because they had labor unions that fought for them.”
The MTD executive board also heard updates about the department’s own grassroots successes, including securing the go-ahead for port modernization projects in New York, gaining local support for non-contiguous Jones Act protections in Hawaii and working with local politicians and leading community figures to preserve jobs at the Kvaerner Philadelphia Shipyard.
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