Carl Levin: “I thank my colleague from the great State of Illinois for organizing this special session to talk about what I consider…”

“I thank my colleague from the great State of Illinois for organizing this special session to talk about what I consider to be the single most transformative piece of legislation that we are considering right now, the PRO Act, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. And why would it be so transformative? Because, as Representative Garcia mentioned, inequality of wealth and income has grown to proportions we have not seen in 100 years in this country. From 1980 to 2014, income for the bottom half of earners, the whole bottom half of American workers, grew 1 percent; whereas, income for the top 1 percent grew 205 percent. And why? Because workers have lost all voice and power in this economy. Workers do not have the freedom to form unions. At its high-water mark in the late forties and early fifties, a third of American workers had collective bargaining, and they built the middle class in this country over the post-war decades. Today, 6 percent of workers in the private sector--6 percent--have collective bargaining, have unions, and so they have no real ability to get their fair share of the American pie and to rebuild the American Dream. The PRO Act would do so much to change this. Truly, it reminds me of my days organizing nursing home workers, kind of a long time ago, in the 1980s, in Michigan and Indiana and Massachusetts and Rhode Island. It was so hard for workers to form a union. Their employer could do almost anything, and that is true to this day.…”