Political Quotes

“Thank you, Madam President. I rise to speak in opposition to the nomination of Marvin Kaplan to serve as a member of the National Labor Relations Board. Mr. Kaplan has spent much of his career as a staff member in Congress, where he worked to undermine unions and the rights of workers to bargain collectively. A key role of the National Labor Relations Board is to preserve the right of workers to bargain collectively. The Board itself is charged with enforcing the National Labor Relations Act, which Congress passed in 1935 in the depths of the Great Depression. The act gave workers the right to join unions, and it encouraged and promoted collective bargaining as a way to set wages and settle disputes over working conditions. This law that passed in the 1930s--and is still in effect today--is not simply a benefit to workers; it also benefits businesses, and it also benefits the economy. Section 1 of the act says, in pertinent part: ``The inequality of bargaining power between employees . . . and employers . . . substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners.'' There are a lot of important words there. When you have inequality of bargaining power, the findings of the Congress at the time said that would burden and affect the flow of commerce. So that tells you the impact on commerce.…”