March 1, 2010,
Vice President Joe Biden told the AFL-CIO that the Obama administration will still be able to push through a controversial union organizing bill that has been stalled for the past year and looked all but dead once Democrats lost their 60-seat super-majority in the Senate.
At the Buena Vista Palace Hotel in Orlando, Fla., where the labor federation is holding its annual winter meeting, Biden asked for continued support from union leaders despite the administration’s inability to push through two big items on labor’s wish list: the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for unions to organize new members, and a pro-union nominee to the National Labor Relations Board.
“I know it doesn’t seem like it, but we’ve come a long way in 12 months,” Biden told several hundred union officials. “In terms of the NLRB, we’re going to get it done. In the fight for EFCA, we’ve got to sit down and figure out where we go from here…. I think we’re going to get it done.”
By Chris Strohm CongressDaily February 22, 2010
The largest federal employee union filed a petition on Monday requesting an election to represent about 40,000 airport security screeners—a direct challenge to Republicans in Congress who argue that giving those workers collective bargaining rights will hurt national security.
In announcing its filing with the Federal Labor Relations Authority, the American Federation of Government Employees asserted that more than 30 percent of the screeners employed by the Transportation Security Administration and working in over 100 airports want the union to become their sole representative.
The election would be a critical step toward winning collective bargaining rights for TSA screeners, which they have never had since the agency was founded in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“We are going to continue our quest for collective bargaining and we know we are going to get it. But you have to do an election anyway,” AFGE president John Gage said on Monday. “We’re just not going to take no for an answer.”
