Bipartisan Politics Yields Bipartisan Support for Collective Bargaining

We’re nearly there. We reintroduced our collective bargaining bill — the Employer-Employee Cooperation Act — in the U.S. Senate on August 7 — hours before the Senate began its August recess.

In a stunning show of support for a labor bill — or for any bill these days in the very polarized politics that currently prevail in the Capitol — five Republican senators and four Democrats cosponsored the legislation.

That level of GOP support for our union’s number-one legislative priority is a clear signal that our non-partisan approach on Capitol Hill works.

To illustrate how important this non-partisan political philosophy is to our legislative work on your behalf, compare the support for our collective bargaining bill to that for the Employee Free Choice Act, a very important piece of legislation that our union strongly supports, along with the rest of the labor movement, with the AFL-CIO taking the lead.

It’s common knowledge that the AFL-CIO has taken very strong political stands in every election in recent memory. So has the IAFF.

However, in virtually every single race the AFL-CIO has weighed in on, it has sided with the Democrat in the race (all you have to do is check the Federal Election Commission’s reports or the AFL-CIO’s own political endorsements).

In stark contrast, our union has a track record (again, born out by FEC records) of supporting more Republicans than any other union. Quite simply, our philosophy is that parties don’t matter — we only care where a candidate stands on the issues that affect fire fighters and emergency services. If a candidate stands with us, we stand with them.

Our political philosophy has, many times, resulted in our union supporting candidates that the AFL-CIO is opposing. The most notable example for this comparison is Maine Senator Susan Collins’ run for re-election in 2008. In that race, the AFL-CIO sent thousands of activists and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to unseat Senator Collins and in their support for the Democrat.

The IAFF and our Maine state association and affiliates stood strong, loud and proud, putting the full force of our union’s trademark gold and black “Fire Fighters For” campaign behind Senator Collins. We worked hard to get her re-elected because of her lengthy record of support on a number of the IAFF’s legislative initiatives that had come before the U.S. Senate.

Senator Collins won re-election by a landslide.

The result, when every single vote matters in a closely divided Senate, not a single Republican is supporting the Employee Free Choice Act.

In contrast, when our bill was introduced August 7, with Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) as its main sponsor, Senator Collins immediately signed on as a co-sponsor, along with Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Mel Martinez (R-FL) and Mike Johanns (R-NE), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Chris Dodd (D-CT), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Tom Harkin (D-IA).

We have cultivated those relationships for decades. Now, with a critical piece of legislation on the line for our members, that hard work is about to bear fruit. And it’s all because we understand the importance of bipartisanship.

As a result, soon, our bill will pass, and President Barack Obama has promised to sign it into law.

The bill will grant the nation’s fire fighters a basic right that has been enjoyed by most Americans for more than 70 years — the right to negotiate with their employer, to set the safety, health, wages, hours and working conditions so important to your dangerous job.

Our bill is about representation and ending the discrimination that prohibits fire fighters from having collective bargaining.

The bill will improve public safety by giving rank-and-file fire fighters a voice in how they protect their communities.

Why is this important? Here’s a simple statistic to punctuate the main reason: fewer fire fighters and civilians die in fires in states that permit fire fighters to discuss workplace issues with their employer. In 2006, the fatality rate for fire fighters in states without collective bargaining rights was one-third higher than in states that extend collective bargaining rights to fire fighters.

Americans living in states that do not permit collective bargaining are 22 percent more likely to die in a home fire than people in other states.

In short, collective bargaining has produced measurable staffing, training, equipment, health and safety improvements throughout the nation’s fire departments, resulting in safer fire fighters and improved local emergency response capabilities.

We all know that you deserve collective bargaining. And because of our nonpartisan political philosophy, Democrats and Republicans are supporting us in our work to finally make that happen.

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