Worker Rights

Action Items:

• Establish a preference for state contracts for local businesses that employ local people as their primary workforce, specifically businesses that outsource less than one-third of their work
• Pass an Oregon version of “The Employee Free Choice Act” (HR.1409 /S.560) 
• Seek a means to implement a 20:1 wage goal, to reduce the income disparity between the highest and the lowest paid workers in any given business. 
• Require employers to pay all costs for employees needing technical training to maintain their employment. 
• Encourage and support worker owned businesses as well as worker collectives and cooperatives.

In order to empower workers, promote their dignity, and institute economic democracy, We the People must:

• Guarantee the right to organize and bargain collectively through democratic unions. 
• Guarantee the right to establish councils that have access to all relevant information about their businesses and that participate in the management of their businesses. 
• Guarantee the freedom of association and the right to have their unions and labor associations be free and independent of government and employer influence. 
• Strictly enforce robust health and safety standards in the workplace.
• Require employers to provide all workers with equal pay for comparable work, based on skills, effort, responsibilities, and working conditions.
• Vigorously prosecute workplace harassment, including protecting the worker right to employment whose claims were not substantiated in the court of law.
• Set and maintain a living wage, indexed to the cost of living. Maintain and extend protection for whistle-blowers.
• Work to make day care services affordable and keep public schools open five days a week with full-day kindergarten, as schooling is a part of many working families' child care arrangements.
• Expand unemployment benefits to sustain and train those who are laid off or underemployed.