UNITE HERE! America’s Labor President

Americans have been feeling it for months, but according to new survey from the National Association for Business Economics, 48 out of 50 economists now officially agree: the United States is in a recession. And who bears the brunt? Not the CEO’s who fly into Washington, DC on their private jets…it’s American workers. Companies are already laying off people and slashing benefits for those who remain Sounds like a job for a labor union? Many see the election of Barack Obama as a turning point for organized labor.

Bruce Raynor, General President of the union UNITE HERE, representing close to 1/2 million workers and over 400,000 retirees from the textile, hotel, casino, food services and industrial laundries, says we’re in a perfect storm of need and possibility. A founding member of the Change to Win labor federation, UNITE HERE was the first union to endorse Barack Obama and deployed 500 full time workers into swing states this election. That’s three times the number they had previously invested in any presidential campaign. Obama is the first president who was a community organizer, who has seen first hand the direct effect of unions in people’s lives, and the first who has actually been on a picket line since JFK.