Preserve public employees’ collective bargaining rights

What can we expect from a Republican-controlled state assembly during the 2017 session? For starters, we can look for Chapter 20 to be ripped apart, thus eliminating many public-sector employee rights.

The Iowa Public Employment Relations Act was enacted during the 1974 session of the Iowa General Assembly and signed by then Governor Robert Ray on April 23, 1974. It is now Iowa Code Chapter 20.

Chapter 20 has served our state and our employees well over the years and gives workers the right to bargain collectively for salary, insurance, vacation, holidays, hours, as well as health and safety issues along with many more items required by law to be negotiated. It is believed by many that Iowa workers will be attacked now that Republicans have the majority in the Senate, House and also control of the governor's office.

You may ask yourself, 'Why would elected officials attack workers' rights?” That, my friend, is a very good question; one that I cannot be answered by some of our elected officials other than the Iowa Republican Party. The commerce plank of their platform calls for legislation that would eliminate all public-sector unions.

I will take this opportunity to remind all who vote to take a few minutes please to read the party platforms before voting. Elections have consequences.

Republican lawmakers will tell you that Chapter 20 needs to go, but at the same time they will pass even more tax breaks for corporations and cut school funding. They may frame the entire thing as much-needed change that will benefit the entire state, but these are simply words - and untrue words. at that.

Chapter 20 works and the elected officials of 1974 knew this. Before Chapter 20, public employees and employers did not have any legally binding system to resolve disputes.

The employees of the public sector are our family members and our friends. They are police, firefighters, sanitation workers, schoolteachers, university professors, nurses and prison guards. They plow and maintain our roads, and do other jobs that are far too many to list.

Stop giving millions of dollars in tax breaks to foreign-owned corporations and make sure that the people who truly keep our state running every day are treated with dignity, respect and fairness.

We all have a duty to call out our elected officials who try to strip our family members and friends of their rights and working conditions. Call your state representatives and make it clear that we will not sit back and allow some of them to attack our workers in Iowa. If elected officials choose to play partisan politics and go after workers, we need to let them know they will be voted out of office. Let them know we expect them to take up matters that actually have a positive impact on working families.

' Rick Moyle is executive director of Hawkeye Labor Council AFL-CIO, Cedar Rapids. Comments: rmoyle@hawkeyelabor.us