Bill Moyers Journal: Leo Gerard debunks myths of Employee Free Choice Act

Excellent PBS interview of Leo Gerard 1-9, 09. Leo Gerard does interview with Bill Moyers. Leo is very good and worth watching. About one half hour: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01092009/profile.html

This is Leo's biography from the PBS article:


Leo W. Gerard

Leo W. Gerard is the International President of the United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union, AFL-CIO, CLC. The U.S.W is the dominant union in paper, forestry products, steel, aluminum, tire and rubber, glass, chemicals, and petroleum.
In his first full term as United Steelworkers International President, Gerard has launched a wide range of new initiatives that have brought more than 350,000 workers into the union's ranks — a sixty-percent increase.
Under Gerard's leadership, the USW has also won tariff relief that helped save the American steel industry, a Workers First law in Canada that gives workers top priority for consideration in corporate bankruptcies, and the landmark Westray Bill that makes corporations criminally liable when they kill or seriously injure their employees or members of the public.
The union's growth over the past four years includes mergers with the American Flint Glass Workers, the Industrial, Wood and Allied Workers of Canada (IWA), the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union (PACE), the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (Canada), and other smaller independent unions.
The son of a union miner, Gerard started working at Inco's nickel smelter in Sudbury, Ontario at age 18. Inspired by a lifelong commitment to economic and social justice, Gerard rose through the ranks to become the first president of the new USW. Before being elected to his first full term by acclamation in 2001, Gerard had served as the Steelworkers' seventh international president, having been appointed to the presidency by the union's International Executive Board upon George Becker's retirement.
The second Canadian to occupy the USW's highest office, Gerard immediately embarked the union on a course of renewed activism, demanding — and winning — government action to halt an unprecedented flood of illegal steel imports and negotiating precedent-setting labor agreements that positioned the USW as the decisive force for a humane consolidation of the industry. Gerard also secured a prescription drug benefit for the retirees of liquidated steel companies, financed by hundreds of millions of dollars of VEBA contributions negotiated with the new companies.
Gerard also serves on the U.S. National Commission on Energy Policy and is a founding board member of the Apollo Alliance, a non-profit public policy initiative for creating good jobs in pursuit of energy independence.
Published January 9, 2009.