FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contacts on behalf of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades
Ryan Kekeris, 410-564-5884, rkekeris@iupat.org
It’s a new day in America. Today we congratulate President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who’s historic achievement of becoming the first woman to be Vice President has shattered another glass ceiling. We also want to congratulate the entire 117th Congress who have pledged to serve our country.
This election cycle, our union’s member mobilization and education campaign was the largest and most robust in the IUPAT’s history. Across the country, but particularly in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, IUPAT members worked to educate, organize, and mobilize voters around the values and priorities of working people. We helped delivery victory in 90% of our top tiered states. It’s in large part because of the efforts of the labor movement that Democrats now have a trifecta and let’s be clear – we demand results.
We welcome the Biden administration’s day one actions like extending and fortifying protections for TPS, DACA and Dreamers, repealing the Muslim and African country travel bans, and much needed urgent relief like pausing student loans and extending eviction and foreclosure moratoriums. We also hope that by the end of the day today, President Biden will have fired NLRB General Counsel Peter Robb. We are excited that President Biden’s Secretary of Labor, Marty Walsh, comes from organized labor and we say good riddance to Eugene Scalia who functioned as the Secretary of Employers.
We look forward in the coming months to working with the Biden administration and the 117th Congress to advance a bold, worker-focused agenda. The week before the election, President Biden told our union he’d be “the most pro-union president ever” and we expect and will demand nothing less. From the PRO Act to comprehensive infrastructure investment to the dire need for a robust COVID response bill, we intend to mobilize our membership to ensure that all of these are brought to President Biden’s desk.
Today marks the beginning of a new administration and the beginning of the labor movement’s fight to hold every politician accountable to the promises that were made to working people. It’s up to us to be organized and will take each and every one of us standing together in our communities and at our jobsites to win the transformative change we so desperately need and deserve.
THE INTERNATIONAL UNION OF PAINTERS AND ALLIED TRADES (IUPAT)
Represents a growing community of over 110,000 active and retired craftspeople in the United States and Canada. The IUPAT membership extends far beyond the workplace. Recognized as one of the most active unions in the labor movement, IUPAT members help shape their communities in many ways: through an abiding commitment to service, by fighting passionately for workers’ rights that benefit all working families, and through effective worker education and mobilization. Visit www.iupat.org to learn more.
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