Sample Letter

(Insert today’s date here)

(Insert Name of Senator or Congressman here)

(Insert Address here)

(Insert City, State and Zip Code here)

Dear (Insert Senator or Congressman Name):

I am a union member writing to urge your support for initiatives to aid America’s workers. I am referring to wages, health care, retirement security, the right to form and join unions, immigration reform and the enforcement of ethical integrity in management’s dealings with its workers.

It has become standard practice to outsource work to lower paying employers especially abroad, and to hire temps and part-timers. These actions suppress both wages and opportunities for most Americans while a very few are enriched.

Fair, fully funded health care benefits are disappearing. Executives, who hypocritically ensure that their own personal health care is fully paid by the companies they lead, arrogantly dismiss the fact that their decisions to eliminate or reduce these benefits for their workers causes a financial burden of crisis proportions upon American families.

Once guaranteed pensions are now rare with executives once again making sure that they and their cohorts are financially safe and secure while stripping away every vestige of similar security for their workers. They point to 401K and other similar plans, but these are not pensions. They are merely savings plans to be funded out of workers fast shrinking paychecks. Now they and some mis-guided politicians even want to turn social security, the best social program ever introduced for Americans, into a fuzzy scheme of private accounts.

The right to form and join unions and immigration reform are urgent issues. The Employee Free Choice Act needs your unconditional support as a means of combating the relentless decline in the rights of America’s workers. The immigration issue calls for a system to secure our borders and control legal entry. Employer recruitment of undocumented labor should be criminalized.

Finally, you must take action to restore ethics and integrity to management. Since executives and managers are intent upon stripping away the hard won advances that unions have achieved for America’s workers while hypocritically protecting their own, you must step up to support unions and the positions they advocate through legislation, public comment and private deliberation. Give me good reasons to vote for you!

Sincerely,

(Sign your name here)