The Transport Workers Union is deeply saddened by the passage of longtime labor ally Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.  Sen. Kennedy championed the tireless march towards justice, equality, fairness, opportunity and progress for this country and has fought on behalf of the unheard, disenfranchised and excluded for decades. He died at age 77 on Aug. 25. 
“Senator Kennedy is a man to be praised and a man to be celebrated,” said TWU International President James C. Little. “The man who President Obama called ‘the greatest Senator of our time,’ really was a champion for working people and a stalwart soldier for labor. He always fought passionately for and was genuinely on the side of the people.” 
President Little, along with several unionists, said workers can best memorialize Kennedy by enacting his last two great causes: Universal affordable health care and the Employee Free Choice Act. Kennedy was an instrumental force in crafting the Employee Free Choice Act and the first to introduce it, and he has referred to health care reform as “the cause of my life.”  His passion and dedication to these two causes did not fade, even as he battled cancer. 

The Massachusetts Democrat, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and first elected in 1962, was a constant champion of workers’ causes.  They ranged from raising the minimum wage to immigration reform to workers’ rights to job safety and health to equal rights for women and minorities on the job, and much more. 
Health care took most of his remaining legislative time in the last year-plus, when he was battling brain cancer, said his closest Senate friend, Christopher Dodd.

“I’ve lost a great, great pal, and the country lost an incredible advocate.  The people who didn’t have a lawyer to stand up for them, and didn’t have a lobbyist, had Ted Kennedy,” Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, said.

And Kennedy was renowned as someone who knew the legislative levers so well and was so effective at reaching across party lines and building coalitions that he could accomplish things for workers even in the face of strong GOP opposition.  Dodd, who worked with him for 30 years, said Kennedy knew when to push, what to do, and how to stick with goals – even in all-night bargaining at the committee.

Even two weeks ago, as Kennedy was battling the cancer that finally killed him, “he knew what was going on, down to the finest details” on health care, Dodd said.  And Kennedy, in an early-morning phone call to Dodd, “whooped and cheered” when the committee became the first to approve comprehensive health care reform.
NLRB Chairman Wilma Liebman said the National Labor Relations Board has “certainly lost a great friend and a skillful advocate.”  “Sen. Kennedy was a giant.  His passing is a huge loss to the Nation.  He was a powerful champion for working people and the laws that protect them […] His absence in the debates on health care reform and labor law reform will be deeply felt […} His commitment to public service, and the passion with which he pursued it, have been an inspiration to me and so many others,” said Liebman.

As Senator Kennedy said so eloquently himself at the Democratic National Convention in 1980, “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
“In his honor, let us redouble our efforts to enact his last two causes:  health care reform and the Employee Free Choice Act,” said President Little.  “Let us follow in his footsteps and show him we are inspired by all he has done for working people and that we will continue to take America in the positive direction in which he has always been steering us.”