Labor Union Blog

WIN Week In Review October 5 -7 , 2007

By Doug Cunningham

If Teamster workers approve a tentative contract deal with UPS, the company will pull out of the Central States pension fund. The Teamsters struck UPS in 1997 to prevent UPS from leaving the Teamsters pension fund. But now Ken Hall, the Teamsters’ Parcel and Small Package Division Director, says UPS leaving the Teamsters pension fund will be good for workers.

[Hall]: “Once the employees are no longer covered by Central States, they will be transferred to a newly-established, jointly-trusteed UPS/Teamster plan, where those employees will actually see increases in their pension benefits.”

Dana Kennedy
Angie Crouse

In a recent Point of View guest column at www.aflcio.org, Brown University Political Science professor Jennifer Lawless described the many reasons more women don’t hold elected public office in the United States.

The barriers range from voter bias against women candidates to different standards for men and women office hopefuls and even to women’s own perceptions of their qualifications. (Click here to read Lawless’s POV).

Dana Kennedy, director of Communications for the Arizona AFL-CIO, told us of one major effort to bridge the political gender gap—Emerge America. The political leadership training program was founded five years ago in California and now includes affiliates in seven states.

Kennedy, a co-chair of Emerge Arizona—along with Arizona AFL-CIO Executive Director Rebekah Friend and Chris Arzaga-Williams—says:

Women often need to be asked to run. Even if they are qualified, they don’t think they are.