Labor Union Blog

Doris Crouse-Mays, secretary-treasurer of the Virginia AFL-CIO, urges all union members in the Northern Virginia area to take part in this weekend’s get-out-the-vote walks. A lot is at stake for working families in the November elections in Virginia, where state Senate races are expected to be decided by just a few hundred votes.

It’s Friday, Oct. 26, just 11 days from Election Day. We are getting much needed rain in Virginia that will be turning the grass green, but we know the Virginia Labor 2007 program will be turning our state blue! So we can not let anything stop us!

John L. Lewis (statue at top), founder of the Appalachian Regional Healthcare hospitals, would be outraged that the chain has hired strikebreakers and anti-union consultants.

Rachele Huennekens, AFL-CIO Media Outreach fellow, is blogging and leafleting her way through the third day of a 10-day bus tour through Kentucky, where Steve Beshear (D) is challenging Gov. Ernie Fletcher (R), who has canceled bargaining rights for state employees and taken other anti-worker stands.

Dozens of local labor leaders and union volunteers are taking part in the Bluegrass Express tour, which yesterday stopped to support striking nurses, members of the United American Nurses (UAN), at Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH) hospitals. Some 800 nurses are on strike at the hospitals in West Virginia and Kentucky.

It was first and foremost an amazing sound. At each stop of the Bluegrass Express tour yesterday, we could hear the nurses’ picket lines in front of the Appalachian Regional Healthcare hospitals before we saw them.

In Middlesboro, Harlan, Whitesburg and Hazard, the nurses’ chants and supporters’ car honks were deafening:

Hey hey, ho ho, (CEO) Jerry Haynes has got to go!

Fired up, can’t take it no more! We’re fired up, can’t take it no more!

Honk, honk, honnnnnnnnnnnk!

Second, it was an amazing sight. The nurses, members of the Kentucky Nurses Association/United American Nurses (UAN), packed the picket lines, wearing a rainbow of t-shirts. There were red ones saying “RNs for Safety;” white ones with “United We Bargain, Divided We Beg” and black ones with a picture of a viper saying, “When Provoked, Will Strike!”

The Kaiser Family Foundation has released its latest Election 2008 tracking poll, and not surprisingly, respondents listed health care as a top priority. According to the survey:

When asked about the two issues they would most like to hear the presidential candidates discuss, the top four issues overall are again Iraq (44 percent), health care (38 percent), the economy (18 percent), and immigration (12 percent)–the same four issues which have topped the poll since tracking began in March.

But what has changed since March is the percentage of Republicans who choose health care as a top issue.

Among Republicans, 30 percent name health care as one of the top two issues–the highest share recorded for that group since the tracking poll began in March 2007.

Our friends over at the Alliance for Retired Americans sent this item today in the organization’s weekly e-mail newsletter. Seems as though the giant pharmaceutical industry is spending lots of its money on cleaning up its tarnished image. But the new series of paid advertisements by the drug industry are promoted as public affairs programs and feature interview segments with guests such as talk show host Montel Williams and former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow.

Chet Held, poet and IBEW Local 130 business manager.
Two years after Hurricane Katrina, too little has changed in New Orleans’ 9th Ward.

Marcy Rein, a communications specialist with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Organizing Department, took part in the International Labor Communications Association annual meeting in New Orleans and describes how the reality of New Orleans is not the one portrayed by traditional media.

We pile onto our buses during a break between late-season thunderstorms. Muggy skies hug the city’s flat streets as the tour heads out through the busy Central Business District.

The International Labor Communications Association (ILCA) has set up a media center here, gathering nearly 100 of us labor communicators to spotlight the real stories of Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath (check out more of our work here). Before we begin our reporting, we get a tour.

“I have to be honest with you,” said the guide on our bus, Chet Held. “I left before the storm. Twenty-five of us piled into my wife’s cousin’s house in Tampa.” Held, an assistant business manager for Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 130, is a wireman by trade and hails from a family of shrimpers and fishermen. He lives in St. Bernard Parish on the southeast side of the city.

We had 42,000 houses under water in St. Bernard, only the rooftops showing.

Katrina had no prejudice. She hit rich, poor, black, white.