Economic Report:
By Jesse Russell
How would you feel if your boss suddenly started firing your co-workers for being unwilling to lose weight or quit smoking? If you said you would be comfortable with it you are in the minority according to a new poll from Harris Interactive. Only four percent said bosses should be allowed to fire based on dedication to weight loss and seven percent said bosses said the same for those unwilling to quit smoking. Roughly one-third said employers should be allowed to require staff to attend weight-loss and anti-smoking sessions.
By Doug Cunningham
Five current and former FedEx workers have scored a win that forces FedEx to pay them more than $253,000 and clears the way for a union election in February at a FedEx terminal in Northboro, Massachusetts. The workers charged they were harassed by FedEx for a Teamsters union organizing effort. FedEx is trying to block workers from organizing by claiming the drivers are independent contractors rather than employees. The NLRB says they’re employees – which means they have a legal right to organize.
Dozens of Vegas hotel-casinos have gotten a short reprieve from a possible strike.
By Jesse Russell
A strike that could impact nearly 50 hotel-casinos in Las Vegas has temporarily been averted. Culinary Union Local 226 has agreed to allow Mission Industries, the contractor that provides linens for the hotels, one more week to find ways to cover health care for members. The two sides will meet again on Monday and if the company has not found a way then a strike is likely. Mission Industries plans to use this week negotiating with the hotels it services. According to the company the new plan costs twice as much as the previous plan as it provides full family coverage with no payments from the workers. According to Casino City Times, on Monday former President Bill Clinton met privately with nearly 100 of the laundry workers and gave them words of encouragement.
By Doug Cunningham
Eight hundred nurses are in the second month of a strike at Appalachian Regional Healthcare in Kentucky and West Virginia. The hospitals were founded by John L. Lewis but now use union-busting tactics. Collective Bargaining Director Richard Bank says the AFL-CIO is strongly supporting the nurses as they strike for better staffing for patients.
[Bank]: “Staffing is a very central issue here. These nurses feel that the staffing ratios are inadequate to ensure proper patient care. And there's also an issue of mandatory overtime. The combination of inadequate staffing ratios plus mandatory overtime puts quality patent care at risk. This is a critically important strike because nurses are the front line of health care in this country. And these nurses are standing up for the communities they serve and they're being punished for it."
Jennifer Sargent, Oregon AFL-CIO research and communications director,reports on working families' election mobilization to increase health insurance coverage in the state and save Oregon's farms and forests.
Oregon’s union movement is very familiar with the ballot measure system—each year, unions grow stronger as they fight reactionary measures from the likes of Grover Norquist and Howie Rich.
Today, members are flexing their voting muscle for two “Yes” campaigns—Measure 50, which would provide health insurance to more than 100,000 uninsured kids, and Measure 49, which would save Oregon’s farms and forests, and the jobs that depend on these natural resources.
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After the Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH) hospitals forced 700 registered nurses out on strike more than five weeks ago, the nurses have stood strong in the face of management's vitriolic anti-union campaign.
The nurses, members of the United American Nurses (UAN) at nine hospitals in Kentucky and West Virginia, had sought to negotiate a contract with safer staffing levels and higher patient care standards.
Yesterday, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka delivered a $20,000 check to aid the nurses on strike at the ARH hospitals (see video).
In Colorado, anti-union publisher Dean Singleton seems to be trying to turn a Rocky Mountain High into a Rocky Mountain Hysteria. After Gov. Bill Ritter (D) signed an executive order Friday allowing some 30,000 state employees to participate in a modern working partnership with their managers, you'd think the mile-high sky was falling, judging by Singleton's rare front page editorial in the Denver Post last Sunday.
Singleton, who has a long record of union-busting, according to the employee advocacy group American Rights at Work, says Ritter's action is the end of the world and will drive business from Colorado and ruin the state's economy. Wow! (Of course, the screed ignored the fact that studies show unions are actually good for business, productivity and the economy).
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Every day, we see images from the war in Iraq, but seldom do we see what the war has done to the lives of ordinary Iraqis.
Four independent photojournalists who worked extensively in Iraq outside the confines of the U.S. military's official "embedding" program are delivering the message that the war is taking a terrible toll on the lives of ordinary, noncombatant people and their families.
Through images photographed over several years in Iraq, they show us slices of life as people try to survive amid the daily dangers of a war zone. There are cheerful pictures of dancers at a wedding party, tragic ones of women mourning the deaths of family members killed when an American missile landed on their home and terrifying photos, such as the one depicting a father holding up his hand to get snipers to stop shooting as he runs through the street with his terrified young son.
With major state elections today in Virginia, Kentucky and several other states, union members and voting rights activists are watching closely for Election Day shenanigans and outright dirty tricks.
Voting rights groups are monitoring the handful of states that have off-year elections today, looking out for how voter identification laws are enforced, officials who won't follow federal election law and electronic voting machine failures. Some political observers say the obstacles to voting that occur today may be a precursor for the 2008 presidential election.
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