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Charles Durning: Winner of SAG Life Achievement Award. |
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This Sunday, spend some quality time with Nikki Blonsky, Josh Bolin, Steve Carell, Russell Crowe, Ruby Dee, Kate Hudson, Tommy Lee Jones, John Travolta and Vanessa Williams. These union members will honor winners at the nation’s only all-union awards show—the 14th Annual SAG Awards
SAG is America’s largest union representing working actors, with 120,000 members in film, television, commercials, video games, music videos and other new media. The SAG Awards is the only nationally televised awards show of any kind that honors the work of union members.
The show will air this Sunday, Jan.27, on TNT and TBS at 8 p.m. EST and PST, and at 7 p.m. elsewhere.
SAG members also know what solidarity is all about. The actors have been some of the strongest supporters of the Writers Guild strike, marching on the picket line and refusing to cross the line to appear on talk shows that have not signed deals with the writers. The striking writers, citing the tremendous support and solidarity from SAG members, agreed not to picket the SAG Awards.
More than six years working for the Bush administration’s Department of Labor seems to be great training for a cushy, and likely well-paid, top post in one of the largest and loudest anti-union groups around: the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).
It certainly worked out that way for Emily DeRocco, former assistant secretary of labor in charge of the Employment and Training Administration. She’s now president of NAM’s National Center for the American Workforce and a senior vice president of the group.
DeRocco’s experience highlights the Alice-in-Wonderland backward Bush world, where unlike most countries, a department of labor exists not to ensure that workers’ rights are enforced, that they are paid fairly or that workplaces are made safe.
A report out today details construction defects in Pulte and Del Webb homes—and traces them to the poor working conditions of the major homebuilders’ low-wage workforce. Katrina Blomdahl, AFL-CIO Voice@Work communications specialist, has more here.
Homeowners in newly built Pulte homes are outraged about nearly every aspect of their homes, from faulty electrical wiring, to peeling paint, to bad air conditioners, according to a new study released at a press conference today at the Arizona State Capitol. John Smirk, business manager of Painters and Allied Trades of District (IUPAT) Council 15, said at the Capitol today:
We’re not surprised by the results of the survey. Workers on these jobs tell us they are dealing with unpaid wages and pressure to work through break times as well as a lack of drinking water and proper safety equipment.
Union organizers don’t sit around when injustice occurs. So when Facebook banned Canadian union organizer Derek Blackadder from the site earlier this week, the global union movement took action—and Blackadder is back on Facebook.
Although candidates running for president, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, each boast tens of thousands of friends on the social networking site, Facebook threw Blackadder off for making too many friends on the site.
Within nano-minutes of Blackadder’s ban, a “Free the Blackadder One” group was created on Facebook, and quickly became so popular, it reached the 1,000 friends mark. According to Facebook rules, once a group exceeds 1,000 members, Facebook turns off the e-mail feature and members can no longer be contacted.
The percentage of workers who belong to unions increased last year, according to the annual union membership report released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Some 311,000 new members joined unions in 2007, the largest single-year increase since 1979. Overall, the rate of union membership increased slightly to 12.1 percent last year, from 12 percent in 2006, reversing a trend of decline in recent years.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says:
Today’s numbers show working people are pushing to form and join unions in order to improve their lives, despite record levels of resistance from employers. They know that a union card is the single best ticket into the middle class, especially in today’s economy.
The largest increase in union membership was in health services, where unions added 142,000 members, a 0.9 percent increase from 2006 to 7.9 percent.
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