Labor Union Blog

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lia href = http://www.laborradio.org/node/10708Vermont AFL-CIO Demonstrates For Single Payer Heath Care At Regional Foruma//li
lia href = http://www.laborradio.org/node/10709Labor Unites To Form Gaming Workers Councila//li
lia href = http://www.laborradio.org/node/10710Blue Cross-Blue Shield Offers Buyouts To Some UAW Workersa//li
lia href = http://www.laborradio.org/node/10711Hoffa Calls Mexican Tariff Threat “Absurd Overreaction”a//li
lia href = http://www.laborradio.org/node/10712Wisconsin State Workers Can’t Fly Personal Planes On Out-Of-State Businessa//li
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pEconomic Report: /p
pU.S. industrial output is at a seven month low. Manufacturing continues to decline as less U.S. manufactured products are exported. Output fell by .7 percent and factories were at 67.4 percent capacity in February. That is the lowest level since the government began tracking factory capacity in 1948. Auto plants saw their first manufacturing increase in four months as production rose by 10.2 percent./p

pWisconsin state employees who fly their own planes for business could soon be grounded. Jesse Russell reports:/p
pA new spending plan proposed by Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle contains a provision that would prevent state employees from flying personal planes out of state on business. The goal of the provision is to reduce risk to the state if an accident happens while the employee is traveling. Employees who wish to fly on business in state would need permission from their agency. /p

pBy Doug Cunningham/p
pTeamsters President Jim Hoffa says Mexico’s threat to raise tariffs on U.S. goods is “an absurd over-reaction” to the shutdown of a cross-border trucking program Hoffa says was unsafe. Congress ended the program as part of the budget bill./p

pBlue Cross Blue Shield is offering buyouts to workers represented by the United Auto Workers as the company faces growing losses. The insurance company will offer the workers two weeks of base pay for every year work up to 52 weeks. Workers will also receive matching health benefits. Blue Cross plans to implement a two-tiered wage scale for new employees and will also increase co-pays for workers hired after January 1, 2008./p

pBy Doug Cunningham/p
pA new Gaming Workers Council is being created in a joint effort to improve organizing, bargaining and communications for workers in the gaming industry from Las Vegas and Atlantic City to Detroit and Connecticut. The Gaming Workers Council brings together the AFL-CIO and UAW, SEIU, and the Transport Workers Union Gaming division. The council will also be reaching out to other potential partners. First order of business for the Gaming Workers Council will be to support ongoing contract campaigns for casino dealers in Atlantic City. It will also help with bargaining efforts in Las Vegas, Indiana and Connecticut./p

pBy Doug Cunningham/p
pAt a regional health care reform forum today the Vermont AFL-CIO is leading a demonstration supporting HR 676 – the single payer universal health care bill. Kay Tillow of the All Unions Committee for Single Payer Health Care says that bill covers everyone for all medically necessary procedures modeled on Medicare. She says opponents of single payer who claim we would give up free choice for that plan are dead wrong./p
p[Tillow]: “The key is choice of your physician and your caregiver and your hospital, And that is what you get with single payer. The other choice is meaningless. Choice of many, many insurance plans – all of which are inadequate – is meaningless./p

Washington, D.C., attorney DeMaurice Smith was selected today as executive director of the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA). He succeeds the late Gene Upshaw, who died in August 2008. The NFL Player Representatives unanimously chose Smith to serve a three-year term.

Smith, 45, is a trial lawyer and litigation partner at the District of Columbia law firm Patton Boggs. A former assistant U.S. attorney, Smith previously served as counsel to then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder in the U.S. Department of Justice.

In a press release, Smith says:

I’m humbled by their decision. I’m honored and proud to lead a great group of men. I think we understand the challenges that face us but we also understand the strength of our unity.

NFLPA President Kevin Mawae praised the choice of Smith, saying:

The Board of Player Representatives made a decision today that will chart the course of this organization. This decision is…one that will unify and strengthen the National Football League Players Association.

Smith takes over at a critical time in the NFL players’ relationship with team owners. The Washington Post reports the owners voted last year to exercise a reopener clause in their labor agreement with the players, ending the deal two years early. The agreement now expires after the 2010 season, and the 2009 season is the final one in the deal with a salary cap. The paper says Upshaw predicted before his death that the owners would consider a lockout of the players in 2011.

Michael Honey

Michael Honey, award-winning author of Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign, will talk about the Memphis sanitation strike and King’s unfinished quest for economic justice and workers’ rights at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md., March 17 at 7 p.m.

Going Down Jericho Road (available from The Union Shop Online^TM in hardcover and paperback) won the prestigious 2008 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. In the book, Honey, a professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma and president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, recounts the 1968 walkout of 1,300 sanitation workers, nearly all of them African American, in Memphis, Tenn. The workers were demanding recognition of their union (AFSCME), an agreement that the city would withhold union dues from workers’ paychecks, a small pay raise and improved safety standards.

The sanitation strike and its famous “I Am A Man” slogan gained national attention and was the catalyst for the Poor People’s Campaign. King delivered his famous “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech at a sanitation strikers’ rally on the day before he was killed.

In a Point of View guest column on the AFL-CIO website, Honey says we should remember King not only for his speeches and his leadership of the civil rights revolution, but also for his quest for economic equality. 

What’s missing from the discussions of King’s life, Honey says, is the fact that King always stressed economic equality and workers’ rights up until his last day on earth. Click here to read “Forty Years Since King: Labor Rights Are Human Rights.”

In an article first published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Honey says King’s life demonstrated that labor rights, human rights and civil rights are indivisible. He quotes King as saying, “We can get more organized together than we can apart.”  

He points out that in one of his last speeches, King told the Memphis sanitation workers:

All labor has dignity. You are…reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. We know that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?

For more information on Honey’s talk, click here.

Customer service workers, flight attendants, pilots and telecom workers gain tentative contracts—and more updates here from the “Bargaining Digest Weekly.” The AFL-CIO Collective Bargaining Department delivers daily, bargaining-related news and research resources to more than 900 subscribers. Union leaders can register for this service through our website, Bargaining@Work.

WORK STOPPAGES AND JOB ACTIONS
IBEW, WTMJ-TV: Camera and media tech workers, represented by the Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 715, picketed outside of WTMJ-TV studios in Milwaukee as talk show host Conan O’Brien visited the NBC affiliate on his nationwide promotional tour. The local is in the process of negotiating a new contract.

SETTLEMENTS
UAW, Ford: The UAW at Ford accepted changes to their 2007 national labor contract aimed at saving billions. Fifty-nine percent of Ford’s production workers and 58 percent of skilled trades workers agreed to the changes, which protect their wages but suspend bonuses, alter work rules and eliminate the jobs bank. The changes also allow Ford to finance part of a retiree health care trust with more stock.

IAM, Hawaiian Airlines: Some 1,500 customer service, reservation, ramp and clerical workers at Hawaiian Airlines, represented by the Machinists (IAM) District 141, announced a tentative agreement with the carrier that provides wage increases ranging from 3 percent to 10 percent, freezes current employee health care contributions, provides an incentive compensation program and enables performance and profit bonuses.

ALPA, Alaska Airlines: Pilots at Alaska Airlines, represented by the Air Line Pilots (ALPA), reached an agreement in concept with the carrier on a tentative agreement. The proposed settlement details have not been disclosed.

AFA-CWA, Alaska Airlines: Flight attendants at Alaska Airlines, represented by the Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA), jointly announced ratification of a two-year contract extension for the airline’s 2,830 flight attendants. The extension offers flight attendants a 1.5 percent pay increase on May 1, 2010 and 2011.

TNG-CWA, San Francisco Chronicle: Telecommunications workers at the San Francisco Chronicle, represented by The Newspaper Guild-CWA (TNG-CWA) Local 39521, reached a tentative agreement that would help save the newspaper from financial demise.  The agreement provides changes to hours, wages, benefits and staff reductions.

CWA, Embarq: Some 250 workers at Embarq, represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 6327, approved a new three-year contract with the Overland Park, Mo., telephone company. The pact provides annual 2 percent raises for three years and increases several reimbursement items for job expenses.

TWU, Howell: Workers in the New Jersey township of Howell, represented by the Transport Workers (TWU), have a new agreement that provides a 3 percent pay increase retroactive to Jan. 1, 2008, and a 3 percent increase in 2010. It also will give back members 1 percent of their base pay toward health benefits.

ORGANIZING
Child Care Workers: Child care workers in Washington State could get collective bargaining rights under a bill passed by the state House, which allows child care workers to unionize if the day care or school they work for accepts state subsidies for children from low-income families.

Disclaimer: This information is being provided for your information only. As it is compiled from published news reports, not from individual unions, we cannot vouch for either its completeness or accuracy; readers who desire further information should directly contact the union involved.