Labor Union Blog

One the largest groups of women business leaders in the nation called this week for comprehensive health care reform that includes a “a robust” public health plan option.

In a report to Congress, the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce, with more than 500,000 members, writes:

Americans should also have the choice of a robust government lead a public plan to take on the insurance carriers, provide vigorous competition, and assure all Americans have access to affordable health care.

A public insurance plan option for workers and families who either have private insurance coverage or no coverage at all is one of the AFL-CIO’s key health care reform principles. It is vehemently opposed by most business groups, the private insurance industry and Republican lawmakers.

In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the group writes:

For more than a decade the American health care system has been careening towards a complete collapse reducing our quality of life, suppressing business growth and international competitiveness, and threatening our country’s security. Over the last weeks, months, and years, our members have told us of the fears, frustrations, and financial hardships they have experienced as a result of our failed health care system.

Very few modern day economic issues more directly impact both economic advancement and quality of life for American women than health care reform.

The report, “Health Care Reform: An American Values Imperative,” also calls for guaranteed access to affordable health insurance coverage, bringing an end to age and wellness discrimination, greater transparency and accountability, choice, flexibility and portability of health insurance.

Click here to read the full report.

The U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce is not connected to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes a public plan option.

The global union movement is issuing an urgent call for the leaders of the Group of Eight nations to tackle the deepening jobs crisis at their summit meeting in L’Aquila, Italy, next month.

The leaders must develop a coordinated and jobs-orientated international recovery and sustainable growth plan that focuses on creating good jobs and re-regulating the global financial system, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney told a gathering of G8 union leaders today in Rome.

 The global economy continues to deteriorate at an unprecedented rate.  Workers around the world—who are the innocent victims of this crisis—are losing their jobs and incomes.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) predicts that unemployment is likely to increase by up to 59 million worldwide by the end of 2009. Unemployment in the G8 countries—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom and United States—is likely to almost double over the next 18 months, according to the ILO. At the same time, more than 200 million workers could be pushed into extreme poverty, lifting the number of working poor to 1.4 billion.

Earlier this week, President John Sweeney and the union leaders of the world’s top economies outlined a plan to stimulate the global economy. Click here to read more about that plan.

When the global economic crisis is over, said Sweeney, the G8 leaders must ensure there is no return to “business as usual.”

While this crisis was caused by global economic imbalances and financial speculation, it was underpinned by the lack of effective economic regulation over preceding decades. Rather than planning “exit strategies” that are a more brutal version of failed past policies, there is a need to establish a new model of economic development that is stronger and more efficient, socially just and environmentally sustainable.

And this time, workers’ views should be represented in the plan, Sweeney said.

Trade unions and the workers we represent have no confidence that this time governments and bankers alone will get it right.  We are asking for a seat at the table.

Rite Aid workers at the drug chain’s distribution center in Lancaster, Calif., took their years-long fight for justice to New York City yesterday, where they urged the company’s shareholders to fire management’s hired-gun, union-busting consultants.

At a Times Square rally, the workers got a boost of solidarity from their New York union brothers and sisters.

At the firm’s annual shareholder meeting, Angel Warner, a veteran Rite Aid employee and member of Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 26, charged Rite Aid with  “abusive, disrespectful and illegal treatment” before and after more than 600 workers voted to join the IWLU in March 2008.

Speaking to the 10 members of the company’s board of directors, 12 top Rite Aid executives and about 40 shareholders, Warner said the abusive treatment began in 2006 when workers expressed their concerns to Rite Aid management about mandatory, unscheduled overtime and unsafe working conditions. Said Warner:

When we told them we wanted to form a union to help us solve problems and have a voice on the job, the company went nuts and started attacking us.

She said the company began systematically threatening and harassing her co-workers. But the workers stayed together and voted overwhelmingly for a voice at work with the ILWU.

Since the election, Warner said, Rite Aid has launched a new set of attacks against workers, hiring a new team of anti-union consultants that formed a company-led committee in the warehouse to campaign against the union.

Warner asked Rite Aid CEO Mary Sammons to fire Oliver Bell & Associates, the union-busting firm that has been coaching managers on how to harass workers and undermine support for the union. Warner also demanded that the company begin negotiating in good faith to reach a fair contract with employees.

In a rally organized by the New York City Central Labor Council before the shareholders meeting, hundreds of union members signed a giant postcard with a message of solidarity and support that will be sent to workers in Lancaster.

Speakers said Rite Aid’s massive interference with the workers’ freedom to form a union and its failure to bargain in good faith are a prime example of why the Employee Free Choice Act is needed.

Click here for more photos of the rally.

Bricklayers and members of dozens of other unions told Congress it’s time to pass health care reform.

Yesterday, members of Congress met in town hall sessions with constituents who were on Capitol Hill to rally and demand health care reform. Here are a few reports that came in after the meetings.

At the Health Care Providers Town Hall
Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean got a zinger in at opponents who are claiming a public health care option plan would lead to “socialized medicine.”

You know who has socialized medicine in this country? Everyone over 65 and everybody in Congress.

Other quotes from Dean:

When doctors and nurses work together, things happen….

Right now, we have rationing in private health care….

The right wing is running around saying Massachusetts didn’t work. But they shouldn’t say that because the reason it didn’t work is because they didn’t put in a public plan.

From Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.):

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for my entire adult life….

We can solve this problem, and we can do it in the next few weeks….

The goal of this whole exercise is not to prop up the profits of the private health insurance industry…and we don’t have to apologize for that.

And from Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.):

There are some folks who plain just want to see us fail….

One of the most compelling arguments for health care reform is that we end up paying one way or another.

Talking to the Media
An hour-long Tampa roundtable discussion was taped in full by radio station WMNF, which planned to play portions last evening. Speakers at the event included: Jodi Ray of Florida Kid Care; Bill Dever, business agent with Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 915; and a worker with a personal health care story. Also there: state Rep. Betty Reed (D) and staff from the offices of U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor and Sen. Bill Nelson, both Florida Democrats.

In Montana, activists met with a reporter from the Great Falls Tribune. Mayme, a Helena woman who completed the AFL-CIO’s 2009 Health Care for America Survey, told about her family’s nightmare with today’s health care system and had the reporter and activists nearly in tears. Mayme’s employer, an orthodontist, is doing everything he can to provide health care coverage for his staff but is increasingly overwhelmed by soaring costs.

Two top business experts have taken to the pages of Business Week to make the case for the Employee Free Choice Act. 

Paul Adler, a professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, and Donald Palmer, an associate dean and professor at the University of California-Davis, say corporate hostility to the Employee Free Choice Act and to workers’ freedom to form unions is short-sighted because communities with well-paid workers have economic advantages for business. 

Adler and Palmer cite training, job satisfaction and the healthy communities that come from economically secure workers as reasons why businesses benefit when their employees can form unions and bargain.

They write in the op-ed: 

When unions raise the wages of the lowest-paid workers, this increases savings and reduces income inequality, which has beneficial effects on a nation’s economic growth and investment, not to mention its health and social cohesion. 

Adler and Palmer say the inability of workers to form unions has real consequences, not only for individual workers but also for communities and the entire economy. The failure to allow workers the freedom to bargain has put us in a “low-performing state,” they say: 

Once unions are radically weakened, as they have been in the U.S. over the past few decades—and in no small measure as a result of the business community’s hostility—a race to the bottom starts. The whole economy slides to a lower-level equilibrium where workers earn less and have less influence in the workplace, where firms pay less for labor but get less qualified and less committed workers, and, where, as a result, society gets less output from its available resources. 

Adler and Palmer say passing the Employee Free Choice Act will “secure a better future”—not only for today’s workforce, but also for tomorrow’s businesses and workers. They authors are among dozens of business and management scholars who share this view. 

Read the op-ed here.

Rachelle Honeycutt works at an oil refinery in Washington State. Sam Schaffer is a skilled sheet metal worker from West Virginia. Javier Almazan organizes workers in south Florida and Cathy Merkel is a registrar in Maryland. They’re all union members. And in a few days, all four will be graduates of one of the crown jewels of the labor movement: the National Labor College.

With a 46-acre campus just outside Washington, D.C., the nation’s only labor college is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and grants bachelor’s and master’s degrees. The college evolved from the George Meany Center for Labor Studies, created in 1969, and now partners with the University of Baltimore and George Mason University for its graduate degree programs.

On Saturday, 101 students will receive B.A. degrees and two others will be awarded M.A. degrees, as the Labor College graduates its 11th class in a ceremony on the Silver Spring, Md., campus. U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis will give the commencement address.

The Labor College’s mix of on-campus course work and life credit enables full-time workers to complete their higher education and, in many cases, fulfill lifelong dreams:  Schaffer, Merkel and Almazan are the first in their families to receive bachelor’s degrees.

Almazan, an organizer with the Machinists union, says he enrolled to reach an education goal he set for himself years ago.

My motivation wasn’t really because of my career. It was more about just making my parents proud and setting a good example for my kids, my children. That’s why I enrolled and pursued it.

Almazan sometimes rose at 4:30 a.m. to work on his assignments before his workday began and, at times, skipped family events to ensure his coursework was completed on time. His parents, migrant farm workers who now have retirement security because of their union pensions, will join him at the graduation ceremonies, as will his six children, one of whom will graduate from the University of Florida within months of her father.

The Labor College enables adults working full-time with families and other commitments to break the barriers they face in pursuing higher education. Merkel, a member of the Office and Professional Employees union, oversees apprentice training programs at the Plumbers and Pipe Fitters union in Maryland. When the union partnered with the Labor College for training programs, Merkel, 48, became inspired to pursue her degree as well. Her curiosity about why more union members don’t take advantage of the Labor College’s resources sparked her final research paper on the importance of college degrees for union apprentice instructors. In interviewing union members and compiling the data from the results of the 1,800 surveys she sent out, Merkel found that time and money were two important factors holding adults back from pursuing their degrees. But there was another factor: fear. Says Merkel:

It’s a sort of a fear of failure. Growing up, I don’t know about them…but we didn’t grow up with money. My best friend went off to college and I went to work and cried my eyes out because I couldn’t go. It just wasn’t an option for me. It was a class thing.

Talking with union members about the Labor College, Merkel says she will hear:

“Oh, Cathy, I can’t do that. You’ve got to get one of those smarter, younger guys to do it.”

They’ve been taught all their lives that they’re blue-collar workers and that’s what they do. They fear academics. It can be intimidating. If I say I’m a welder, if I say I’m a plumber, how seriously does the academic world take me?

And that’s what sets the Labor College apart. Says Merkel:

From the minute I walked on the campus, I thought it was a perfect fit for any worker. 

A member of the United Steelworkers (USW), Honeycutt is the union’s Safety Department coordinator at the Conoco Phillips plant in Ferndale, Wash., and tailored her final research project at the Labor College to address workplace safety and health issues. She created a database from the past 20 years of the refinery’s morbidity and mortality reports and shared the information with other union members on the USW’s Conoco Phillips Council, which includes workers from plants nationwide. Her research turned up an unexpectedly high number of lower back injuries, which she now seeks to address.

Honeycutt, mother of three college-aged children, says her double major in Safety and Health and Union Leadership and Administration was

so interlinked to everything I do. It taught me how to research stuff, locale stuff, report writing, that of course is way beneficial here, because what I do is write reports.

She credits members of the Fire Fighters with giving her the inspiration for creating a database from job safety reports, a cross-pollination of ideas that occurred because of the time she spent with other union members at the Labor College.

I think the strength of NLC is because you have that diverse group of unions. It was such an eye-opener to me to see how other people do things. I know so many different  people from so many different unions.

Schaffer, whose grandfather was part of the famous 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia, spends evenings teaching sheet metal apprentices at the Sheet Metal Workers International Training Institute after working full-time as a sheet metal worker at Aerofab in Dayton, Ohio. He says the structure of the college is “very helpful for somebody that’s been out of school for a long time” and getting the opportunity to attend was “an unbelievable dream.”

Like Honeycutt, Shaffer says the opportunity to meet union members from around the country at the Labor College campus was a key part of his experience, including the 25  members of Sheet Metal Worker unions nationwide—the most from any union in this graduating class—who will join Honeycutt in graduating this weekend.

Meeting all the different union people—that was great. There were lots of sheet metal workers in the program. We’d sit at night and talk about how they do things in their local that’s totally different from Huntington [West Virginia].

Now Schaffer, who has worked 22 years in the industry, hopes his B.A. in Labor Education will help advance his career as trainer. His achievement already has thrilled his family, especially his mother, who passed away in April. Schaffer, who is heart-broken his mother will not see him graduate, consoles himself with the knowledge that she read his final research paper, which described the Blair Mountain battle her father took part in.

She was so proud to have a child who was getting ready to graduate.

Another benefit: Schaffer says his degree also makes it easier to encourage his daughter, Lori, to finish college and his high school son, Matthew, to attend.

Merkel isn’t alone in encouraging union co-workers to enroll. Says Almazan, who already has recruited two new students:

I’m trying to promote and encourage other members of our union that are seeking a degree to go there, that is geared toward our kind of lifestyle that will assist you in attaining a degree.

The Labor College enables working adults to obtain higher education many thought was long out of reach. It provides students with valuable skills they can take back to their workplaces and their unions. It also opens up for them the bigger picture of the U.S. union movement-it’s short-term goals, long-term accomplishments and network of activism.

Honeycutt says the Labor College

gave me a broader sense of union policies and priorities, just introduced you to the bigger picture which never think about-you’ve got your own little world. It gives you deeper appreciation for why we matter. We really do a lot of good. We really do matter.

Adds Merkel:

            The Labor College shows you what a sisterhood and brotherhood means.

This is a cross-post from the Firedoglake blog.

As state and local governments struggle to provide services in this tight economy, the role of unions like the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA) is more important than ever.

IUPA, which is celebrating its 30-year anniversary, assists law enforcement locals, including those in “right to work” states, negotiating contracts for and providing benefits to locals in more than 35 states. The union has negotiated contracts that give officers access to good benefits, wages, leave and time off.

In a press release, IUPA President Sam Cabral says officers and their families need representation that protects them during times of duress and need.

It is in the charter of the IUPA to ensure officers receive adequate support and benefits.  Together, the Association forms one cohesive “family” to support and to help each and every member. 

IUPA Secretary-Treasurer Timothy Scott says the union’s biggest challenge lies ahead as state and local jurisdictions facing tight budget consider cuts to law enforcement agencies. 

The first and foremost obligation of any government is to protect its citizens. That can only happen when law enforcement is enabled.  

Click here to read the entire press release.