Labor Union Blog

This week, the grassroots movement for health care reform centered on working family roundtables where dozens of participants in key states testified about the need to fix the nation’s broken health care system. 

In Gary, Ind., more than 50 attendees, including union members, faith leaders and civil right activists, came together last night to discuss the changes we need to make health care accessible and affordable.

Roundtables also took place in Wisconsin and Nebraska this week, with many more scheduled in the days ahead. 

Working families say their big concern about the current Senate health care reform bill is that it would tax health benefits. The Senate bill includes a tax on health plans that cost more than $8,500 a year for individuals or $23,000 a year for families—but that’s not the right way to fund reform. 

In the Grand Forks Herald today, North Dakota AFL-CIO President David Kemnitz says reforming health care is an urgent priority—and that we must make sure it’s paid for fairly: 

One troubling proposal is a tax on the health benefits of middle-class families. It’s the wrong path. The average family health care premium is up 131 percent since 1999. Yet some in Washington think it’s OK to ask workers already struggling with stagnant wages, higher health care costs and foreclosures to pay more for what they already have. 

We know there is a better way. The House has passed legislation that will require the already wealthy to pay a fair share. We think it’s only right for those who benefit so richly from the $2.5 trillion Bush tax cuts to pay their fair share. 

In a new report at Health Affairs, researchers say high-cost health care plans don’t mean policyholders are getting “Cadillac” benefits. Instead, benefits could cost more because of factors such as the age and health of workers, and the cost may even depend upon where a company is located.

A new survey of employers suggests that with a health benefits tax in place, many employers would raise deductibles or co-payments—or reduce or eliminate their contributions to their workers’ health coverage. 

Here’s more news from the fight for health care reform: 

• Ed Coyle of the Alliance for Retired Americans appeared yesterday on MSNBC to set the record straight on how health care reform helps seniors and protects Medicare.
• The American Cancer Society Action Network explains the next steps in the Senate.
• Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) offers a great health care reality check at the Huffington Post, saying everyone deserves access to the kinds of health care choices members of Congress have.
• The insurance industry’s latest attempt to manufacture dodgy numbers against health care reform is a bust.
• Families USA asks senators to allow a vote, not block health care reform with a filibuster.

With working families trying to stretch every dollar to make ends meet, the City Council in Northampton, Mass., last night unanimously gave final approval to a resolution defining a living wage as a human right. The nonbinding resolution also states the city will attempt to do business with employers that pay living wages and will encourage people to patronize those businesses.

The resolution was sponsored by the 16-member Northampton Living Wage Coalition, most city council members, the Human Rights Commission and the mayor. The resolution defines a living wage as a salary sufficient to meet basic needs such as housing, transportation, food and health care. Using data from the Northampton Housing Authority and the Crittenton Women’s Union, the coalition calculated a living wage in Northampton for a single person without children at $11.90 per hour. The minimum wage in Massachusetts is $8 per hour.

The resolution urges employers who pay less than $11.90 an hour to provide other benefits, such as food and transportation discounts.

Fiore Grassetti, president of the Hampshire/Franklin Central Labor Council, one of the Living Wage Coalition members, says:

Unions hold employers to higher community standards regarding wages, hours and working conditions. The Hampshire/Franklin CLC got behind the Northampton Living Wage Coalition as a broader way to do that, with community allies. We very much appreciate the City Council getting on board and will be reaching out to other municipalities to follow suit.

Working America and union members held roundtable discussions of the jobs crisis in Albuquerque and other cities across the country.

While top leaders from government, business and labor gathered yesterday at the White House, grassroots union members and struggling families held their own job summits across the country.

In roundtable discussions in Ohio, Minnesota and New Mexico, members of the AFL-CIO’s community affiliate, Working America, joined union members to discuss the continuing challenge of high unemployment and the need to start creating new jobs.

Working America member Pablo Trujillo hosted a roundtable discussion at his home in Albuquerque and said the jobs crisis must be addressed for today’s workers so we can build a stronger economy for generations to come:

We need to be vigilant in the actions we take as a community. The economy is one of those actions we need to focus on, not only for the present but for the future of New Mexico. I want to see my grandchildren grow up with opportunities and be able to prosper.

Bruce Bostick, who attended a roundtable in Columbus, Ohio, said he had to take early retirement from his job, and he’s seeing similar challenges facing friends, family and neighbors:

For all the people I know, we have been facing an emotional as well as an economic depression for a long time now. The problems we are seeing are a result of an approach by politicians of redistributing wealth upward. The upward redistribution is now greater than it has ever been. We need to produce jobs for Main Street.

Through door-to-door visits and the Unemployment Lifeline, Working America has been reaching out to families in economically distressed areas and workers struggling with the jobs crisis, helping them deal with immediate needs and mobilizing them behind action to create jobs.

The AFL-CIO has proposed a five-point plan to create jobs and rebuild a strong, fair economy:

1. Extend the lifeline for jobless workers.
2. Rebuild America’s schools, roads and energy systems.
3. Increase aid to state and local governments to maintain vital services.
4. Put people to work doing the jobs we need done in our communities.
5. Put the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds to work for Main Street by increasing lending to small and medium-sized businesses.

These steps will help give people the paychecks—and the confidence—they need to get our economy moving again. In Ohio, Minnesota and New Mexico, workers get it: we must create good jobs now.

Studs Terkel passed away in October 2008.

The life and times of the late labor activist and author Studs Terkel will be celebrated Monday at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., with a concert-style reading of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections of Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith.” Director Derek Goldman adapted the stage celebration from Terkel’s award-winning book of the same name.

The concert begins at 8 p.m. on Dec. 7 in Gaston Hall on the Georgetown campus. Click here for more information.

Terkel, who passed away last year at age 96, was renowned for his compilations of oral interviews with famous and mostly not-so-famous Americans. He talked with thousands of people about their experiences on the job, serving their country in World War II, their perceptions of race and, most recently, the challenges of growing old and facing death. One of his most famous books is Working, in which more than 100 Americans share their hopes, dreams and daily struggles on the job.

Directed by Goldman and Joseph Megel, this celebration of Terkel’s life and work features several well-known actors, including Academy Award nominee David Strathairn, Theodore Bikel and several Tony Award nominees and Helen Hayes Award winners.

In this adaptation of Terkel’s book, the subjects range from everyday citizens to recognizable figures such as author Kurt Vonnegut, actress Uta Hagen, musician Doc Watson and Terkel himself.

Goldman says after he read “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” he approached Studs about developing a stage adaptation.

I feel blessed that he not only consented, but played a generous and active role in shaping the piece. Like so much of Studs’ work, the book is about many things—faith, family, work, justice, race, war, health and our mortal bodies. But he and I bonded especially over the ways it is about music and the deeply intertwined relationship between death and artistic expression.

A new National Nurses United union is holding its founding convention Dec. 7-8 in Phoenix. The new union is a joint effort by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC), the United American Nurses (UAN) and the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA).

The 150,000 RN super union was proposed earlier this year by the trio of nurses’ unions. The 23,000-member MNA approved the creation of the NNU in October. The 86,000-strong CNA/NNOC voted to join the super union in September.

Says UAN Secretary-Treasurer Jean Ross, RN:

It is long overdue for all staff nurses to join together nationally to tackle health care reform that works for everyone, safe nurse staffing levels and giving every unorganized nurse in this country who wants a union the chance to join one. None of these goals will be met without the cooperative work of staff nurses, and we can’t wait to get to work building on the good work UAN nurses have begun over the past decade.

MNA President Donna Kelly-Williams puts it this way:

With the formation of National Nurses United, we have a historic opportunity to create the largest union and most influential collective voice of registered nurses at a time when that voice is sorely needed. The MNA is proud to be a founding member of this new national movement of direct care RNs. We understand that this is a unique moment for nurses, a once in a lifetime opportunity to dramatically improve the lives of all nurses and patients and to transform the face of health care.

“This is truly a historic moment and I hope it sends chills down the backs of those employers who would want to keep us down,” says CNA/NNOC Co-President Deborah Burger, RN.

Among the new union’s goals are strengthening the ability of direct-care RNs to protect and improve patient care conditions and RN standards from coast to coast. It also will fight for federal legislation, including S. 1031—the National Nursing Shortage Reform and Patient Advocacy Act—modeled after the successful California law that established nurse-to-patient safety ratios.

ALPA President Capt. John Prater (left) and Ron Rindfleisch (right), an ALPA staff rep, welcome Capt. Al Gallo, temporary NAA MEC chairman, into the union.

The 181 pilots at North American Airlines (NAA) are the newest members of the Air Line Pilots (ALPA). An overwhelming 87 percent of the pilots voted for the union.

The pilots fly Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft for passenger, military and cargo operations around the world.

“We are extremely pleased that the NAA pilots have joined the ALPA family,” says Capt. John Prater, ALPA’s president.

NAA pilots realized that the world’s largest pilot’s union has the resources vital to help them enforce their current contract now and prepare for negotiations in the future.

The pilots chose ALPA “because of the many benefits such as aeromedical services and the access to worldwide support through ALPA,” says Capt. Al Gallo, temporary master executive council (MEC) chairman of the NAA unit of ALPA.

Those benefits extend to the ALPA staff whose vast experience and expertise will be invaluable in our efforts to protect our rights and advance our careers.

Marcy Rein, a retired member of Office and Professional Employees (OPEIU) Local 29, gives us an in-depth report on the struggle by students at the University of California to oppose draconian cuts that endanger jobs and quality education.

From a block away on Telegraph Avenue, you could sense the muffled rumble of the crowd on the University of California’s Berkeley campus Nov. 18. Getting closer, you heard the call-and-response of “Whose university? Our university!” from students, faculty and members of five campus unions gathered in Sproul Plaza. They had walked off the job and out of their classes to protest UC’s move to slash staff, salaries and services and send student fees soaring.

Members of University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE/CWA Local 9119) kicked off the day’s action with unfair labor practice pickets at 5 a.m. They joined forces with other members of the campus community for the 1,000-strong rally at noon. Three busloads of people headed straight from the rally to Los Angeles, where the UC Regents were set to meet the next day. They joined some 2,000 students and unionists from around the state to denounce the Regents’ plan to raise student fees another 32 percent.

Protests also flared at the UC campuses in Davis, Santa Cruz and San Francisco. Over the next five days, students occupied buildings on each campus. Police in Berkeley and Los Angeles used tasers and rubber bullets on the protesters and some 100 got arrested.

But these stormy November days marked just one stage in the ongoing fight to defend one of the top public university systems in the United States.

Says Kathryn Lybarger, a gardener at UC Berkeley and rank-and-file organizer with AFSCME Local 3299:

I tell my co-workers this is a fight to keep this place public, and keep it a place that respects union labor. It’s about the fight against privatization.”

While workers fight for their jobs and union rights, students like Catherine Fung, a graduate student at UC Davis and member of the Solidarity Coalition, are standing up for their right to higher education.

My mother always said her only hope for my brother and me was that we would have more opportunities than she had. Many of us at UC come from immigrant and refugee families, working families. We’re first-generation college students and UC for us is not just a school but the ability to build big dreams. I’ve watched the Regents triple tuition and fear that now entire sectors will be denied access to the university-and my mother’s dream will not be realized.

Organizers started strategizing for this round last summer, after UC’s Board of Regents announced 9.3 percent student fee hikes and began pressuring unions to agree to furloughs and pay cuts.

Mobilizations of students, staff and faculty swept the UC system and beyond on Sept. 24. UPTE, which represents a wide range of research and technical workers, called a statewide unfair labor practice strike that day as well. The Coalition of University Employees (CUE), the clerical workers’ union, struck in support. The other campus unions can’t go out on sympathy strikes, but service workers in AFSCME, lecturers in the University Council of the American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT) and graduate student workers in UAW 2865 all found ways to take part, as they did during the November actions.

The UC Regents showed nothing but disrespect. After students and workers waited patiently for hours to speak at the Nov. 19 meeting, the Regents extended their bathroom break for 30 minutes, according to UC-AFT President Bob Samuels. “Then the Regents cut off public comments, while several people were still waiting to speak,” Samuels wrote in his blog.

When our group at the meeting started to yell, “Let them speak,” not only did the regents declare their own meeting an “unlawful assembly,” but they brought up police with guns into their own meeting to arrest the people who wanted to speak.

The Regents’ response at that meeting mirrors their arrogant attitude toward the campus unions. UPTE, CUE and AFSCME have all filed unfair labor practice charges with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) over the university’s failure to bargain over layoffs and furloughs.

UPTE and CUE have each been in negotiations with UC for more than a year and a half. The university proposed a three-year wage freeze for CUE members, and tried to get the union to declare impasse. At the Berkeley campus alone, nearly 100 CUE members have gotten notices of permanent or temporary layoffs since July.

More than 300 UPTE members around the state have lost their jobs to layoffs, including three members of the bargaining team. UC wants to hike health insurance premiums by 10 percent, raise parking fees and cut pay by four percent to fund pensions. On top of these take-backs, which add up to about $150 per month, the university wants direct pay cuts of between four and 10 percent. UPTE has held off these cuts for its membership, but unrepresented workers have already been hit with pay cuts and furloughs.

In response to UPTE’s unfair labor practice charges, the PERB issued a 30-page complaint against the university on Nov. 22. The Board found strong enough evidence to take UC to a hearing on numerous charges of bad faith bargaining. Those included refusing to bargain over layoffs, furloughs and holiday closures; canceling and sabotaging bargaining sessions, and direct dealing. PERB also found that UC “engaged in blatantly coercive speech containing both threats and promises of benefits.”

The AFSCME unit at the Berkeley campus took the hardest blow. UC laid off 38 custodians, and imposed furloughs that cancel out the 4 percent across-the-board pay raise they won in their new contract, signed last January. The members face speedup as well as pay cuts, as management expects them to pick up the load carried by their laid-off coworkers.

“It’s very stressful,” Lybarger said.

Layoffs among lecturers and graduate student workers are harder to track, because the university treats them as disposable labor anyway, according to Katherine Lee, a lecturer in the English department and rank-and-file member of UC-AFT. Lecturers can only get job security after six years in the system and graduate students work semester-to-semester. Between them, the lecturers and grad students teach the bulk of the basic courses that have borne the brunt of UC’s 10 percent cut in course offerings. The arts and humanities have suffered most; UCLA is cutting its whole writing program, Samuels said.

As Lee puts it:

Students who didn’t come to college with basic skills will suffer. This includes students who come from high schools without strong curricula, schools that might not have advanced placement and honors classes available. Many are students of color, immigrant and low-income students.

Having fewer course offerings means classes will be overcrowded, or even unavailable. Students may need to stay in school longer to complete requirements—or drop out because they can’t afford the higher fees.

Jason Williams, a UC Berkeley student who transferred from one of the local community colleges, says he’s already $26,000 in debt. 

I know a lot of people in my situation, and a lot of them won’t be back next semester.

The 32 percent fee hike the Regents approved at their Nov. 19 meeting will take effect in two installments, on top of last summer’s 9.3 percent increase. Students returning to UC next fall will be paying 45 percent more than they did in spring 2009.

This doesn’t have to be. UC administrators say the state’s budget crisis has forced them to raise fees while cutting jobs, pay and services. But the university gets only 4 percent of its funding from the state. A federal stimulus grant of $716 million offset more than half of the $1.2 billion in state funds cut this year.

UC’s medical centers, extension programs, housing and parking services bring in just over 40 percent of its budget. The medical centers alone brought in $4 billion in profit in the last fiscal year. But funds go to construction and to the ever-growing administration.

Tanya Smith, president of UPTE’s Berkeley local says “the problem isn’t money—it’s priorities.”

At the same meeting when the Regents raised student fees, they handed out big raises for top administrators.

Smith was aid off when UC chopped staff, and spent her last day of work on the picket line.

But on another level, it doesn’t matter if UC could survive on its own resources if public education isn’t funded, from K-12 on up. We’re all in this together.

The other branches of California’s public higher education system-the community colleges and the California State Universities-depend much more heavily on state funding than does the UC system. The CSUs have lost more than $1 billion in state funding since 2008 and community colleges lost $935 million last year. CSU students also got hit with a 32 percent fee hike for the 2009-10 academic year, on top of 10 percent increases for 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. Community college students are paying an extra $6 per unit for courses and facing drastic overcrowding in classes as enrollment balloons-some 250,000 were turned away from classes this fall.

Students and workers from the CSUs and community colleges joined those from the UC campuses in the Sept. 24 strike and walkout, and activists  already are organizing for the “March Forth” rallies in Sacramento and Los Angeles in defense of public education on March 4. (See www.AgainstCuts.org for more info.) To help build the spring actions, the union for CSU faculty called an “E-march” on the state legislature in Sacramento, which you can join at www.calfac.org.

Asked about the most encouraging thing that happened during the November mobilizations, Katherine Lee said, “actually seeing people’s perspectives change.”

Her AFT contract wouldn’t let her strike when UPTE members walked out-so Lee took her English class to the picket line.

They talked to workers for about a half hour.” A lot of them didn’t know what a picket line was before, but they started to think critically about the issues. As part of their assignment, they also had to talk to people who weren’t on the lines-but after that half-hour, they didn’t want to cross. Their conversations laid the basis for solidarity.

Marcy Rein, a retired member of Office and Professional Employees (OPEIU) Local 29, gives us an in-depth report on the struggle by students at the University of California to oppose draconian cuts that endanger jobs and quality education.

From a block away on Telegraph Avenue, you could sense the muffled rumble of the crowd on the University of California’s Berkeley campus Nov. 18. Getting closer, you heard the call-and-response of “Whose university? Our university!” from students, faculty and members of five campus unions gathered in Sproul Plaza. They had walked off the job and out of their classes to protest UC’s move to slash staff, salaries and services and send student fees soaring.

Members of University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE/CWA Local 9119) kicked off the day’s action with unfair labor practice pickets at 5 a.m. They joined forces with other members of the campus community for the 1,000-strong rally at noon. Three busloads of people headed straight from the rally to Los Angeles, where the UC Regents were set to meet the next day. They joined some 2,000 students and unionists from around the state to denounce the Regents’ plan to raise student fees another 32 percent.

Protests also flared at the UC campuses in Davis, Santa Cruz and San Francisco. Over the next five days, students occupied buildings on each campus. Police in Berkeley and Los Angeles used tasers and rubber bullets on the protesters and some 100 got arrested.

But these stormy November days marked just one stage in the ongoing fight to defend one of the top public university systems in the United States.

Says Kathryn Lybarger, a gardener at UC Berkeley and rank-and-file organizer with AFSCME Local 3299:

I tell my co-workers this is a fight to keep this place public, and keep it a place that respects union labor. It’s about the fight against privatization.”

While workers fight for their jobs and union rights, students like Catherine Fung, a graduate student at UC Davis and member of the Solidarity Coalition, are standing up for their right to higher education.

My mother always said her only hope for my brother and me was that we would have more opportunities than she had. Many of us at UC come from immigrant and refugee families, working families. We’re first-generation college students and UC for us is not just a school but the ability to build big dreams. I’ve watched the Regents triple tuition and fear that now entire sectors will be denied access to the university-and my mother’s dream will not be realized.

Organizers started strategizing for this round last summer, after UC’s Board of Regents announced 9.3 percent student fee hikes and began pressuring unions to agree to furloughs and pay cuts.

Mobilizations of students, staff and faculty swept the UC system and beyond on Sept. 24. UPTE, which represents a wide range of research and technical workers, called a statewide unfair labor practice strike that day as well. The Coalition of University Employees (CUE), the clerical workers’ union, struck in support. The other campus unions can’t go out on sympathy strikes, but service workers in AFSCME, lecturers in the University Council of the American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT) and graduate student workers in UAW 2865 all found ways to take part, as they did during the November actions.

The UC Regents showed nothing but disrespect. After students and workers waited patiently for hours to speak at the Nov. 19 meeting, the Regents extended their bathroom break for 30 minutes, according to UC-AFT President Bob Samuels. “Then the Regents cut off public comments, while several people were still waiting to speak,” Samuels wrote in his blog.

When our group at the meeting started to yell, “Let them speak,” not only did the regents declare their own meeting an “unlawful assembly,” but they brought up police with guns into their own meeting to arrest the people who wanted to speak.

The Regents’ response at that meeting mirrors their arrogant attitude toward the campus unions. UPTE, CUE and AFSCME have all filed unfair labor practice charges with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) over the university’s failure to bargain over layoffs and furloughs.

UPTE and CUE have each been in negotiations with UC for more than a year and a half. The university proposed a three-year wage freeze for CUE members, and tried to get the union to declare impasse. At the Berkeley campus alone, nearly 100 CUE members have gotten notices of permanent or temporary layoffs since July.

More than 300 UPTE members around the state have lost their jobs to layoffs, including three members of the bargaining team. UC wants to hike health insurance premiums by 10 percent, raise parking fees and cut pay by four percent to fund pensions. On top of these take-backs, which add up to about $150 per month, the university wants direct pay cuts of between four and 10 percent. UPTE has held off these cuts for its membership, but unrepresented workers have already been hit with pay cuts and furloughs.

In response to UPTE’s unfair labor practice charges, the PERB issued a 30-page complaint against the university on Nov. 22. The Board found strong enough evidence to take UC to a hearing on numerous charges of bad faith bargaining. Those included refusing to bargain over layoffs, furloughs and holiday closures; canceling and sabotaging bargaining sessions, and direct dealing. PERB also found that UC “engaged in blatantly coercive speech containing both threats and promises of benefits.”

The AFSCME unit at the Berkeley campus took the hardest blow. UC laid off 38 custodians, and imposed furloughs that cancel out the 4 percent across-the-board pay raise they won in their new contract, signed last January. The members face speedup as well as pay cuts, as management expects them to pick up the load carried by their laid-off coworkers.

“It’s very stressful,” Lybarger said.

Layoffs among lecturers and graduate student workers are harder to track, because the university treats them as disposable labor anyway, according to Katherine Lee, a lecturer in the English department and rank-and-file member of UC-AFT. Lecturers can only get job security after six years in the system and graduate students work semester-to-semester. Between them, the lecturers and grad students teach the bulk of the basic courses that have borne the brunt of UC’s 10 percent cut in course offerings. The arts and humanities have suffered most; UCLA is cutting its whole writing program, Samuels said.

As Lee puts it:

Students who didn’t come to college with basic skills will suffer. This includes students who come from high schools without strong curricula, schools that might not have advanced placement and honors classes available. Many are students of color, immigrant and low-income students.

Having fewer course offerings means classes will be overcrowded, or even unavailable. Students may need to stay in school longer to complete requirements—or drop out because they can’t afford the higher fees.

Jason Williams, a UC Berkeley student who transferred from one of the local community colleges, says he’s already $26,000 in debt. 

I know a lot of people in my situation, and a lot of them won’t be back next semester.

The 32 percent fee hike the Regents approved at their Nov. 19 meeting will take effect in two installments, on top of last summer’s 9.3 percent increase. Students returning to UC next fall will be paying 45 percent more than they did in spring 2009.

This doesn’t have to be. UC administrators say the state’s budget crisis has forced them to raise fees while cutting jobs, pay and services. But the university gets only 4 percent of its funding from the state. A federal stimulus grant of $716 million offset more than half of the $1.2 billion in state funds cut this year.

UC’s medical centers, extension programs, housing and parking services bring in just over 40 percent of its budget. The medical centers alone brought in $4 billion in profit in the last fiscal year. But funds go to construction and to the ever-growing administration.

Tanya Smith, president of UPTE’s Berkeley local says “the problem isn’t money—it’s priorities.”

At the same meeting when the Regents raised student fees, they handed out big raises for top administrators.

Smith was aid off when UC chopped staff, and spent her last day of work on the picket line.

But on another level, it doesn’t matter if UC could survive on its own resources if public education isn’t funded, from K-12 on up. We’re all in this together.

The other branches of California’s public higher education system-the community colleges and the California State Universities-depend much more heavily on state funding than does the UC system. The CSUs have lost more than $1 billion in state funding since 2008 and community colleges lost $935 million last year. CSU students also got hit with a 32 percent fee hike for the 2009-10 academic year, on top of 10 percent increases for 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. Community college students are paying an extra $6 per unit for courses and facing drastic overcrowding in classes as enrollment balloons-some 250,000 were turned away from classes this fall.

Students and workers from the CSUs and community colleges joined those from the UC campuses in the Sept. 24 strike and walkout, and activists  already are organizing for the “March Forth” rallies in Sacramento and Los Angeles in defense of public education on March 4. (See www.AgainstCuts.org for more info.) To help build the spring actions, the union for CSU faculty called an “E-march” on the state legislature in Sacramento, which you can join at www.calfac.org.

Asked about the most encouraging thing that happened during the November mobilizations, Katherine Lee said, “actually seeing people’s perspectives change.”

Her AFT contract wouldn’t let her strike when UPTE members walked out-so Lee took her English class to the picket line.

They talked to workers for about a half hour.” A lot of them didn’t know what a picket line was before, but they started to think critically about the issues. As part of their assignment, they also had to talk to people who weren’t on the lines-but after that half-hour, they didn’t want to cross. Their conversations laid the basis for solidarity.

Granting collective bargaining rights to airport screeners and other Transportation Security Agency (TSA) employees would enhance national security, union leaders and Obama administration officials said this week.

Federal border guards, immigration and customs and Federal Protective Service employees are already union members. In an interview with CNN last night, AFGE President John Gage pointed out that union members routinely protect the national security:

 No one talked about union when the cops and fire fighters went up the stairs on 9/11 at the World Trade Towers. No one talks about our two members who took down the shooter at Fort Hood. There was nothing in their union membership that stopped them from doing their duties.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) is using his opposition to collective bargaining rights for TSA employees to hold up confirmation of the Obama administration’s nomination of Erroll Southers to head the agency. During the 2008 campaign, President Obama pledged to make bargaining rights for TSA workers a priority. Gage and other union leaders say DeMint is endangering the traveling public by preventing the White House from filling such an important post.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano echoed Gage’s comments when she told DeMint during a Senate hearing this week:

             Collective bargaining and security are not mutually exclusive.

TSA employees moved a step closer to bargaining rights in September when the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved legislation (H.R. 1881) restoring the workers’ rights that the Bush administration stripped away in 2003. In addition, the bill grants the screeners and other TSA workers “whistle-blower” rights and the same civil service protections enjoyed by other federal workers.

Committee chairman Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) says the restoration of collective bargaining rights is “long overdue” and will help the agency deal with the high attrition, low morale and severe workplace injury rates that have plagued the agency since its creation in 2001.

In 2003, President George W. Bush took bargaining rights away from screeners and other workers at the TSA in one of the first shots in his war on America’s workers. Both the House and the Senate approved bargaining rights for screeners in 2007, but that provision was dropped in conference after Bush threatened to veto the bill.

Although they have been denied the freedom to bargain collectively, AFGE represents 12,000 TSA workers nationwide and regularly represents these employees before the TSA Disciplinary Review Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Congress and in the courts.

Granting collective bargaining rights to airport screeners and other Transportation Security Agency (TSA) employees would enhance national security, union leaders and Obama administration officials said this week.

Federal border guards, immigration and customs and Federal Protective Service employees are already union members. In an interview with CNN last night, AFGE President John Gage pointed out that union members routinely protect the national security:

 No one talked about union when the cops and fire fighters went up the stairs on 9/11 at the World Trade Towers. No one talks about our two members who took down the shooter at Fort Hood. There was nothing in their union membership that stopped them from doing their duties.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) is using his opposition to collective bargaining rights for TSA employees to hold up confirmation of the Obama administration’s nomination of Erroll Southers to head the agency. During the 2008 campaign, President Obama pledged to make bargaining rights for TSA workers a priority. Gage and other union leaders say DeMint is endangering the traveling public by preventing the White House from filling such an important post.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano echoed Gage’s comments when she told DeMint during a Senate hearing this week:

             Collective bargaining and security are not mutually exclusive.

TSA employees moved a step closer to bargaining rights in September when the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved legislation (H.R. 1881) restoring the workers’ rights that the Bush administration stripped away in 2003. In addition, the bill grants the screeners and other TSA workers “whistle-blower” rights and the same civil service protections enjoyed by other federal workers.

Committee chairman Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) says the restoration of collective bargaining rights is “long overdue” and will help the agency deal with the high attrition, low morale and severe workplace injury rates that have plagued the agency since its creation in 2001.

In 2003, President George W. Bush took bargaining rights away from screeners and other workers at the TSA in one of the first shots in his war on America’s workers. Both the House and the Senate approved bargaining rights for screeners in 2007, but that provision was dropped in conference after Bush threatened to veto the bill.

Although they have been denied the freedom to bargain collectively, AFGE represents 12,000 TSA workers nationwide and regularly represents these employees before the TSA Disciplinary Review Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Congress and in the courts.