Labor Union Blog

Tomorrow Massachusetts will go to the polls to choose a successor for the seat left empty when Senator Edward Kennedy passed away last year. Kennedy served as a Senator to the state for 46 years. One of the candidates vying for the seat is Republican Scott Brown. Brown came under fire this weekend over a vote he cast in October of 2001 against a Massachusetts bill that would have provided financial assistance to Red Cross workers who volunteered to work at the Ground Zero site after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

read more

Across the country unemployment is around 10 percent, but for communities of color that number goes up to 15.6%. For the Workers Independent News Karen Miller finds out how African Americans living in Washington DC are doing during this recession and if President Obama’s economic recovery package is providing relief.
39 year old, Washington DC electrician Robert Smith was recently unemployed for 7 months. He says he and his colleagues have never seen it worse.

read more

Massachusetts working families are on the phones, doorsteps and worksites–mobilizing a get-out-the-vote drive for Martha Coakley in today’s special election for the U.S. Senate.

Coakley, the Bay State’s attorney general, has a long record of supporting working families. As attorney general, she vigilantly enforced prevailing wage, overtime, employee misclassification, independent contractor and workplace discrimination laws. She has earned the support of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO.

As a U.S. senator, Coakley says she will be a strong advocate for job creation and the Employee Free Choice Act. She vows to continue the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s legacy of fighting for working families.

Her opponent, Scott Brown, strongly opposes the Employee Free Choice Act. Like an echo from the Bush-Cheney days, Brown believes the answer to the economic crisis is to give more tax cuts to the wealthy.

Brown opposes a proposed fee on Wall Street firms that received taxpayer bailouts and then gave extravagant bonuses to executives. Coakley says that exemplifies a major difference between them.

I choose to stand with the middle-class taxpayers who deserve to get their money back from the big banks that caused the economic crisis and are now lavishing bonuses on failed executives. Scott Brown is standing with Wall Street CEOs. As attorney general, I’ve stood up to Wall Street and recovered millions of dollars back for taxpayers

In the state legislature, Brown turned his back on working families when he voted to cut unemployment benefits for people who needed them the most.

If you like to volunteer at phone banks, call 781-324-8230.

_______________________________________

Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.