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Workers Independent News Labor Radio
Internet Radio Program 05/05/10
Producers: Doug Cunningham & Jesse Russell

Labor Radio Rundown:

1) WIN Newscast

2) The Coalition for Clean & Safe Ports is on Capitol Hill today testifying at a hearing and lobbying for national legislation to reform labor and environmental standards at America’s ports. WIN’s Doug Cunningham speaks with the coalition’s Valerie Lapin.

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On Tuesday, New York Governor David Paterson announced a plan to furlough 100,000 unionized state workers each week. Paterson will include the plan in his weekly emergency spending bill – a bill that the state legislature is required to pass or reject as a whole. A rejection of the bill would result in a government shut down. Paterson said it is time for the public sector workers to make “sacrifices.”

Lawsuits begin to stack up as oil continues to fill the Gulf. Jesse Russell reports:

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By Doug Cunningham

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The future prosperity of the country depends on our ability to create good, green jobs and clean energy, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said today.

Speaking at the opening plenary of the 2010 Good Jobs, Green Jobs National Conference meeting in Washington, D.C., she said clean energy jobs are one way to put people back to work and  address the problem of chronic unemployment.

We must train the next generation of workers in the good-paying jobs of the 21st century. And clean energy jobs is one way to do just that.

 We know our recovery and our prosperity depend on making the United States first in clean energy. For our economy and our workers, America must be first.

Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) echoed Pelosi at the afternoon plenary, telling participants at the three-day conference that green jobs offer the opportunity for people of color who have been hit hardest by the economic crisis to gain long-term employment.   

The Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference, which began today, brings together union members, environmentalists, business leaders, lawmakers and administration officials to map out a path to a green economy that creates good jobs, reduces global warming and preserves America’s economic and environmental security.

U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis told participants that “while the steps we have taken over the past year have begun to put the economy back on the right track, we still have a lot of work to do.”

Together we must “invest, innovate, and act” to restart our economy.        

Our workers are our nation’s most valuable asset and it is critical that as we invest in clean energy jobs, we ensure they are good jobs for everyone.

Read Pelosi’s speech here and Solis’ here.

Communications Workers of America (CWA) President Larry Cohen, who introduced Solis, told the participants protecting workers’ rights will ensure that green jobs are good jobs.

The fight we’re all in has never been tougher. But all of us working together can keep alive the hope that is in this room. We’re building new alliances and new allies and together, we can’t be stopped.

Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) President Warren George made the case for mass transportation as a key part of the effort to clean up the environment and create jobs. He pointed out that every $1 billion spent on public transportation creates 60,000 new jobs. He called on Congress to quickly pass climate change legislation that includes substantial investment in mass transit.

Dean Allen, CEO of McKinstry, a Seattle-based company that designs, builds, operates and maintains buildings, said his company and the building trades unions that represent the employees have developed several new, innovative ways to create green buildings. He said it is essential to bring everyone to the table to address the issues of green jobs in order for the country to grow.

Pelosi, Solis, Cohen and George head up an impressive group of speakers, including AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka; United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard; Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.); Sierra Club Executive Director Carol Pope; Rick Fedrizzi, president and CEO of the U.S. Green Building Council; George Miller, president of the American Institute of Architects; high-ranking Obama administration officials; and Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter.

More than 100 workshops are on tap, covering green manufacturing, environmental and occupational health and safety, business investment and new markets. Click here for a schedule of the workshops and here for the entire agenda.

In addition, the conference features the 2010 Green Innovation Expo, where more than 100 exhibitors from labor, industry, environment and academia will be on hand to demonstrate how they are charting the path toward growing the green economy and developing clean energy jobs.

The conference is coordinated by the Blue Green Alliance, the partnership of the labor and environmental organizations, which includes the USW, CWA, AFT, Utility Workers (UWUA), ATU, the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

At least 7,000 people marched and rallied at Cambodia’s National Assembly, the largest number ever at a May Day event.

 By Alison Omens

This is a cross-post from the  AFL-CIO Solidarity Center website.

AFL-CIO Working America staff member Alison Omens reports from Cambodia, where she is part of a four-member U.S. labor delegation sponsored by the Solidarity Center. This is the first in a series of posts about her experiences during her 10-day visit.

Some truths: The Cambodian labor movement is a women’s movement. Eighty percent of union members are women. It’s also a young person’s movement. In the garment industry, which makes up the vast majority of the Cambodian labor movement, 63 percent of the local leaders are under 30. It’s also the best anti-poverty program in Cambodia today. Here, the union movement makes up a huge part of civil society. In a country that’s as marred by its leaders’ actions as Cambodia, the next generation of elected officials will come from unions—it’s the only large-scale training ground to develop leaders in the country.

It’s also impossible to talk about Cambodia and not include mention of the genocide. It’s right under the surface in a country that barely a generation ago experienced a mass execution of its citizens.

The union delegation to Cambodia, sponsored by the Solidarity Center and funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of State, is on its fourth day here, halfway around the world.

Each day brings a new adventure.

The highlight for me would have to be the massive march and rally on May Day. It’s a holiday that’s been largely forgotten in the United States. But here, workers were out in mass. Marchers came in from across Phnom Penh and surrounding areas to be there. Participants called for minimum wage for garment workers ($93 a month), longer-term contracts and no union discrimination. At least 7,000 people marched and rallied at the National Assembly, the largest number ever at a May Day event. It was a privilege to be part of it.

The call for a higher minimum wage was put even more into focus after we visited garment workers at their homes later in the afternoon. We met with women and men living four to six people in a bedroom the size of some Americans’ closets. Many have been living there for at least five years.

I’ll be writing a separate post on a roundtable discussion we had with a group of women union leaders, many of them former garment workers, who are building and training a generation of women workers for leadership. Their accomplishments in a few short years on issues such as maternity leave make ours pale in comparison.

On Friday, we sat down with a large contingent of the Cambodian union leaders, most of whom are not much older than me. (This isn’t happenstance. After the genocidal Pol Pot regime, the entire country is very young. The Solidarity Center doesn’t count leaders over 45 years old because there are so few of them.) We discussed challenges facing Cambodian unions and U.S. unions. It’s fascinating to realize that a union movement about a century younger than ours can face the same types of debates and concerns but from a completely different perspective. They’re worried about building infrastructure, selecting and electing leaders who will support workers and educating people with few resources on what unions are all about. They’ve also been hard hit by the worldwide economic crisis, with corporations using the same excuses we hear—that in this tough time, the last thing that the economy needs is collective bargaining agreements.

In fact, since we’ve been in Cambodia, the U.S. labor movement has staged a massive rally on the steps of Wall Street, calling out the kind of greed that Cambodians hear about every day in trying to get better wages for themselves. As I marched on May Day with thousands of Cambodians, I found myself thinking (dare I say it?), “Workers of the world, unite!”

CWA Vice President Ed Mooney leaflets outside the Deutsche Telekom annual meeting in Cologne, Germany.

T-Mobile USA employees and Communications Workers of America (CWA) Vice President Ed Mooney traveled to Cologne, Germany, last week and joined with their colleagues at ver.di, the German telecommunications workers union, to tell shareholders  about the company’s double standard to deny its U.S. employees the freedom to join a union.

In many countries around the world, T-Mobile’s parent, Deutsche Telekom (DT), follows internationally recognized labor and human rights, including the freedom of association and the freedom to join a union. But not in the United States. Here, the German company allows management to harass and intimidate workers who want to join a union.

Some 50 ver.di members leafleted the entrances to DT’s annual shareholders meeting in Cologne with a flier that described T-Mobile’s “Wild West” tactics.

Inside the meeting, Kornelia Dubbel, a ver.di member and member of the T-Mobile supervisory board, told shareholders DT is known in the United States as an employer who spreads fear among its workers.

There is fear of arbitrary dismissal for being “caught” by management for simply taking and reading a leaflet from the union, the Communications Workers of America. Why do you act this way?

For many years, American management at T-Mobile has prevented CWA from introducing itself to the workers. That is the only way workers will have a choice as to whether they want to become a union member. But that is exactly what American management does not want!

DT’s social charter and other guidelines set high standards for the way management should run the company, Dubbel said.

But what good is a social charter, what good are guidelines, if workers are afraid to take leaflets or contact the union? I have seen this treatment first hand.

In a recent study, John Logan, a professor at San Francisco State University, found that DT is not exporting the constructive and cooperative labor practices it uses in Germany and other countries to the United States. Instead, he said, he found:

• In 2003, T-Mobile distributed “The Union Free Privilege,” an anti-union memo, to its operations across America.
• Routinely, T-Mobile security officers take down the license plate numbers of workers who take union leaflets outside T-Mobile call center and support facilities.
• T-Mobile employees are forced to attend management-led meetings where they are warned about joining a union, with both implied and open threats that they will be fired for doing so.
• In 2008, an updated anti-union memo was distributed secretly to front-line managers offering instructions on what to do if CWA organizers attempt to communicate with T-Mobile rank-and-file employees. 

Today is National Teacher Day and members of AFT across the country are launching a “Pink Hearts, Not Pink Slips” campaign to draw attention to the devastating impact educational budget cuts—and the resulting layoffs—will have on our students, our schools and our communities.

By the end of this school year, it is estimated that as many as 300,000 teachers, school support staff and higher education faculty will receive pink slips throughout the country.

This could result in drastic increases in class sizes, erode classroom discipline and school safety and eliminate essential programs like art, music and summer school.

You can take action. Click here to sign an online petition to support legislation sponsored by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.). The legislation would provide $23 billion to help school districts avoid layoffs and would preserve the quality of education in our schools and on our college campuses.

Says AFT President Randi Weingarten:

The magnitude of the cuts is staggering. The number of educators who might be pink-slipped in the fall is nearly equal to the population of Toledo, Ohio. This isn’t just about saving jobs; it’s about saving the next generation.

The federal government didn’t walk away from Wall Street, and it should not walk away from our kids and their public schools. These massive cuts in teachers and programs will seriously jeopardize the hard work being done in school districts throughout the nation on genuine reforms to boost student achievement.

For more information on “Pink Hearts, Not Pink Slips,” click here.

In a column on the National Education Association (NEA) website, NEA Vice President Lily Eskelsen says it’s the children who will suffer from the school staff cuts.

Many teachers have already been told they are being laid off….But this isn’t about them. It’s about the children they serve.

If you put a six year old in a class of 40, her experiences and the attention her teacher will be able to give her will be much more limited. If you cut out the art program or the AP [Advanced Placement] Calculus class or the foreign language class that that senior had planned to take in preparation for applying to a university, he doesn’t ever get it back.

Tim Miller doesn’t buy the coal industry’s claims that nonunion mines are as safe as union mines.

He survived a 1989 methane gas explosion and fire that killed 10 other miners at the nonunion William Station No. Nine Mine in his native western Kentucky. Miller helped recover the bodies.

All 10 men were more than fellow miners. “They were my good friends,” says Miller, now an international representative for the Mine Workers (UMWA).

From 1979 to 1997, Miller dug coal 1,000 feet underground at the mine and can’t forget the human toll: 28 fatalities in 18 years.

We finally organized that mine in 1997. It was bankrupt then. But it lasted almost seven more years under the UMWA banner. There wasn’t a single death from the time we organized the mine until it closed.

Pyro Mining Co. owned the mine, and so the deadly explosion is sometimes called the Pyro Mine Disaster. “I’ll carry that with me for the rest of my life,” says Miller, 50.

His office is in Madisonville, the Hopkins County seat. His desk is about 27 miles from the Pyro mine site and about 10 miles from the Dotiki Mine in Webster County, where two miners died last month in a roof fall. “Dotiki is also nonunion,” Miller says.

The double fatality followed an April explosion at the Massey Energy Co.’s nonunion Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia that left 29 coal miners dead. The blast was one of the worst mining disasters in years.

Inspectors had cited the Upper Big Branch and Dotiki mines for multiple safety violations. Ultimately, the Pyro mine superintendent pleaded guilty to hiding hazardous conditions at the mine and attempting to cover them up.

Admitting he hadn’t looked at mining accident statistics recently, the vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association told the Beckley, W.Va., Register-Herald he wasn’t “aware of any measurable statistical difference between” union and nonunion mines.

Miller says his experience and a mountain of data prove the coal industry is dead wrong: Union mines are much safer than nonunion mines.

In a UMWA mine, you have a real say when it comes to safety issues. Members of our safety committee that are elected by their fellow union workers travel with mine inspectors.

Because they are in the union, safety committee members can point out problem areas the company hasn’t addressed and not fear retribution from the company, Miller said. Also, any UMWA miner can leave a work area he or she feels might be dangerous, again without having to worry about retaliation, he added.

I know the law says you have the right to withdraw yourself from an unsafe area. But in a nonunion mine, you know if you do withdraw, or if you speak out about safety problems, your days on the job are numbered. The company might not fire you right away. But they’ll get you in one of those bogus layoffs. So people are scared to speak out—scared they won’t have a job if they do.

Miller was 19 when Pyro hired him. He ended up at the William Station Mine, which is in Union County. Union, Webster, Hopkins and Muhlenberg counties are the heart of Kentucky’s western coal field.

The nonunion coal operators paint the picture that MSHA [the Mine Safety and Health Administration] is the enemy and the UMWA is the devil that tries to take money out of your pocket.

He’d been mining coal for about three years when he witnessed a retirement “ceremony” for a veteran miner in his 60s. It helped make Miller a union man.

About 15 minutes before quitting time they gave the old fellow a little going away cake and the superintendent handed him a pocket watch. The old fellow had tears in his eyes. But he wasn’t getting a pension or health care. All he had was his Social Security. From that point on, I knew what I had to look forward to without the union.

Miller embraced the UMWA. He helped in organizing drives that eventually resulted in the mine going union.

But it was too late for his 10 buddies, who lost their lives on Sept. 13, 1989.

Miller says he was working in another part of the mine when the blast occurred. Thick smoke made it doubly difficult for rescue teams, including Miller, to search for the miners, who died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

One of the guys had a pulse when he was found. They did CPR on him, but he didn’t make it.

Miller said he and the other would-be rescuers had to wear heavy oxygen tanks, which made recovering the bodies even more arduous. “But I was thinking if that was my body down there, I’d want somebody to get me out.”

Miller and his mates sewed makeshift body bags from wing curtains, heavy cloths that are draped in shafts to improve ventilation.

We cut the curtains off, wrapped them around the bodies and pinned the curtains with nails. We put them on a flat car and carried them out—about seven miles. It was a long way.