People Before Profit blog

As final NAFTA rules kick in, Mexicans worry

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 08:32:00 +0000

On New Year’s Day, the 13-year-old North American Free Trade Act linking the United States, Mexico and Canada will come into full bloom as the remaining tariffs on agricultural products, including corn, beans, sugar, milk and chicken, are lifted.

NAFTA came into force on Jan. 1, 1994, with a three-nation publicity campaign full of promises of prosperity for everybody.

In Mexico, then President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, while acknowledging that up to 13 million of the country’s farmers could be driven off the land by cheap U.S. and Canadian grain imports, argued that such losses would be more than offset by Mexico’s export of specialty fruits and vegetables to the U.S. and Canada (whose high tariffs had always kept such Mexican products out) and by increased investment by foreign manufacturers seeking low-wage labor.

But on the same day NAFTA took effect, the rebels of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation marched into towns in Mexico’s southernmost Chiapas state, proclaiming war against NAFTA and drawing attention to the impoverished plight of the region’s indigenous people.

Three months later, the presidential candidate of Salinas’ Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was assassinated under suspicious circumstances. Shortly thereafter, Ernesto Zedillo, the newly elected president (also from the PRI), decided to devalue the peso … and tipped off politically connected Mexican investors about the devaluation in advance. Zedillo’s actions created a panic as both Mexican and foreign investors rushed to offload treasury bonds and take their capital out of the country. Mexico faced bankruptcy.

President Bill Clinton and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, seeking to rescue Wall Street’s investors, arranged a $50 billion bailout loan, but with harsh conditions. Whereas the Mexican government had hoped to keep some social safety nets in place to cushion the blows of NAFTA, these were scrapped in the name of repaying the loan. The old Conasupo system, whereby the government stabilized farmers by buying their crops at above-market prices and then distributing them cheap to the urban poor, was dismantled.

As tariffs on U.S. imported grain were cut to a minimum, Mexican farmers were indeed driven off the land, but the increased fruit and vegetable exports did not help them. Since NAFTA was introduced, a million and a half Mexican farmers have gone broke, resulting in the impoverishment and displacement of the farmers and their families — about 6 million people.

The hoped-for new foreign investment in manufacturing never panned out, partly because of the country’s social and economic instability and partly because other countries offered even lower labor costs.

The result was a sharp drop in living standards for millions of Mexicans. Is it any wonder that the rate of undocumented immigration from Mexico to the U.S. quickly rose by 60 percent?

Moreover, Mexico, which used to be self-sufficient, now imports 40 percent of its food, according to the newspaper La Jornada del Campo.

Yet the U.S. grain industry continues to be heavily subsidized, with the biggest benefits going to major transnationals like Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and the Mexico-based MASECA — not to family farmers on either side of the border. Analyst Laura Carlsen of the Americas Policy Program writes that in 2001, corn, which costs $3.41 a bushel to produce in the U.S., was “dumped” in Mexico and elsewhere at $2.28 a bushel. Policies like these have devastated Mexico’s rural areas.

The Bush administration has made it clear that it will accept no renegotiation of NAFTA. The Mexican and U.S. governments, rather, are talking about security cooperation, which many suspect means U.S. intervention in Mexico to help stem the coming political unrest.

A group in the Mexican Senate, mostly on the left, has petitioned President Felipe Calderon to demand a renegotiation of NAFTA, and is receiving support from progressive organizations in the U.S. and Canada. Mexican farmers and their allies are organizing mass street actions, including rolling hunger strikes and blockades of roads on which U.S. farm products enter the country. These protests will grow, but even more hard times are ahead, along with more undocumented Mexican immigration to “El Norte.”

Green jobs: wave of the future

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 08:07:00 +0000

OAKLAND, Calif. — Earlier this month, the mayors of four San Francisco Bay Area cities — Oakland, Richmond, Berkeley and Emeryville — announced formation of the East Bay Green Corridor Partnership, together with leaders of the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The partnership’s ambitious goals: to build “the heart of the East Bay into a dynamic Green Corridor” and “to lead the world in environmental innovation, emerging green business and industry, green jobs, and renewable energy.”

Their Dec. 3 announcement came as new possibilities are emerging to combine curbing global warming and creating good jobs for workers who have been driven to the margins, including minority youth, workers with limited education, and former prisoners.

The U.S. House and Senate passed the Green Jobs bill to provide $125 million a year to train 35,000 workers for jobs that help the environment. It was incorporated into the overall energy legislation signed into law by President Bush on Dec. 19.

Locally, Oakland’s City Council has approved $250,000 to fund a Green Jobs Corps slated to launch next year. Richmond has a similar program.

In their statement of principles, the four mayors pledged to support new and emerging green industries, strengthen development of green technology, support employment opportunities and work together to build the “East Bay Green Corridor.” They said they would expand job training for a “diverse cross-section of youth,” including new partnerships with high schools, community colleges, adult education programs and California’s university systems.

As they unveiled the project, Oakland Mayor Ronald Dellums and Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin emphasized the importance of job training and good entry-level jobs for their cities, where many residents have experienced prolonged economic crisis.

“We are cautiously hopeful about the potential of this partnership,” Aaron Lehmer, Green Collar Jobs campaign manager at the Oakland-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, told the World.

Together with the Apollo Alliance, a national business-labor-environmental coalition, the Ella Baker Center was a significant force for passage of the federal Green Jobs bill. With the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the center also co-convenes the Oakland Apollo Alliance, which helped spark the Oakland Green Jobs Corps.

“We understand the mayors intend to pull their political clout together as a regional cooperative of cities, to increase the federal appropriations for investment in green businesses, and to augment green collar jobs training programs,” Lehmer said.

He said the Ella Baker Center believes it is vital for social justice organizations to help guide the process so that investment “is done with equity and justice in mind for everyone in the region.”

Lehmer expressed concern about possible negative effects from the regional program’s emphasis on biofuels, because of its potential to raise food costs. Earlier this year, UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Livermore Lab announced plans for energy biosciences research with funds from the energy firm BP and the U.S. Department of Energy.

The national Apollo Alliance has said its long-term program for a new, diversified, environmentally safe and more efficient energy infrastructure could add over 3.3 million jobs to the economy nationally.

In a recently released report, “Putting Oakland to Work: a comprehensive strategy to create real jobs for residents,” the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE) identified “green jobs” as a rapidly growing category including well-paying jobs for young people and those with limited education, as well as managers and professionals.

“A number of initiatives are happening here to encourage the growth of the green sector, including the new partnership,” said EBASE spokesperson Kate O’Hara. “As with other sectors of the economy,” she added, “the more the city can do to set standards for wages and benefits, the more likely that these will be family-supporting jobs.”

Another just-released report, “Green Collar Jobs,” analyzes the ability of green businesses to provide quality jobs for workers with barriers to employment. Its author, San Francisco State University professor Raquel Pinderhughes, concludes, “Green collar jobs represent an important new category of workforce opportunities because they are relatively high quality jobs, with relatively low barriers to entry, in sectors that are poised for dramatic growth.”

At the green collar jobs panel organized by the Apollo Alliance during the recent Mayors’ Climate Protection Summit in Seattle, Oakland’s Mayor Dellums called the green economy and its potential for new good jobs “the wave of the future.”

He added, “We now have an opportunity to reach out to a community that has been neglected for the last 40 years. Poverty is real in our communities, and we all know it, with high crime rates, high murder rates, high incarceration rates, high dropout rates. But here’s this brilliant moment when we can address the unfinished business of the cities, the unfinished business of America and the new business of saving the planet.”

mbechtel @pww.org

Using OSHA to win victories: the case of Cintas

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 07:56:00 +0000

There is a tendency among U.S. trade union leaders, shop stewards and rank-and-file activists to strongly distrust federal and state agencies charged with protecting workers’ health and safety — and therefore not to utilize them.

While there are good grounds for suspecting government agencies of anti-worker bias and wrongdoing, there are also ample reasons for not allowing big employers and right-wing political officials to destroy the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and its counterparts on the state level.

The golden period of OSHA was in the late 1970s. During those years, the agency aggressively sought to enforce its rules and regulations. Around the same time, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), responding to mass pressure, recommended additional proposals to protect workers on the job.

Unions were very involved in the development of these proposals. And when OSHA was doing its work properly, labor unions had another tool to protect their members from the ravages of asbestos, lead, industrial solvents and many other hazards.

But starting with the election of Ronald Reagan, 12 years of Republican rule dealt OSHA and NIOSH punishing blows. The Reagan and first Bush administrations stripped OSHA of many of its powers and forced NIOSH to use corporate-paid researchers to write occupational safety and health rules. Labor was removed from any policy-making positions. State agencies were weakened, too.

The Clinton years restored some muscle to OSHA and NIOSH, but now, after eight years of George W. Bush’s rule, the credibility of the two agencies is almost completely shot.

It’s with this background in mind that one should assess the recent victory of the Unite Here union, which represents garment and hotel workers, in winning an OSHA-ordered $2.8 million fine against Cintas, the giant laundry company. Unite Here has been trying to organize the workers at Cintas for several years now.

The penalty stems from an incident last March, when Eleazar Torres Gomez, a 46-year-old Cintas worker, was killed in an accident at the company’s Tulsa, Okla., plant. Torres Gomez was caught on a conveyor belt used to transfer uniforms from washers to dryers, and he died inside a 300-degree dryer. The company said it was his own fault.

In response to this incident, Unite Here’s staff and activists directed their organizing power against Cintas nationwide. They went to OSHA and demanded it take action. They believed that within OSHA, below the Bush-appointed, anti-worker leadership, some civil servants wanted to do their jobs. And they were correct.

In short order, Cintas’ plants in Oklahoma, Alabama, Ohio, Washington, California and Pennsylvania were subjected to OSHA inspections. The net result was the multimillion-dollar fine against the company in the Tulsa case and additional fines for safety violations elsewhere.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose statistics are not completely reliable, nonetheless offers some comparative data about the dangers facing laundry workers. Laundry and dry-cleaning workers have an injury rate of between 6.7 and 9.3 per 100 full-time workers. By comparison, the injury rate of chemical workers is 3.7, oil and gas well workers, 6.7, and forestry and logging workers, 9.9. In other words, commercial laundering is a very unsafe industry.

The highly profitable laundry and linen supply industry has grown into one of the largest industries in the United States. Why? Because of the outsourcing of the laundry function by hotels, hospitals and nursing homes.

Boosting the bottom line also is the companies’ policy of employing the most vulnerable workers, including undocumented immigrants, at low wages with few benefits.

Whether the fines that OSHA has levied against Cintas will be paid, or whether this episode will boost the union organizing drive by Unite Here, is still unknown. We are hoping the answer is yes on both counts.

What is not open to question is the valuable role that federal and state governments can play in holding scofflaw employers’ feet to the fire. Regardless of how “friendly” an employer may be at any given time, it is still vital to have a strong, effective OSHA administration ready to be called into the picture if it is needed to curb the greedy actions of the company.

We need to rearm OSHA and NIOSH with strong enforcement powers, with labor unions to back them up. Keep that thought in mind as we approach the 2008 elections.

After fatal accidents, unions put spotlight on port safety

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 06:56:00 +0000

OAKLAND, Calif. — After the second fatal accident at the Port of Oakland in 10 weeks, port workers and their union are raising urgent concerns about safety at the nation’s fourth largest port.

Edward Hall, 47, was killed Dec. 3 when he was struck by a large tractor-trailer truck. Hall, who was working as a shipping agent for Hanjin, was apparently checking lists of cargo on the container ship Yang Ming as it finished docking. The driver of the truck, who was waiting to move containers from the ship to another part of Hanjin’s property at the port, said he didn’t see Hall.

A few months prior, on Sept. 24, Reginald Ross, 39, a longshoreman, died following an accident aboard a Hapag-Lloyd ship, the Stuttgart Express. He was crushed as a container was lowered into place.

Leaders of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) met with shipping company officials of the Pacific Maritime Association last week to voice their concerns about the impact of the shippers’ demands for ever-faster production. Discussions were slated to continue this week.

“Longshore work is a very dangerous industry, as are other types of work at the port,” Farless Dailey, secretary-treasurer of ILWU Local 10, which represents Port of Oakland longshore workers, said in a telephone interview.

“Ultimately,” he added, “the biggest factor in causing accidents at the port is the employers’ demands for increased production.” Dailey said one firm has actually taken the union to court, contending the workers are not moving fast enough. “We are constantly battling the employers over speedup,” he said.

Contributing to the push for speedup, he said, is the “just-in-time” system of production and distribution that has drastically reduced the warehousing of goods.

Besides the fatalities, workers at West Coast ports have suffered many non-fatal accidents, Dailey said, including some causing serious injuries.

The longshore contract the ILWU negotiated with the employers’ Pacific Maritime Association in 2002 is set to expire July 1, 2008. While specific approaches to the negotiations will be decided when representatives elected by the longshore unions meet in caucus starting late next month, ILWU Communications Director Craig Merrilees said he expects safety will figure significantly in the talks.

“The general public doesn’t always appreciate how dangerous longshore jobs are,” Merrilees said. “People don’t need to die on the job. Many workers feel there are types of work where accidents are more likely. We’d like to explore these.”

The ILWU says at least 25 of its members, mostly longshore workers but also including members of the Inlandboatmen’s Union, have died on the job in the last decade.

In the last 18 months alone, the ILWU has lost five members. Besides Reginald Ross, those who have died include Jose “Pepe” Perez Correa of Local 54, whose truck crashed through a railing into deep water in Stockton, Calif., and Kenneth Eddo of Local 23, who was killed on the Tacoma docks when the container he was towing rolled over.

Also, two members of Local 19 were killed: Joseph Aliseo, who was run over by a top loader at APL’s intermodal yard in Seattle, and Dan Miller, who suffered a fatal heart attack aboard a ship at the Port of Tacoma’s SSA Terminal.

mbechtel @pww.org

What the UAW should do now

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:13:00 +0000

Now that the 2007 auto talks are over, Ron Gettelfinger, the union negotiator, should heed the words of Ron Gettelfinger, the union president.

Before the United Auto Workers ever sat down with GM, Ford and Chrysler to work out a Voluntary Employees Beneficiary Association (VEBA) to provide health care for auto retirees, Gettelfinger, the union president, was telling everyone who would listen that the problems of health care cannot be solved at the bargaining table.

He was right then, and he is even more right now. VEBA (along with the two-tier wage) may have dramatically reduced the $30-an-hour labor cost differential between the Detroit Big Three and their chief competitors, the Japanese Big Three, but the basic problem of uncontrollable health care costs still remains unsolved.

The UAW’s VEBA will give the union some bargaining power to negotiate better prices on prescription drugs for its retired members, but it won’t have anywhere near the strength the federal government would have in negotiating drug prices for all Americans.

A VEBA will allow UAW leadership the ability to cut a better deal with a few selected health insurance companies on behalf of the union’s retired members. Meanwhile, most Americans, including the non-UAW family and friends of UAW members, will remain at the mercy of greedy, for-profit insurers that make money by providing the least amount of health care for the buck.

The UAW leadership’s job is not done despite its successful contract ratification votes. It has just begun.

The UAW’s VEBAs are going to be faced at some time, maybe sooner than later, with the falling worth of their funds (which are heavily invested in Big Three stocks) and soaring health care costs. At that point, auto retirees will be aiming their anger at union leaders for raising premiums, co-pays and deductibles or cutting coverage to balance the VEBA account.

Before that happens, Gettelfinger, the union president, must be reminded what he said before auto talks began and get the union to take a leading role in building the grassroots movement for single-payer, national health care.

The UAW needs to get back to its roots as a social union that fights for everybody. If it doesn’t, it’s going to fail in its goal of protecting the health care of its own dues-paying Big Three members.

It can’t afford to continue bemoaning the loss of two-thirds of its peak membership since 1979. It also can’t assume it doesn’t have any clout left. Five hundred thousand members, educated and mobilized, are a far more powerful force than 1,500,000 who are never called to battle.

As union leaders pass on the task of administering their VEBAs to Wall Street experts, they should focus their expertise on what they do best — getting the membership united and moving behind a common goal.

There is absolutely no downside to the UAW becoming an active player in building the grassroots health-care-for-all movement.

First, it could help bring union leadership, staff and members out of the doldrums they’ve been in since the loss of union jobs became alarmingly apparent to all. It could give the membership, staff and leadership that sense of pride and strength that earlier generations of UAW members felt when they were major players in fighting for social progress in America.

UAW activism also has the potential of bringing the large number of members who opposed VEBA and the two-tier wage back on the side of a union leadership that is ready and willing to take on the health care powers-that-be.

Taking a leadership role in the fight for winning health care for all would also provide the UAW with the best PR it could ever afford to buy. Just imagine being a UAW organizer and realizing your union’s reputation precedes you before you even knock on that potential new member’s door.

“Hi, I’m with the UAW — the union (that fights) for all workers.”

Dave Mortimer is a labor activist in Detroit.

Labor pushes for universal health care

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 07:20:00 +0000

‘800-pound gorilla’ sits on bargaining table

NEW YORK — Union leaders here have made it clear that the AFL-CIO’s Labor Day pledge to push for national health care by 2009 is high on labor’s agenda for the 2008 elections.

“The rising cost of health care is an 800-pound gorilla sitting on top of our bargaining tables,” declared Roger Toussaint, president of Transport Workers Union Local 100, during a Nov. 30 conference here sponsored by Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

“For reasons of history,”

Toussaint said, “the U.S. has had a private model of health care as opposed to the social model in place in most of the industrialized world. And for reasons of history, labor has been compliant with that model. Now is the time to change that model.

“The first step now is to put pro-labor forces in office in Washington, the state and in City Hall. 2008 is the year to do this,” Toussaint said.

Following Local 100’s 2005 strike, the city administration responded with an assault on the union including not only a jail term for Toussaint and millions of dollars in fines, but revocation of the union’s dues checkoff. The TWU has been forced to go worker-to-worker to collect the dues money it needs to survive.

Toussaint said he favors a “single-payer-type solution” that would provide health care to everyone “as part of the nation’s social insurance system,” but acknowledged that “the fight for improvements and the fight for a national plan that covers everyone includes a variety of different ideas.”

Some AFL-CIO unions are pushing for passage of HR 676, introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich). The bill would, in effect, expand Medicare by providing total coverage for everyone, eliminating private insurance companies.

The AFL-CIO has not backed any particular bill but has called for universal health care with the government playing a major role controlling costs.

Maida Rosenstein, president of United Auto Workers, Local 2120, warned the conferees that “we will not, in the meantime, let employers off the hook — they must continue to provide health insurance for workers and rather than just arguing that it is too expensive, they should be joining the fight for national health care.

“This is important,” Rosenstein added, “because no major health care reform is going to happen under Bush.”

Last Labor Day, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said essentially the same thing but noted, “Rather than fighting a losing battle, we are assembling a million-member mobilization team of activists working with a broad group of allies to keep universal health care at the top of the political agenda in 2008 and to ensure that the real work of forging a decent health care system gets under way after the election.”

Richard Lanigan, OPEIU Local 153 secretary-treasurer, told the conference, “As part of the health care crisis, companies are moving to divest themselves of responsibility for providing health care. We saw this with the recent auto contracts.”

GM, Ford and Chrysler pushed to establish retiree health care trust funds that are administered by the union after an initial company contribution of cash and stock. “This is no long-term solution,” Lanigan said. When a union administers a fund with large amounts of company stock in it, “there are a lot of potential problems,” he said.

Toussaint said, “Workers must be helped to get rid of any illusions they have that it is the companies that pay for their health care. This is false. It is the workers who pay. The health care contribution of the employer is part of what workers earn, and when the companies give a dollar in health care they try to take it away in wages or somewhere else.

“This is why we fight for universal, national health care. Such a system will get that gorilla off the bargaining table and give us more leverage to fight for better wages and working conditions.”

The TWU has won gains in health care for its members, Toussaint said, “because we have a serious, militant trade union, something that will be indispensable in the struggle for health care coverage for everyone.”

jwojcik @pww.org

Anti-immigrant equals anti-union at Yale

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 06:41:00 +0000

Commentary

Service and maintenance workers at Yale University, members of Local 35 Unite Here, have become the target of an anti-immigrant hate group seeking to create racial divisions and undermine the union leadership.

A flurry of petitions and fliers attacking the union showed up at work sites during a week long sign-up program on campus for the Elm City Resident Card. The card, which provides access to municipal services in New Haven, is available to city residents regardless of age or immigration status. The National League of Cities honored New Haven, the first city in the country to issue a residents card, for its efforts to integrate immigrants into the community.

The anti-immigrant Community Watchdog Project, whose web site features links to such right-wing groups as the Minutemen and the John Birch Society, came into New Haven to oppose the ID. They are now circulating anti-immigrant and anti-union fliers filled with misinformation and bigotry, calling upon union members to stop paying their dues because the union is “selling out the American worker” by supporting the rights of immigrants.

Mug shot style pictures of Local 35 President Bobby Proto, along with African American workers, including Vice President Mark Wilson, make the outrageous charge that the union along with the AFL-CIO and SEIU view immigrant workers as “a lucrative market for dues to keep the bureaucracy of organized labor humming.”

The unions at Yale participated in the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride five years ago. When Local 35 members went on strike, immigrant workers, bused in as strike breakers, courageously walked off the job to join the picket line and helped win the strike. Their act of solidarity convinced Yale workers to support the ID card this year.

Playing on fear, the Watchdog attack fliers claim the union policy “condemns American workers to a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions.” In fact the race to the bottom is caused by anti-union transnational corporations in search of maximum profits, backed up by U.S. trade and military policy.

The unions at Yale are mobilizing their members and community allies in preparation for contract negotiations. Outsourcing and subcontracting have eliminated many union jobs at Yale. Actions that pit African American, Latino and white workers against each other, as the Watchdog is attempting, serve the interest of the employer. It is by sticking together and sticking with the union that wages and working conditions for all workers can be raised.

Anti-immigrant bigotry appears on campus at the same time African American students are protesting racist graffiti, and clerical and technical workers in Local 34 are protesting an egregious incident of racial profiling against an African American library worker (see related story).

The pro-corporate, ultra-right Bush administration has fomented this ugly wave of racism. But from Yale to Jena, La., people are coming together to speak out for equality and justice. The most powerful voice for workers’ rights and equality will be to change the direction of our country in the 2008 elections.

Joelle Fishman (joelle.fishman @pobox.com) is the chair of the Connecticut Communist Party.

Road to White House runs through Ohio

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 06:34:00 +0000

Labor rallies for high-stakes election

CLEVELAND — The Ohio AFL-CIO is mobilizing an army of political activists to make sure Democrats win the state in next year’s elections.

Under the slogan, “The road to the White House runs through Ohio,” hundreds of political coordinators and local union leaders, many of them veterans of past electoral campaigns, have met in six regional “political training meetings” throughout the state recently to discuss plans to reach union members and supporters.

Underscoring the urgency of the situation confronting working people, Joe Rugola, president of the state labor organization, told those meeting here Nov. 27, “We are perched on the edge of what may be the most difficult economic period in our lifetimes. There is a greater concentration of wealth than anytime since the eve of the 1929 stock market crash that set off the Great Depression.”

The 2008 election, he said, is “the last good shot to change course” from the disastrous tax, trade and budget policies that have created this crisis.

“We have to convince our members of the importance of this election,” he said. “All the Democratic candidates have weaknesses, but for those of you who play golf, there are no ‘mulligans,’ no do-overs. This is our only shot.”

Rugola said that without a Democrat in the White House, “there could be severe consequences for generations to come. Our children and grandchildren will pay for years.”

Rugola pointed to dramatic gains labor has made since Democrat Ted Strickland was elected governor and Democrats won most state offices as well as electing Sherrod Brown to the U.S. Senate in 2006. The gains have included sweeping changes in enforcing prevailing wage laws and allowing unions to organize.

In addition to the White House, there are real possibilities to win more Ohio congressional seats for the Democrats, but Rugola warned that Republicans plan to promote hysteria and scapegoat immigrants to distract voters from the real problems.

“They will tell us immigrants, not the corporations, are responsible for the loss of jobs,” he said. “We must convince our people to keep their eyes on the ball.”

Jobs, universal affordable health care and the right to organize are key to reaching union members and establishing “an economy that works for all,” said Jim Tackett, AFL-CIO staff representative, who presented a slide show on these issues.

The AFL-CIO will be able to reach 2.1 million Ohio members and their families in 2008, said Ben Waxman, state director of the Labor 2008 campaign. This is the highest number of any state, he said, and it is due in large part to the organizing efforts of Working America, the unions’ community affiliate, whose membership here is expected to reach 800,000.

With offices around the state, teams from Working America have gone door-to-door recruiting people on such issues as the State Children’s Health Insurance Plan (SCHIP), living wage campaigns, union solidarity and elections, said Dan Heck, the group’s state director. Members are contacted six to 38 times in person and by phone, mail and email in the course of a campaign, and they vote like members of “regular” unions.

Workshops at the meetings addressed issues in reaching union members at their places of work.

ricknagin @yahoo.com

Columbus janitors win union

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 11:43:00 +0000

COLUMBUS, Ohio—Coming on the heels of organizing victories in Cincinnati and Houston, some 1,200 janitors here, organizing with SEIU, won contracts with nine of the city’s largest employers last month.

“This is a historic victory,” said Service Employees union organizer Chris Moore. “It will double the income of some of this area’s lowest paid workers.”

The agreement came soon after an Oct. 31 unity rally at City Hall, where Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman and County Commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy spoke out in support of the union organizing drive. The nearly 200 folks at the rally demanded that the richest city corporations stop blocking the organizing drive and recognize the janitors’ right to unionize. Most of Columbus’ unions, as well as many social justice groups, were in attendance at the rally.

Coleman, the city’s first African American mayor, spoke sharply of his long support for organized labor. “I remember as a youth my mother working hard, tough jobs to help us get an education. We always supported organized labor, because organized labor always supported us. As long as I’m mayor, Columbus will be a union city,” he shouted to the cheering crowd.

County Commissioner Kilroy, an announced Democratic candidate for the congressional seat now held by conservative Republican Deborah Pryce, also spoke out strongly in support of the union drive. “A union city is an economically strong city. United, we will make sure that central Ohio is union-strong,” she said.

Incumbent Rep Pryce, following numerous other Republicans, announced she will not seek reelection in 2008.

“We now have the tools we need to stand up for our families and our communities,” said janitor and organizing committee member Faduma Mohammed.

The union contract effective Dec. 1 will raise wages, give janitors paid holidays and vacation time, as well as strengthen health care coverage for 1,200 janitors.